FENCEROWS...Antler Bracket Madness
By John Luthens
The sun dropped to the western horizon on the first day of spring and took the temperature along for the ride into the coming darkness.
Ice fishermen huddled on their buckets and in their shacks against wind chill gusts as I swung out of northern Winnebago County. All was still across the drifted expanse of Lake Winnebago. There was no rippling and open water shining in the last rays of the March sun. My God! I think it was still making ice.
I was in a hurry to get home, get two hours south and closer to the equator, although it was not going to be any warmer. There would still be plenty of snow waiting to greet me, but after all, this was the eve of the annual dance. If Mother Nature didn’t want me to trade my winter boots for dancing shoes, she would have to be left to her own devices. The madness dictated that I attend.
March signs of madness.
In a yearly tradition, my daughter, my son and I scratch out our teams the night before on the kitchen table. The basketball picks are not for money, and none of us portend great college basketball knowledge. Nonetheless, the brackets are of paramount importance to family honor and bragging rights.
Cinderella stories are foreshadowed, hedged with a healthy dose of favorites. It goes without saying that all the Wisconsin-represented schools are stretched, branch by branch, further into the tree bracket than the odds dictate possible. Cheers erupt and curses are thrown. New teams come on strong and old favorites are mown down Brackets inevitably end up in crumpled balls in the trash can, only to be taken out and caressed into wrinkled straightness when the next game starts.
Eventually, all of our sheets assume the appearance of a forked antler after a battle with another sparring buck. Some will grow tall and majestic; others will be broken and dropped. Only one will be the dominant-buck bracket in the end.
The plan was to watch as much basketball over a four-day span without going crazy, which necessitates backing slowly away from the television for short intervals. The kids would be in school for the early games on Thursday and Friday, and when they got home the tournament would be in full swing. I thought it wise to pace myself. If my regional brackets were going to end up looking like shed antlers, then I should go out in the mornings and search for the real deals.
I knew of a few local spots, although I recognized the odds were stacked against me. The shed racks would have to be high enough to stick above the snow pack and I wouldn’t be searching out endless acres, but I could still make it back to my lounge chair in plenty of time for the bracket-crunching three-pointers; they would be more than easy to spot from a perch directly in front of the T.V.
Thursday morning found me dropping the kids at school, before driving a scant two miles to an 88-acre park called Pleasant Valley in the township of Cedarburg. It has a nice looping walking trail and sloping meadows, but parts of it are actually quite rugged and thick. There are briar tangles and winding stands of cutover ash trees, alternating open glens and hardwood patches, and it is shadowed along one side by high the high marsh grass of a spring-fed creek bottom.
The snow was plenty deep in most spots, but it had melted down to bare ground on some of the south-facing slopes. There were cottontail rabbit tracks running rampant through the sapling, and you could see how high the snow had been through the winter season by the bark that the rabbits had chewed off choice sapling morsels.
I thought that if I could follow the tracks of rodents, maybe they would lead me to a shed that they had been nibbling on. Maybe I could even find a bedding area by following deer trails, but I was in the woods two hours without any telltale signs. In fact, it was two hours before I found my first deer print.
When I finally found one, it led to more. Soon I was standing on a thick sloping ridge that was ringed by birch and oak trees. The creek wound below, and scattered about were many iced-over impressions with fibers deer hair frozen in the bottoms. I searched the area over, sometimes crawling through the snowy brush on my hands and knees. It looked promising, but the snow was simply too deep. I turned up no antler sheds.
I did kick up a fur-trader’s ransom of rabbits, some exploding out of hiding at my very feet. And I found a rabbit’s foot, likely cast away down a melted slope by a coyote, fox, or maybe a night-cruising owl. I thought the rabbit charm might portend some basketball luck for me; though it had obviously not worked out so well for the rabbit.
Found relic of a rabbit’s fortune.
I barely beat my crew home from school. I had been out for over six hours and had to wrestle them for the best seat. Marquette needed every bit of luck the rabbit’s foot brought to the tournament table. We gave them up for dead before jumping up and down on the couch, shouting ourselves hoarse, and bringing them back at the finish. The rest of our night was spent in much the same position and in the same vocal fashion.
Dawn of day number two found my brackets in no worse shape than usual; and me at a farmer’s doorstep outside of the town of Saukville. The farmer runs an egg-producing operation with 19,000 chickens, and he plants and harvests more acres than I can comprehend.
We took a short drive and he pointed me in the direction of several island woodlots in the midst of his agricultural workshops, which is to say he gave me permission to shed-hunt his land. I brought him two freezer bags of bluegill fillets to offer my thanks, but he made me take two-dozen fresh eggs in return. That, my friend, is capitalistic commerce at its finest.
The sun glared white on the deep drifted snow. I could have put polarized glasses to good use, but snowshoes would have been a bulky waste of time. The drifts were so hard packed that it was like walking on spongy concrete. I squinted against the snow blinding brightness and sailed the cottonwood edges of my chosen woodlot with ease.
Overhead, two hawks hunted the marsh grass, scanning for field mice while I worked the edges hunting for my own thing. Circling shadows crossed the snow in front of me, looking huge and menacing on the reflected snow, although the birds were several hundred feet in the air. I gained a new respect for keeping my own shadow off the trout waters. With light-sensitive eyes, even the smallest movement is magnified tenfold.
I discovered a foreleg bone of a deer, frozen beneath the roots of a tree. I was unable to chip it out with my knife, but I considered it at least a moral victory. Again, the snow was simply too deep for a thorough search. I hurried the ordeal a bit, partly because the packed snow made for such easy walking, but also because the Badgers were playing the early game. I needed to get home to claim my throne.
A frozen deer bone foreshadows the Badger’s basketball tournament hopes.
The rest of the weekend went by in a blur. Wisconsin went down and dealt a mortal, antler-snapping blow to our brackets (no luck from the deer leg, maybe I should have worked harder to dig it from the snow.) We yelled at the top of our lungs for the final minute of the Marquette game Saturday night, finding that at least the rabbit’s foot was still valid.
Gonzaga broke off bracket tines with their loss, and a Gulf Coast Florida team swept in like a hurricane and tore off a half-rack, but by Palm Sunday, all three of us still had sheds of hope left. We went to church and waved palms. Then the whole family tromped out onto an abandoned farmstead and searched the overgrown tangles for forked and pointed relics.
It was snowing lightly when we left. We trotted home soaked from a full-fledged snow squall, racing for the best seats. After all, more games awaited, more antlers clashing it out; there’s nothing like a bombardment of snow and antler bracket madness to welcome in a Wisconsin spring.