“Not since I was a kid.” He set his fork down. “My uncle used to take me, up near Chippewa Falls.
Then I joined up at nineteen and did two tours in Afghanistan. Kandahar. When I came home, my uncle had passed and his land was sold. I never found anywhere to go after that.” He gave a short, embarrassed laugh. “I’ve got a rifle in my closet I haven’t fired in fifteen years. Dad’s old .30-
06.”
On Dale’s other side, another man shook his head. He was maybe forty, broad-shouldered, with a buzz cut and a Wisconsin Badgers sweatshirt.
“Wes Hanna,” Dale said. “Army National Guard. Iraq, 2007.”
“Nobody’s got land anymore,” Wes said. “Everything’s leased up. The big outfitters lease it, or out-of-staters come in and pay a fortune. Guy I know pays six grand a year to hunt a hundred and twenty acres over by Durand. Six grand. I’ve got two kids and a mortgage on a house in
Boyceville. I can’t pay six grand to sit in a tree.”
I looked at the three of them, sitting in the basement of my grandfather’s church eating Jell-O salad off paper plates.
I thought about the green ledger in the kitchen drawer. I thought about Grandpa standing on the field edge in the dark, looking down at a nine-year-old girl.
“These men already paid,” I said out loud.
Dale looked up. “Sorry?”
“I have eighty acres,” I said. “My grandfather’s farm, out on County Road H. There’s a hardwood ridge with a creek bottom. Best deer ground in Dunn County, according to him.” I took a breath.
“It’s posted now, but not against you. If you three want to hunt it this fall, it’s yours. All season.”
The table went quiet. Even Wes stopped chewing.
“What’s it cost?” Dale asked carefully.
“Nothing.”
“Ma’am, we can’t hunt your land for nothing.” Dale reached for his wallet right there at the potluck table. “Let me at least give you something. A thousand. That’s fair for opening weekend alone.”
I put my hand over his wallet.
“Dale,” I said, “my grandfather walked veterans up that ridge for free from 1961 until the year before he died. If I took a dime from you, Grandpa Arvid would haunt us both.”
Dale looked at me for a long moment. Then he slowly put his wallet away.
“Arvid Halvorsen,” he said quietly. “My dad hunted with him. In the seventies. After Vietnam.”
I went home that night, opened the green ledger, and found it in Grandpa’s slanted handwriting:
“Roger Moody, Vietnam, 1974. Big 10-pointer, north ridge. Cried when he shot it. Said it was the first good thing since he got back.”
We spent two October Saturdays fixing Grandpa’s old stands.
Brad’s four plywood boxes I tore down myself with a pry bar and a cordless drill. Patricia said I didn’t have to, but I didn’t want anybody climbing into something Brad built. Some of the plywood was rotting, and one of the ladders had a cracked rung he’d patched with duct tape.
Duct tape, twelve feet up a tree.
Grandpa’s stands were different. He built them himself in the early eighties out of white oak he cut and milled on the farm. There were three of them, simple wooden ladder stands with a little bench
seat and a shooting rail, set in the best spots on the ridge: one at the corner of the woods where the deer came down to the corn, one halfway up the ridge at the creek crossing, and one at the top overlooking the cedar bottom.
They’d weathered silver-gray over forty years, but the oak was still hard as iron. They just needed new straps, some new lag bolts, and a couple of rungs replaced.
Dale knew carpentry. Wes had a truck full of tools and opinions. Tim mostly carried lumber and
didn’t say much, but he worked harder than both of them, and at the end of the second Saturday, he stood at the bottom of the creek-crossing stand looking up at it for a long time.
“My uncle’s stand looked just like this,” he said.
I bought new ratchet straps and safety harnesses at Fleet Farm, $340 worth, because Lyle at Farm Bureau told me to and because Grandpa would’ve wanted it. Wes inspected every bolt twice. Dale climbed each stand and bounced on it to test it, and at fifty-eight and two hundred thirty
pounds, that was a pretty good test.
The second Saturday, while we were finishing up, a black Silverado slowed on County Road H, rolled past my gate, and kept going.
Kurt’s truck.
I didn’t think anything of it at the time.
Opening morning of the Wisconsin gun deer season was the Saturday before Thanksgiving.
I set my alarm for 3:45 and didn’t need it. I’d been awake since three, lying in Grandpa’s old bed in the farmhouse and listening to the wind in the oaks.
