The Light of November
By Tom Nigl
Our pilgrimage to the towering hills and rolling valleys of Richland Center, Wisconsin happens without fail. No matter the weather, there’s a special kind of light in the November sky, calling my family to drop what they’re doing and assemble their best blaze orange. They hurry with anticipation from across the state to greet one another. It has been that way for many years.
There is the traditional last minute rush for everyone: boxes of extra shells to be purchased and warm clothes to be gone over one last time. But for me, the real tradition never started until I reached the edge of Richland Center and spied my cousin’s cabinetry shop. Light shown brightly through the window, his truck parked in front, and it wouldn’t be the beginning of the gun deer season until I stopped in.
My cousin Mike was one of those guys that made everyone’s life shine a little brighter. He graduated from the Air Force Academy with a degree in aeronautical engineering, flying in the Air Force for 14 years, not because he had to, but because he wanted to. Many summers, he’d take my daughter and son for a week to his farm, introducing them to outdoor adventures. He may have never admitted it, but he was a big influence on my own son’s Air Force career.
Mike was the ultimate craftsman when it came to woodworking, engineering a cabin on the 300 acre tree farm where we gather every deer season. More importantly, he could craft stories like no one else. Mike’s traditional deer stand, on one of the highest ridges of the farm, was where most of the camp action was sighted and the stories originated. He’d stroll down the ridge, walking from hunter to hunter like an old-fashioned telegraph wire, pounding out stories of deer down, or deer missed, with equal gusto.
We’d relive old hunts in his cabinetry shop. Sawdust on the floor piled up like the stories; like the one about the windy and cold day, when I’d sweat too much walking to my ridge-top stand.
I’d sat it out a bit too long, and when I finally tried to walk it off, I was shivering uncontrollably. Looking back, I’m sure it was a heavy dose of hypothermia. I think if I would have fallen, I’d have had trouble getting back up. Suddenly, there was Mike, rolling up on a four-wheeler, like he knew I was in trouble.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“I’m c…c…c…old,” was all I could stammer out.
Mike drove me back to the cabin to warm up next to the wood stove. I thawed out and was able to get back to my stand for the afternoon hunt. I’ll never live it down.
“Careful out there tomorrow morning, Tommy,” Mike would say. “It’s supposed to be c…c….c…old!”
It was the reason I stopped to see him on the eve of the big hunt, to hear the stories and set the mood for opening morning. But that was not the most important reason.
I have come to believe, after years of hunting, that killing a deer is perhaps least important in the grand scheme of the hunt. Mike knew this too. It was tradition. There was a light in Mike’s eyes that I needed to see before I put on my blaze orange and uncased my rifle for the annual rites of November.
It was a light born of playing cards around an old table, of laughing and good-natured teasing. It was a light that shines brightly in the places of the deer – how the woods sound, with every twig snap making your heart race, and how the sunrise peeks over the ridge top and spreads its warmth into the dark valleys below. Most importantly, it was the light of family coming together.
Last year was the end of a tradition. Mike’s light was on and his truck was there, so after all I had to stop. He was tired, having been diagnosed with cancer and going through the usual regiment of chemical radiation.
It would be his last season, but you wouldn’t have known it by looking in his eyes. His eyes said it all. The light of November was still there, and it was glowing blaze orange. I knew that light would keep calling the family hunt together for years to come. My cousin Mike would have wanted that.
“Be thankful for everything you have,
Because some day it could be taken away”
-Mike Nigl
Tom Nigl is an avid outdoorsman from Omro, Wisconsin.
This story is dedicated to Mike Nigl’s family and the deer hunting tradition.