The Deer Camp by Dean Kuipers

Author:Dean Kuipers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Animal stories had to save us. It was all we had. That, and hillbilly “hold my beer” stories about the neighbors. When we all lived in the big new house in the woods, dinners were excruciating unless Joe, Brett, or I could whip up a show about the guy down the street mistakenly gunning his snowmobile up the woodpile and hanging it from the eavestroughs. Dad would generally eat his dinner in total silence while we tried, and when he was done eating, he’d look at Mom like none of us were there and complain, deadpan, “No dessert?” No dinner she ever cooked was good enough. But if we could get him laughing, the night would be saved.

The story of Dad’s crown fire was an instant classic and would usually have us in tears. Or the rabbit Dad bought to train our beagle that immediately bit the dog and started chasing it around the yard. Dad wasn’t prickly about being the butt of the joke. He would forget the details in between tellings, so every time he heard these tales he would be dumbstruck.

“Remember my underwater hunting apparatus with Terry Purk?” I started one night at the table.

“Yeah, with the air compressor?” Brett said.

“Yeah, Terry and I wanted to be able to spear rock bass, and we had that three-pronger trident spear with a long handle, a frog spear I guess, but you could never see anything from the dock that you could hit. We figured that if we could stay underwater we could lurk in the darkness under the dock and just stab fish when they came by.”

“Oh, ha ha ha, that is a good one,” Dad started. It was just that easy to steer him away from evil.

“So we wanted to make like a diving helmet out of a bucket or something, but then we realized we didn’t need one. We just hooked the garden hose up to the air compressor, and then duct-taped the other end to the top of a snorkel—”

“Oh Lord!” said Dad, already wiping his nose.

“—and you’d crank that thing up and the air would come blasting out of the purge valve on the snorkel, so all around you the water was like boiling and this froth would blow your mask off and everything. From up on the dock it looked like a submarine was going to the bottom. But we’d be down there like Poseidon, armed with our trident.”

“HAW HAW HAW!”

“Oh, but that air!” Mom said, making a face.

“It was full of oil. It tasted like car exhaust. We couldn’t stay down very long because it made you dizzy. We did see fish, though. Some big ol’ fish would come by, but none of them ever came close enough that we could poke it.”

“HAW HAW! How could you get enough arm speed to throw the spear?”

“Well, you couldn’t. It was always like slow motion. Your best bet was to try a kind of straight-ahead jab.”

“Gosh, you’d think Marge would say something about that air,” said Mom.

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