And Now We Shall Do Manly Things (20 page)

“Yeah.”

That night, as I was unpacking and laying out everything I needed for my first day hunting, I pulled the book on small-game butchery out to review the incisions I would need to make in order to field dress a pheasant, I found it—the receipt from hunter's safety class. It was tucked between illustrations demonstrating how to remove guts and break off wings. And in large, block letters, it read “IMPORTANT: HUNTER ID NUMBER” followed by five numbers.

So much for my life as a hunter, I thought. I couldn't even track a piece of paper.

15

Hemingway's Shot

U
ncle Mark banged open the bedroom door and flipped on the overhead light with the suddenness and urgency of a marine drill sergeant waking new recruits on their first Parris Island morning.

“Quarter to seven,” he barked. “Time to get up, dude.”

He hadn't gotten to “dude” before I had swung my feet off the bed and onto the ground. “I'm up!” I snapped, not rudely but with an avidity I hadn't expected. I wiped the sleep from my eyes and gave a halfhearted stretch to my aching back before standing and heading into the bathroom across the hall for some perfunctory ablutions before breakfast.

I hadn't slept in my cousin Will's room for a decade, and I had barely slept at all on that last trip. My dad, Kosta, my brother-in-law Mike, and I had driven out to meet up with Mark, Will, and Tom and my uncle Paul and his sons, Ben and Mike, before we all drove twenty hours north through Minnesota and western Ontario for a fishing trip. After the trip was over, we stopped in Iowa for the night before making our way back to Cleveland. In one form or another, the Heimbuch family had been making the trip from Mason City to the nameless tract of wilderness near Ignace, Ontario, for more than half a century—ever since my grandpa Robert and his brother-in-law had loaded all the gas cans they could find, some fishing gear, and sandwiches into an old car and driven north until half their supplies were gone.

I made my first Canadian fishing trip when I was ten, the age when young Heimbuch boys were deemed old enough to join the men for a few days of solitude and fishing for northern pike. I sometimes look at the picture taken of me with my first pike on that first trip, which my dad keeps framed on the credenza in his home office, and I wonder whatever happened to that kid. I was so little. So pale. I struggled to hold the moderately sized fish in both hands, my elbows dug deep into my burgeoning love handles to sustain the weight.

I went back a couple of years later with a group of men from the family and got my first real taste of the wilderness and just how naive I was about its power and glory. In those early years, we camped in tents and under camper tops mounted to the back of the family's old Chevy pickups. It was a short walk down a hill to Elephant Lake and my cousin Rob—two years my elder and light years harder and stronger than I, though we called him “Robby” back then—and I were hauling fishing gear down to the boats one morning when we noticed something off in the bushes to the left of the trail.

“Is that a trash bag?” I asked, looking at the lumpy black shape nestled among the undergrowth.

“Probably,” said Rob and he went to have a closer look when suddenly the object turned to look at him with big moist eyes and a shiny black snout. “Oh shiiiiiiiiiiit!” he yelled and took off running up the trail. I don't quite remember what I did, apart from leave a streak of excited poo in my Underoos, but family legend has it that the footsteps left in the dirt as my cousin ran away from his face-to-face encounter with a black bear were anywhere between eight and twenty feet apart on the uphill slope back toward camp.

You really must never assume you're safe in the Canadian wilderness.

My fourth and final fishing trip to Canada came the summer after I graduated from college. I was working at a fly-fishing and backpacking store after my postgraduation job at my hometown newspaper had fallen through at the last minute. I had always loved the shop and spent many Friday afternoons in high school browsing around the gear, touching the heavy leather boots and studying the details of the fishing flies in the shadowbox cases toward the back of the store. I was excited to try fly-fishing in Canada and confident that I was the first member of the family ever to make such an attempt apart from my aunt Diane, who had told me about fly-fishing, which she had learned while working as a nurse in Alaska in the 1980s.

“Craig,” said my amazing, pleasant, smart, and well-traveled aunt, “fly-fishing is the greatest excuse in the world to stand up to your ass in ice water.”

As if I needed one.

I wanted to catch a big forty-inch northern on a fly rod as a way of showing my appreciation for the force she had been in my life.

