This article was chosen by Field and Stream as a runner up in their ‘Thanks, Dad’ writing contest. It was first published in the August 2025 issue of North American Whitetail magazine.
I was robbing Peter to pay Paul when I met the woman I wanted to marry. A whirlwind romance had me shopping for engagement rings, but I was a dirt-poor seminary student with no money and even less credit. I hadn’t, in fact, taken a vow of poverty; the banks just believed I had.
I had just been denied yet another loan when I got phone call from home. Mom told me that dad had walked in from work with news. Turns out, Oklahoma’s Wildlife Department, for whom my dad worked as a fisheries biologist, had awarded me a scholarship back when I was a senior in high school. According to my parents, that scholarship had somehow fallen through the cracks, but the mistake had been caught and two full years after I graduated from high school, the check had been mailed. Ironically, the amount of money that scholarship awarded was just enough to cover the down payment on a diamond ring.
I’m embarrassed to admit how long it took me to work out what my parents had done for me. For years, I not only naively accepted the story they’d spun; I recounted it for anyone who would listen. It wasn’t until I sat down with my daughter to fill out scholarship applications of her own that I finally put two and two together.
I had a similar epiphany last November. I’ve reached the stage in my hunting career where it’s more enjoyable to relive the past than it is to fantasize about the future, and last fall I was passing time in a tree stand thinking about deer hunts gone by when I remembered a blown shot opportunity from my youth at what would have been my best buck to date. I smiled ruefully at the memory, thankful for the perspective that the passage of time provides. I sure wasn’t smiling, though, the day I missed my shot at that buck.
The day after my miss, I was sitting next to my dad, my confidence so shaken that I didn’t trust myself to hunt alone, when a good buck stepped out of a mesquite thicket 50 yards away. Dad told me to shoot, but I shook my head no. He insisted. I refused. The buck was too good for me to miss. He was also too good to let walk. So, dad shot instead.
And missed.
“You didn’t think your old man could miss, did you?”
Remembering the details of that hunt, again with a rueful smile on my face, I realized for the first time that something didn’t quite add up. My dad doesn’t miss deer, period. Much less chip shots at good bucks. He’s got the trophies on the wall to prove it. But he missed that deer clean, and when he did, it somehow softened the blow of my own miss. When our heroes show themselves to be human, it gives us permission to be human, too, I suppose. My dad had unmasked himself when he missed that deer, trading Superman’s cape for Clark Kent’s glasses, and it occurred to me in that moment, as I sat there shivering in my tree stand, that my dad’s miss that morning so long ago was simply a precursor to a scholarship check that had somehow slipped through the cracks, that he had intentionally blown his shot on that buck, purely for my benefit.
I’ve been deer hunting for nearly forty years. I’ve been married for close to thirty. And I’ve never acknowledged either of those gifts. Until now. Thanks, dad.
Wright Outdoors 