Tim Seger shot his first deer in fifteen years at 3:52 that afternoon.
It was a fat six-pointer that came up out of the cedar bottom along the creek crossing, right under Tim’s stand, walking slow in the late light. We heard the shot from the farmhouse, one clean crack from his dad’s old .30-06, and then nothing.
Fifteen minutes later, my phone buzzed with a text from Wes up in the top stand.
“Tim got one. He’s sitting next to it. I think he’s crying. Should I go down?”
I texted back, “Give him a few minutes.”
When we got there, Tim was sitting in the leaves with his back against the oak, one hand resting on the deer’s neck. His eyes were red. He didn’t try to hide it.
“My uncle would’ve liked this,” he said.
Dale knelt down next to him and put a big hand on his shoulder. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to.
Wes pulled out his phone and took a picture of Tim with the buck in front of Grandpa’s old oak stand. Later, Tim had it printed and framed and gave me a copy. It’s on the wall in the farmhouse kitchen now, next to a photo of Grandpa in 1974 with Roger Moody and his ten-pointer.
Dale didn’t shoot that day. He sat in Grandpa’s corner stand from dawn to dark and watched eleven deer, does and young bucks, come down off the ridge into the corn. He didn’t raise his rifle once.
“I didn’t need to,” he told me that evening at the kitchen table, over a bowl of venison chili Wes’s wife had sent along in a Crock-Pot. “I just sat there. Nobody came up behind me. Nobody walked in on me in the dark. For the first time in about twenty years, I just sat there and watched the world wake up.” He shook his head slowly. “I’d forgotten what that felt like.”
That night after they left, I opened the green ledger, took out Grandpa’s old fountain pen, and wrote three new lines under his last entry.
“Dale Moody, Army, Desert Storm and Iraq. 2026. Didn’t shoot. Sat all day. Said nobody came up behind him.”
“Tim Seger, Army, Afghanistan. 2026. Six-pointer, creek crossing. First hunt since he was a boy. Remembered his uncle.”
“Wes Hanna, Army National Guard, Iraq. 2026. Saw a big one, couldn’t get a shot. Says he’ll get him next year.”
Then I sat back and looked at the page for a long time. Grandpa’s handwriting ended on one line, and mine started on the next. It was the same ledger and the same ridge.
Laura Bennett writes about complicated family dynamics, difficult conversations, and the quiet moments that change everything. Her stories focus on real-life tensions — inheritance disputes, strained marriages, loyalty tests — and the strength people find when they finally speak up. She believes the smallest decisions often carry the biggest consequences.