sleeping bag trouble

The first time I went deer hunting at the shack with grandad, there were a lot of other hunters there. I think there were four other hunters staying in the cabin with us, and two or three others in a camper on the back of a pickup truck that was parked outside. In later years, there were not so many other guys, which I liked better. It was more fun for me to hang out with grandad without so many guys I didn't really know around.
Soon after arriving that first time, I learned about the "Five Step Rule." One of the guys was giving another guy a hard time because he hadn't obeyed the five step rule. It seemed like he was half joking, so I couldn't figure out if it was some kind of hunter's gag or if it was something real. At first I thought it might be five steps to follow when making sure your gun was not loaded because the rule breaker was saying how cold it was as an excuse for breaking the rule. Then the criticizer said how simple it was to take at least five steps from the door, even when it was cold, instead of pissing from the doorway. At that point I understood the five step rule.
The next day I noticed that there was a sort of ring of yellowish snow and ice from about twelve to fifteen feet out from the door. It looked like some people adhered to the five step rule, but only barely.
A number of the guys were easily fifty years younger than grandad. Grandad liked to go out to the country bars and have a drink or two some nights, but some of the younger guys liked to go into town and have more than a drink or two. I think a couple of the guys would drive all the way to Tomahawk at night because they really liked a bar there. Or perhaps one of them had a local sweetheart there.
One night one of the guys didn't come back. No one really noticed until the next day, and some were concerned he might have crashed his truck on the way back to the cabin and frozen to death over night. Fortunately it was nothing that bad. He had merely been arrested after getting in a fight with some local guys and then doing doughnuts in the middle of the main street with his truck. He was bailed out of jail and was back to hunting the next day.
Of all the times I went deer hunting there, I only once saw a deer in the woods during the day when I had my gun. It leapt across the logging road about a hundred yards ahead of me. I only saw it for a fraction of a second, and there was thick forest on either side of the logging road, so there was no time to even raise my gun.
I did see quite a few deer though. Almost every time we would drive to a bar or to town at night, some deer would run across the road in front of the car, or be standing in a field by the road, or occasionally standing in the middle of the road. The theory was that the deer had learned to lie low in the swamps in the daytime during hunting season, and be active only at night. Grandad was convinced that if we could get a few more guys to start at one end of a swampy area, and station the others on the other end, we'd be able to drive some deer out of the swamp to the hunters waiting on the edge. We never had enough people or got organized enough to do that though.
Only one guy shot a deer while I was up there. He was in a tree stand, and it was right as the sun set. I'm not sure, but it might have been a minute or two, or maybe even ten after the official end of shooting time. Fortunately there were no game wardens in the area to raise that question. That night we ate very fresh deer heart and liver.
A few of the guys had some amusing hunting stories to tell. One of the stories I remember supposedly took place a few years earlier during bow season. A group of hunters were going to try to drive deer from a section of woods, and three hunters were stationed along a fence line at the edge of the woods. There was one tree stand, and a hunter, who we will call Bob for the duration of this story, climbed up in the tree stand. He had a bit of a reputation for being not the most dedicated hunter, but they let him use the tree stand because he promised to be vigilant and take a shot at any deer that came within range. After a while Bob realized he had to pee. He climbed down from the tree stand and put his bow up against the tree. He was peeing when a big buck came crashing out of the woods and ran right past him. The buck jumped over a fallen tree that was in front of the fence, but it must not have seen the fence because it came down right on a fence post and fell over dead. Bob finished peeing, and started calling out to the other hunters. Bob told his story several times as the other hunters arrived. No one would have believed him but for the dead deer lying by the fence. The hunters stood around the deer and started discussing what they should do. Although the hunters that were trying to drive the deer had caused the buck to run, which led to its death, they agreed that it was clearly Bob's deer since he had been urinating near where it died. They were kind of making fun of him, and implying that was the only way Bob could get a deer was to have it drop dead near him. Then Bob realized there might be a problem when he brought the deer in to register it. The game warden might notice there was no arrow wound, and ask him if the deer was roadkill or something, and that might cause complications. So Bob got his bow and shot an arrow into the deer's chest.
Some of the hunters accompanied Bob when he took the deer in to register his kill. The man who registered the deer kept looking at it and shaking his head. Bob was a little nervous and asked the man if there was anything wrong. He replied that he had been registering deer during bow season for almost twenty years, but this was the first one he had ever seen that had been shot by a man lying on his back. The other hunters stifled their laughter, and Bob said nothing else, but he realized he should not have shot his arrow into the bottom of the deer's chest while the deer was lying on the ground.
One of the first nights I spent in the cabin during deer season, after the gasoline lanterns were turned off, and the kerosene lamps were blown out, everyone was in their sleeping bags on the bunks. The wood stoves had been loaded up with large logs and the flues closed in hopes they'd burn all night. There was silence except for the soft crackling of the fire in the wood stove, and the occasional creak of a bunk bed.
The silence was broken by a loud fart from the lower bunk by the kitchen. Someone in the bunk on the other side of the room groaned in disgust. A few seconds later, there was another groan of disgust, this time from the bunk from which the fart noise had emanated.
A voice said, "That's the trouble with sleeping bags. There's only one way out."