After our kids were grown and gone, my wife and I decided that we’d had enough of the cookie cutter neighborhood in which we’d raised our family and bought an old farmhouse on ten acres. The lot had been carved out of a much larger acreage decades before when a farmer couldn’t afford to feed his cattle and had to sell. We were excited about the peace and the quiet and the space to grow things. Our garden in town consisted of a couple of raised beds, and we’d always wanted something more.
Along with the tomatoes and squash, I planted pumpkins and watermelons and ten rows of corn. just a hundred yards from the house. To my shock and pleasant surprise, they immediately sprouted up. Maybe the gift of growing things was in my blood, but I’m sure planting my garden on what had previously been premium farm ground didn’t hurt, either.
Not long after the squash sprouted, the deer showed up. I grew up hunting deer and ordinarily, I would have been thrilled to see them. The newfound farmer in me, though, took serious offense and started strategizing how I was going to protect my fledgling crop.
I found an old pallet leaning against the dumpster behind our local grocery store and threw it in the back of the truck. I busted it up when I got home and nailed together a crude frame. Then I dug through the boxes in the attic and found some of my dad’s old things. Frayed red plaids, a worn in pair of overalls and a worn out Stormy Kromer hat. Dad had given me his gear when he realized his hunting days were behind him. I’m ashamed to admit it now, but at the time, I had turned my nose up at his gift in favor of the latest camouflage patterns and scent control technology. Dad’s deer hunting clothes had been sitting in a box in the attic ever since. They were perfect for the scarecrow that was going to spook those deer off my garden. The irony that I was using what he wore hoping to see deer to spook them off instead wasn’t wasted on me.
But my scarecrow did absolutely nothing to deter the deer from decimating my corn crop, and eventually, I had no choice but to accept my garden’s fate. It was either that or go crazy, right? I liked watching those deer more than I liked eating corn on the cob, anyway. At least, that’s what I told myself. And besides, if the freezer wasn’t going to be full of corn, it might as well be full of corn fed venison.
I had seen the same handful of does and fawns every day for a month when I caught sight one evening of a bigger bodied deer in the shadows. I was just sure it was a buck. I hung a trail camera to see how big he was and was shocked when I got images of what looked like a monster nontypical. I never could get a clear picture of the buck, though. He was always on the edge of the frame and never but a step or two away from the safety of the deep woods. The old buck hadn’t gotten big by posing for trail camera photo shoots.
I finally decided that it was my scarecrow that was making the buck nervous, so I traded out dad’s red plaids for my high dollar camouflage and just to be safe, I sprayed the whole outfit down with scent killer. That’s when I quit getting pictures of the big buck entirely. A day or two later it registered with me that it wasn’t just the buck that had gone missing, it was every single deer that had been in my corn.
I hadn’t seen a deer in weeks, so two days before the season ended, I finally decided I’d better retrieve my good camouflage before it got ruined. The upside was that it looked like I was going to have some corn for the freezer after all, as there were still a few stalks of corn holding. I replaced my camouflage with dad’s red plaids and the old Stormy Kromer and was shocked when the deer showed back up that very night.
I arrowed the big nontypical the next afternoon as he stretched to snatch an ear of corn from its stalk. I hit him high and spined him, so he went straight down in the corn. I was loading him into my side by side when I happened to glance up at my scarecrow.
I could have sworn he was smiling.