At 4:30, I filled Grandpa’s steel thermos with coffee. It’s an old green Stanley with a dent on one
side from when he dropped it off the tailgate in 1987. I tucked my auburn hair into a low ponytail and pulled on a blaze-orange knit hat. Then I took Grandpa’s tan canvas hunting coat off the hook by the back door, where it had hung for three years.
It still smelled like him: pipe tobacco and wood smoke and cold November air.
I put it on. It was too big in the shoulders, and the sleeves came down past my fingertips. I rolled them up twice.
Dale, Tim, and Wes pulled into the yard at 4:45 in Dale’s pickup. They got out in blaze-orange vests and hats, rifles cased, breath fogging in the yard light.
“Morning,” Dale said.
“Morning,” I said.
Grandpa always walked his hunters in the first morning, so I did too.
I went first along the field edge in Grandpa’s coat, with the thermos under one arm and a small
flashlight with a red lens pointed at the ground. There was frost on the picked cornstalk stubble, and gray light was just starting to come up behind the oaks on the ridge. The stars were going out one at a time.
Behind me came three men in blaze orange with their rifles slung, none of them loaded. That was Grandpa’s rule. Nobody loads until they’re in the stand and the harness is clipped.
Nobody said a word. The only sounds were frozen cornstalks crunching under our boots and,
somewhere down in the creek bottom, a barred owl asking who cooks for you, who cooks for you all.
I took Wes to the top stand first, the one overlooking the cedars. He climbed up, clipped his
harness, and gave me a thumbs-up in the dark.
Then Tim, to the creek crossing.
Tim stood at the bottom of his stand for a long minute without moving. I waited. I’d learned
from Grandpa that you never rush a man at the bottom of a ladder on opening morning.
“My uncle used to walk me in like this,” he whispered. His voice was thick. “In the dark. He’d go first, and I’d step where he stepped.” He swallowed. “I forgot that till right now.”
“You can remember it every year now, if you want,” I whispered back.
He nodded without looking at me, then climbed up into the old oak stand and clipped in.
Dale’s stand was the last, the wooden ladder stand at the corner of the woods, where the ridge
comes down to the corn. It was the best stand on the farm. It was Grandpa’s own.
I unscrewed the thermos cap, poured coffee into it, and handed it to him. Steam rose up into the cold.
“Your dad sat right here,” I said. “In 1974. He shot a ten-pointer from this stand.”
Dale held the cup in both hands and didn’t drink it. He just looked up at the stand in the gray light.
He had one boot on the bottom rung when we heard it.
There were voices at the gate, then footsteps coming up the field edge, heavy boots on frozen stubble, and flashlights bobbing white instead of red.
Kurt, Mike, and Russ, Brad’s buddies, were walking onto posted land.
Dale stepped off the ladder and stood beside me. He handed me back the thermos cap without spilling a drop.
The three of them came up the field edge and stopped about thirty feet away. Kurt shone his flashlight on me, then lowered it.
“Amy,” Kurt said. “Brad said you’d cool off.”
“I didn’t,” I said.
Kurt looked up at the blaze-orange hats in the trees, then at Dale’s gray beard.
“Who are these guys?”
“Army,” I said. “All three. They hunt here now.”
Nobody moved.
A mile off, the first shot of the season cracked across the hills.
Kurt looked down at the frost. Then he took one slow step toward Dale, and everything that happened next happened the way I already told you: the patch, the handshake, the folded paper
with my name forged at the bottom, and Russ asking where their four thousand dollars went.
We stood there in the cold while the light came up. I read that fake lease three times. The signature was close enough to fool someone who’d never seen mine, but it was nothing like the
way I actually write my name.
“Kurt,” I said. “Didn’t Brad tell you about the letter?”
“What letter?”
“I sent him a certified letter in August. It revoked any permission for him or anybody he’d told. He signed for it.” I pulled out my phone and showed him the photo of the green return receipt card with Brad’s signature on it. “And I posted every fence line on this property. Didn’t you see the
signs at the gate?”
Kurt looked at Mike. Mike looked at the ground.
“We saw the signs,” Mike admitted. “Last week, when we drove by. Brad said they were for other
people. For trespassers. He said you put them up because some guys from Eau Claire were poaching out here, and that we were covered because we had the lease.”
“He said that?”