Everything went fine for the first few days of the trip. We had some luck fishing, though my attempts to land a pike on a fly line were meager and fruitless. I had caught a perch, but the wide-open and windy lakes of western Ontario were too deep and formidable to land a fly and draw the attention of even these greedy and aggressive fish.

A few years prior, the family had abandoned the tradition of sleeping in tents and campers when an old high school classmate of one of my uncles—it's often hard to tell which one—had purchased an old log cabin building school in the Ignace area and set up a guide operation. Having access to such facilities and wanting to help out a guy who could use it, my uncles and dad had been visiting Brother Bruce and staying in his lodges for the annual fishing pilgrimage, which was a real departure for me, since I hadn't been along for a trip in a while. Brother Bruce was nothing like I would have expected from a familial acquaintance. In a family in which the closest thing to a hippie we had were a couple of cousins who had devoted their early adulthoods to the Peace Corps, a long-haired man who smoked pot and often hosted groups of seekers in his sweat lodge in order to make a connection with the Great Spirit Bear was eccentric if not downright absurd. Brother Bruce reminded me of a Vietnam vet who had dropped out of the world and found solace in the Great North Woods, which happened to be exactly what he was. He was an odd bird without trying to be odd. He spoke with the spongy lilt of the upper Midwest combined with the clipped cadence of the masculine woods north of the Trans-Canada Highway. My favorite detail was his dog, a German shorthaired pointer mutt he had found on the side of a Minnesota highway, grossly underweight and with shotgun pellets embedded in the skin of its face, ear, and jowl. He called the dog “Hey You” because that's what he yelled out the truck window when he pulled onto the shoulder of the road and that was all it took for the dog to jump into the cab of the pickup, kick-starting a friendship the likes of which has scarcely been duplicated.

And yet, improbably and incongruously, my self-admitted redneck, right-wing uncle Mark and he got along great. Probably, I remember thinking as I watched the two men talk on the porch of the big cabin on our first night in camp, because they share a mistrust of cities, government, and big business—though for decidedly different reasons—but theirs was an interesting friendship.

Bruce had taken Mark and Dad bear hunting, resulting in the skin rug hanging in my parents' basement. He had taken them fishing, and they had always managed to catch their limit. I think Mark got a discount on Bruce's guide fees for helping out on projects in camp and for bringing supplies up from Mason City whenever he was coming and Bruce had remembered to ask.

We had been in camp a few days, hustling from lake to lake, portaging our small aluminum boats through the woods and catching enough fish to fill the deep fryer Bruce had connected to a propane tank on the side of the house. We decided to forgo a morning trip to a distant lake and spend some time relaxing around the camp. Uncle Mark had brought his three-wheeler on a trailer and Brother Bruce, the psychedelic monk of the north woods, had a six-wheeler and four-wheeler that he used for everything from hauling gear to removing tree stumps around the property. My cousins and I decided to go for a ride.

I got on the six-wheeler and followed my cousins up the narrow two-rut road. In our cars, earlier in the week, the branches from the trees scraped the windshields and doors and there was one place where we had to pull the side mirrors in for clearance. At the top of the hill, we turned onto the abandoned dirt logging road that had once serviced the area and rode for a mile or more before deciding to turn back. It's hard to imagine, but a person can get seriously lost on a road with no intersections or turnoffs in the North Woods and we all wanted to be sure we could find our way back to camp. After missing the narrow entrance to the camp drive a couple of times, we eventually found it and began making our way back down. I went last and was doing my best to keep the six-wheeler in a controlled descent with the left set of tires in one of the ruts and the right on the raised median. I can't remember exact details, but I remember coming to a point where the narrow track veered left and feeling the right front wheels being pulled down into the ruts on the right-hand side.

Try as I have over the years to remember the exact set of events that followed, I have been unable. I remember hearing my cousin Ben call my name and opening my eyes to find myself lying on my back ten yards in front of the six-wheeler. It was as if I had woken in the middle of a terrible dream. My head felt fuzzy and numb and I was, in retrospect, clearly in a state of shock. Apparently, I had tried to right my veering ATV and had nearly done so, but the back right wheel hit a small tree and sent me flying ass over donuts over the handlebar. I apparently lost consciousness, but I don't know for how long, because Ben had been back at camp and decided to ride back to the top of the hill—not to find me, but for fun—when he happened across me. I could have been unconscious for five seconds or five minutes. I had not been wearing a helmet. There's just no way of knowing.

