Audiobook (adult fiction) - The Meadow
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November 18th 1967. Most years, my father grew antsy as Wisconsin's deer hunting season approached. It was a good kind of antsy, though nervous excitement. So much about him was so inescapably stern that when he allowed himself to show genuine excitement, it was welcomed by everyone under our roof. Deer hunting genuinely excited. My father. He appreciated being in the forest, I know, but not as I did. He did have an affinity for the land, but I knew he wasn't up in his stand, reflecting on passages from Waldon. For him, the hunt offered a different thrill. The opportunity to pit himself against the gray ghosts that haunted the forest that, added to the satisfaction of providing for his family by putting food on the table, rendered my father as close to intoxicated as any of us would ever witness. Ah, successful hunt satisfied him in ways I could know but not feel until years later, his customary nervous excitement that fall mixed with a fair measure of crankiness due to an unusual lack of snow. Typically, when the rut began, the bucks next swelled beyond normal proportions, and their own hunt clouded their judgment. Snow would already have fallen never a blizzard, but enough to carpet the fields and fall through the naked canopy of the trees, limbs and cover the forest floor. The absence of that blanket bothered my father, and it showed in the days before the opener. He muttered under his breath his not so subtle ploy to get whoever was around him to inquire about the mumbling. It was his way of giving the appearance of keeping his irritation under wraps, but we all knew otherwise. My first encounter with his muttering happened in the barn one evening before we began milking lousy background for shooting, he said in a low voice as he forked mounds of corn silage into the manger in front of each cow. He pretended not to notice. I was at the other end of the cow, using the business end of a pitchfork to scrape away manure that hadn't quite reached the gutter. What's that? I asked, Taking his bait, he forked another mound of silly JJ the Brown, he said. How's a man to draw proper bread? What if the animals on the move he shook his head? You're six pointer last year, he said, you got him on the run. I did. I said it wasn't an easy shot, But you're right. The snow helped. We tussled over so many other things. I thought I could throw him a bone when it was warranted. I'd started hunting at 12 part of being a Newman male. And at 17 I'd yet to experience a hunting season without snow. I could only imagine what my father was fretting about. I wasn't a dedicated hunter in the sense my father would have liked me to be. But the annual gun deer hunt was a family tradition that put food on the table and made my father happy. And though my success in hunting wasn't enough to warrant my father verbalizing his