New York Reader Stories: Teaching kids how to hunt is a father’s gift

“You’d better get up here! The deer are running stupid.”
If I’ve heard that once, I’ve heard it a hundred times. From the third week in October till the first week in December, those words meant one thing to me, my brother Eddie, my Uncle Bill and my brothers-in-law, Bob and Curt. We all knew that it meant that the deer were starting to move and more importantly, someone in our hunting club had probably gotten a buck. Later in his life Dad would use that phrase to include just seeing a buck, hoping to lure us north, as he longed to see all of his boys in camp.