Needless to say, there was some concern over what had happened when Ben and I returned to camp, he on his four-wheeler and me desperately pushing the six-wheeler, broken rear axle and all, with shaky hands. The concern from my aunt Linette—who had broken the “boys only, no girls allowed” tradition on the fishing excursions a few years prior—was for my health. My dad's concern, however, was for my stupidity.

“How could you do this?” It was a statement more than a question. “You were showing off and being reckless and now you've fucked Bruce. He makes his living with that six-wheeler and you've fucked him.” He poked me hard in the chest, which brought tears to my already spinning eyes. He yelled at me with reckless abandon for what felt like whole minutes. And he continued to poke me in the chest every time I tried to explain.

“I've never known your dad to lose it like that,” Linette said as we made the bed in Will's room ten years later. “He just doesn't do it.”

“As far as I know,” I told her, “I'm the only one of the four of us who has ever made him mad enough to swear.”

“I don't know that I've ever heard him swear since.”

“Me neither.”

“He was plenty mad.”

“That's an understatement,” I said. “And I paid for the repairs too. Took cash advances on my credit cards and maxed them out.”

“Well,” Linette said. “I was afraid for you.”

“I remember sitting on the grass and crying with you,” I said. “That was the worst trip of my life.”

“Me too.”

We stopped in Mason City on the way home from that trip and I saw Aunt Diane for what would turn out to be the last time. Resting in a hospital bed on the first floor of Grandma's house—a hundred yards across the lawn away from Mark and Linette's place—she looked skeletal and Zenlike. She told me she wasn't afraid and that the world was a beautiful place, even if she did have cancer, even if your favorite people die too young, before their time. Her insight scared me. She was serene. I lay awake in Will's bed that night, looking out the window across the yard and waiting for the light in Aunt Diane's room to go out. It didn't. She died a few weeks later.

After Mark flipped on the lights to wake me up, I opened the blinds and looked across the predawn dark yard toward the old house, which had been empty for two years. Aunt Diane had died. Grandma died eight years later. And it had been dark ever since, for the first time in more than seventy years.

I put in my contacts and brushed my teeth with the iron-laden well water, then went back into Will's room to lay out all my new gear. Mark made eggs, sausage, and toast for Tom and me. I was self-conscious about my new gear. I felt like a dandy. Dressed head to toe in the clothes I had ordered from L.L.Bean, I felt like a kid getting dressed up for Halloween. Inauthentic. New from the box. Unearned and somehow barely more pretend. Still, I was excited to get out into the field. I had a good feeling about the hunt even though Mark had warned me that pheasant hunting in Iowa wasn't what it once had been. Twenty years ago, it wasn't uncommon for him and my other uncles and their friends to go out to the farm—just outside Thornton, Iowa—and shoot their limit of three birds apiece in the time between breakfast and lunch. Three roosters apiece, like swatting mosquitoes from moist summer air.

But a few things had conspired to reduce the pheasant population of Iowa, namely freezing rain and corn prices over $6 a bushel. Freezing rain is a problem for any bird, but pheasants most especially. Their feathers are thick and full, more like the fur of a Labrador retriever puppy than the slick, linear, and smooth quills of a crow or a sparrow. They are a species tailor-made for adaptation in winter. They burrow under cover and are more likely to run from cover to cover than to fly. And they are natural-born grain scavengers. They can survive a thick blanket of snow by burrowing down in search of corn and grain, then make a little shelter for themselves. But Iowa had experienced three or four years of early winter freezing rain, which froze the birds' feathers and lay a sheen of ice over the ground making it impossible for the pheasants to find food or shelter. A large portion of the once-mighty population simply starved or froze to death, according to my uncle, and those that didn't either fled for places with more consistent snowfall or were tracked down by the resurgent Iowa coyote population. Barn owls, hawks, and other birds of prey also became a problem for pheasant, but the most damaging species to the bird's population has been the Iowa farmer. And it's hard to blame them.