I went first along the field edge in Grandpa’s coat, with the thermos under one arm and a small flashlight with a red lens pointed at the ground. There was frost on the picked cornstalk stubble, and gray light was just starting to come up behind the oaks on the ridge. The stars were going out one at a time.
Behind me came three men in blaze orange with their rifles slung, none of them loaded. That was Grandpa’s rule. Nobody loads until they’re in the stand and the harness is clipped.
Nobody said a word. The only sounds were frozen cornstalks crunching under our boots and, somewhere down in the creek bottom, a barred owl asking who cooks for you, who cooks for you all.
I took Wes to the top stand first, the one overlooking the cedars. He climbed up, clipped his harness, and gave me a thumbs-up in the dark.
Then Tim, to the creek crossing.
Tim stood at the bottom of his stand for a long minute without moving. I waited. I’d learned from Grandpa that you never rush a man at the bottom of a ladder on opening morning.
“My uncle used to walk me in like this,” he whispered. His voice was thick. “In the dark. He’d go first, and I’d step where he stepped.” He swallowed. “I forgot that till right now.”
“You can remember it every year now, if you want,” I whispered back.
He nodded without looking at me, then climbed up into the old oak stand and clipped in.
Dale’s stand was the last, the wooden ladder stand at the corner of the woods, where the ridge comes down to the corn. It was the best stand on the farm. It was Grandpa’s own.
I unscrewed the thermos cap, poured coffee into it, and handed it to him. Steam rose up into the cold.
“Your dad sat right here,” I said. “In 1974. He shot a ten-pointer from this stand.”
Dale held the cup in both hands and didn’t drink it. He just looked up at the stand in the gray light.
He had one boot on the bottom rung when we heard it.
There were voices at the gate, then footsteps coming up the field edge, heavy boots on frozen stubble, and flashlights bobbing white instead of red.
Kurt, Mike, and Russ, Brad’s buddies, were walking onto posted land.
Dale stepped off the ladder and stood beside me. He handed me back the thermos cap without spilling a drop.
The three of them came up the field edge and stopped about thirty feet away. Kurt shone his flashlight on me, then lowered it.
“Amy,” Kurt said. “Brad said you’d cool off.”
“I didn’t,” I said.
Kurt looked up at the blaze-orange hats in the trees, then at Dale’s gray beard.
“Who are these guys?”
“Army,” I said. “All three. They hunt here now.”
Nobody moved.
A mile off, the first shot of the season cracked across the hills.
Kurt looked down at the frost. Then he took one slow step toward Dale, and everything that happened next happened the way I already told you: the patch, the handshake, the folded paper with my name forged at the bottom, and Russ asking where their four thousand dollars went.
We stood there in the cold while the light came up. I read that fake lease three times. The signature was close enough to fool someone who’d never seen mine, but it was nothing like the way I actually write my name.
“Kurt,” I said. “Didn’t Brad tell you about the letter?”
“What letter?”
“I sent him a certified letter in August. It revoked any permission for him or anybody he’d told. He signed for it.” I pulled out my phone and showed him the photo of the green return receipt card with Brad’s signature on it. “And I posted every fence line on this property. Didn’t you see the signs at the gate?”
Kurt looked at Mike. Mike looked at the ground.
“We saw the signs,” Mike admitted. “Last week, when we drove by. Brad said they were for other people. For trespassers. He said you put them up because some guys from Eau Claire were poaching out here, and that we were covered because we had the lease.”
“He said that?”
“He said, ‘You’ve got paper. Paper beats signs,’” Russ said bitterly. “And we believed him. We paid him four grand in July. Cash, in an envelope, at the Legion Hall. Same as last year, and the year before. Twelve thousand dollars over three seasons.”
“Three seasons?” I said. “The divorce wasn’t final until two years ago.”
Kurt’s face changed again.
“The year before the divorce,” he said slowly, “Brad told us you two were splitting up and he needed money for his lawyer. He asked if we’d pay him for the hunting that year, since you were going to be difficult about the land. We felt sorry for him.” He shook his head. “We paid for three years, Amy. Four thousand a year. Brad said you were in on it the last two. That you’d agreed.”
Twelve thousand dollars, for hunting rights Brad never had, on land that was never his. And he’d been doing it since before the ink was dry on the divorce.
I thought about what Patricia had told me about the recreational use law, and about Lyle Swenson on the phone saying, “We’re talking about the farm.” For three years, men had been climbing Brad’s duct-taped stands on my land with a cash lease in their pockets, and if any of them had fallen, I’d have been the one sued.
Dale had been quiet through all of it. Now he spoke, low and even.
“Sounds to me like you three got robbed,” he said.
Kurt looked at him.
“Your buddy sold you something he didn’t own,” Dale said. “That’s not on her, and it’s not on you. That’s on him.”
Kurt pulled his hat off and rubbed his hand over his head. In the growing light, he looked older than forty-nine. He looked tired.
“Amy, I’m sorry,” he said. “We’re leaving. Right now. I swear we didn’t know.” He looked up at the stands, at Tim and Wes watching silently from the trees. “And I’m sorry we came up here in the dark, making noise on opening morning.” He looked at Dale. “I know better than that. I really do.”
“It’s all right,” Dale said. “You didn’t know.”
“We’ll talk to Brad,” Russ said. His voice was hard. “Today.”
They turned and walked back down the field edge toward the gate, flashlights off now, stepping carefully on the frozen stubble like men leaving a church service.
Halfway to the gate, Kurt stopped and turned around.
“Amy,” he called softly. “Your grandpa walked me in once. Nineteen ninety-two. The year after I got home. Brad never knew that. I was too embarrassed to tell him.” His voice wavered. “He told me I’d already paid.”
Then he turned and kept walking.