“He said, ‘You’ve got paper. Paper beats signs,’” Russ said bitterly. “And we believed him. We paid him four grand in July. Cash, in an envelope, at the Legion Hall. Same as last year, and the year before. Twelve thousand dollars over three seasons.”
“Three seasons?” I said. “The divorce wasn’t final until two years ago.”
Kurt’s face changed again.
“The year before the divorce,” he said slowly, “Brad told us you two were splitting up and he
needed money for his lawyer. He asked if we’d pay him for the hunting that year, since you were going to be difficult about the land. We felt sorry for him.” He shook his head. “We paid for three years, Amy. Four thousand a year. Brad said you were in on it the last two. That you’d agreed.”
Twelve thousand dollars, for hunting rights Brad never had, on land that was never his. And he’d been doing it since before the ink was dry on the divorce.
I thought about what Patricia had told me about the recreational use law, and about Lyle Swenson
on the phone saying, “We’re talking about the farm.” For three years, men had been climbing Brad’s duct-taped stands on my land with a cash lease in their pockets, and if any of them had fallen, I’d have been the one sued.
Dale had been quiet through all of it. Now he spoke, low and even.
“Sounds to me like you three got robbed,” he said.
Kurt looked at him.
“Your buddy sold you something he didn’t own,” Dale said. “That’s not on her, and it’s not on you. That’s on him.”
Kurt pulled his hat off and rubbed his hand over his head. In the growing light, he looked older
than forty-nine. He looked tired.
“Amy, I’m sorry,” he said. “We’re leaving. Right now. I swear we didn’t know.” He looked up at the stands, at Tim and Wes watching silently from the trees. “And I’m sorry we came up here in the
dark, making noise on opening morning.” He looked at Dale. “I know better than that. I really do.”
“It’s all right,” Dale said. “You didn’t know.”
“We’ll talk to Brad,” Russ said. His voice was hard. “Today.”
They turned and walked back down the field edge toward the gate, flashlights off now, stepping carefully on the frozen stubble like men leaving a church service.
Halfway to the gate, Kurt stopped and turned around.
“Amy,” he called softly. “Your grandpa walked me in once. Nineteen ninety-two. The year after I got home. Brad never knew that. I was too embarrassed to tell him.” His voice wavered. “He told me I’d already paid.”
Then he turned and kept walking.
I walked back to the farmhouse alone while the three of them sat in their stands. It was full light by then, a clear, cold November morning. The frost was going silver on the cornstalks, and shots
were echoing all over the township.
I sat at Grandpa’s kitchen table with my coffee and the green ledger and that forged lease spread out in front of me. Then I called Patricia Haugen at home, on a Saturday at 7:15 in the
morning. She answered on the second ring.
“He forged my name, Patricia,” I said. “On a hunting lease. And he’s been taking cash for three years.”
Patricia was quiet for a moment. “Do you have the document?”
“I’m holding it.”
“Don’t fold it again. Put it in a plastic sleeve. Don’t let anyone else handle it.” Her voice was calm,
but I could hear the edge in it. “What you’re describing is serious, Amy. Signing someone else’s name to a document to get money is forgery under Wisconsin law. It’s a felony. Taking money by pretending to have rights you don’t have can be theft by fraud. That’s a matter for the district
attorney if you want to report it.”
“I don’t know if I want to send Brad to prison,” I said. “I just want this to stop.”
“That’s your decision,” Patricia said. “Nobody gets to make it for you. But you should know that
Kurt and his friends have their own claims. They’re the ones he took the money from. They can sue him in small claims court to get their twelve thousand back. In Wisconsin, small claims handles cases up to ten thousand dollars per claim, so they’d each file separately, or split it. Or they can
go to the DA themselves.”
“What about the trespassing? This morning?”
“Kurt and his friends didn’t know. They thought they had permission. Did they leave when you told
them to?”
“Immediately.”
“Then I’d let that go. They were victims too.” She paused. “Brad’s a different story. If Brad sets one foot on that property after receiving your certified letter, that’s trespass, and he knew it. Call the
sheriff or the conservation warden. Don’t confront him yourself.”
“Do you think he’ll come?”
“I think a man who forges his ex-wife’s signature on a lease doesn’t like being caught,” Patricia
said. “Keep your phone on you.”
She was right.
At 2:40 that afternoon, Brad’s red Ram pickup came down County Road H too fast, skidded on
the gravel, and stopped at my gate. He got out and stood there with the engine running and the door open.
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