Each year, I walk into the quiet darkness to find those things I’ve lost.
The moment falls in late November, opening weekend of gun deer hunting in my native Wisconsin. Dressed in heavy clothing against the harsh cold, striding to the deer stand through the early morning darkness, I carry my rifle in careful wonder at what I’ll see.
Sometimes, as I reach my stand, there’s fog lingering even as soft gray light appears over the treetops. Other times it’s clear, and the great valley where my family and I hunt materializes before me all at once, with its gently rolling fields and curving wood line. Always the air is cold and clean, biting my face and creeping beneath my heavy coat, freshening my lungs and quieting my thoughts.
It’s here, in the high seat of my deer stand overlooking the past year, that I find those lost things—loved ones gone, feelings I’ve forgotten or lacked the courage to name, a sense of self known only to God and me. This time isn’t simply about finding a trophy deer. It’s about finding joy, pain, and renewal. My usual world is a whirlwind, but out in the woods I can hear God’s “still small voice” (1 Kings 19:11–12, KJV).
As our country has become more divided, participation in hunting has declined, and I find critics tend to envision a reckless blood sport, not realizing the care and consideration a good hunter brings to the woods. I grew up with deer hunting as an honored tradition, one where we learned about respecting the animal with an ethical hunt, honoring our natural environment, and carrying on a way of life where faith is found in living close to the land.
Faith Lived Close to the Land
My main memories of deer hunting are about my grandpa on my mom’s side, Roman Ripp, hunting on land that was in our family thanks to my grandpa on my dad’s side, Albert Reisinger.
Grandpa Ripp is almost mythical in my memories—smiling broadly, singing songs in idle moments, and telling big-buck stories over his morning coffee with the flair of a classic American showman. He wore bright red hunting pants and an old-fashioned hunting hat with ear flaps, jauntily tipped atop his head. I still marvel at his sharpshooter’s aim.
He may as well have been Buffalo Bill Cody to me, and the setting for his adventures—and those of my dad, my uncle, and eventually me and my sister and friends—could not have been more sacred. It was the rolling Wisconsin farmland where I grew up, which my Grandpa Albert had worked since he was a child, climbing out of the Depression into the middle class so that my dad and mom could farm it with us.
Not long after I was old enough to carry on the tradition, Grandpa Ripp declared himself too old to handle the hardship of another winter deer hunt. He passed his stand to me, and I hunted it each year, carefully harvesting deer when I got the chance, missing enough to leave me wondering if I would ever shoot and track and regale others with stories as he had. When I graduated high school—excited to pursue a writing career, worried I was letting my dad down by not farming—Grandpa Ripp became an important mentor, introducing me to a newspaper editor who became my first boss.
One year, the chance came to make him proud. In the early morning light, a buck stepped out from the tree line. He was so big I swore I could see the fog of his breath mingling with mine, though he was much too far away for that—and maybe too far for a young hunter like me to reach.
I got him. That deer was my first truly triumphant moment at my grandpa’s deer stand, but also my last great moment with my grandpa. He had been slipping for a few months. I brought the antlers to his assisted living apartment in town, expecting he’d leap to his feet like always to greet me at the door, hear my story, and tell it back to me as if it were one of his own.
Instead, I saw just how far gone he was. His face lit up, but he couldn’t rise from his chair. And though I told him the story as many times as he wanted, he couldn’t repeat it back to me, let alone add his own visions of it to help me treasure the memory. We took a picture to preserve the best of the moment, and I left.
Grandpa lived several months longer, and he and Grandma Ripp moved out to the farm for their final care, where I drove out to see them each week. But his memory—the happy times, and his decline—became so tied to the annual deer hunt that it took many years in the deer stand I’d inherited to process our loss.
It was only in my deer stand, in the dark slowly becoming light, that I could really think of him. There, the distractions of the world fell away. The things I told myself all year about how I was doing could finally be separated, wheat from chaff, to see the truth. I learned to pray about things I hadn’t realized were weighing on my heart.
God is never “far from any one of us,” of course, “for in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:27–28). But in the stillness of the deer stand, his presence is more noticeable for me. Prayer comes more easily. Surrounded by God’s creation, I remember to say with the psalmist:
All creatures look to you
to give them their food at the proper time.
When you give it to them,
they gather it up;
when you open your hand,
they are satisfied with good things.
When you hide your face,
they are terrified;
when you take away their breath,
they die and return to the dust.
When you send your Spirit,
they are created,
and you renew the face of the ground. (Ps. 104:27–30)
I remember to meditate on God’s work in the world and in my own life. Since that moment with Grandpa Ripp, hunting seasons have come with both triumph and defeat—not only in pursuit of the next buck but also in moves across the country, career defeats, relationships lost and gained, and the grief that has come with the passing of our remaining grandparents and other loved ones.
I’ve also been able to pass on the tradition, to introduce a new generation to the stillness of the deer stand. My 15-year-old nephew has already harvested as many big bucks as the adults who hunt on our land. My two younger nephews have watched me harvest deer for years, and this year they get to try it themselves for the first time. And my wife and I have a daughter, our first child of just 9 months—old enough to appear in big-buck photos with her daddy that she’ll see years from now, if I’m fortunate enough to live out another legend this year.
But no matter what I see, as the dark turns to light, I’ll know I’m where I need to be: with God, honoring his creation, finding those things lost. And those things yet to come.
Brian Reisinger is a writer and the author of Land Rich, Cash Poor: My Family’s Hope and the Untold History of the Disappearing American Farmer. He can be found at brian-reisinger.com and @BrianJReisinger.
