Bambi

It was late August 1962 and the family was having a rough time of it. We were living on, and operating, a dairy farm in northern Arkansas and we were just scraping by. It wasn’t that we weren’t making money, in fact we could have lived just fine with a little judicious budgeting. The problem was that J.T. (my stepfather) was an alcoholic and he was losing the battle with the bottle. The upshot was that though there was always money for booze, sometimes there wasn’t any money for food.

I was feeling the weight of the world on my shoulders. It wasn’t my load to bear but I didn’t see anyone else stepping up so I took it on myself to feel responsible for feeding the nine hungry kids. I didn’t think any of us could face another macaroni and cheese dinner.

This particular afternoon fate stepped up to bat in the form of an eight point buck wandering across the rocky meadow in front of the house. Under normal circumstance that buck would have been pretty safe as deer season was still a ways off, but these were not normal circumstances. My first thought was to get J.T. to shoot the deer but when I ran into the living room he was passed out on the couch in no condition to operate a dangerous weapon.

I froze just for a second then went for the gun myself. It was a Winchester model 94, 30-30 rifle. I had never shot it but I had shot my 22 enough to know how it was done. I went back out on the back porch and pulled a folding chair up to the railing. I checked to make sure the gun was loaded and the safety was off, I steadied it against the rail and took aim at the grazing buck. My mind went through all the things taught me about shooting by the drunk in the living room and I carefully squeezed off a shot. The deer jumped took two running steps and fell over dead.

In less than an hour we were listening to the sounds and smelling the smells of dear meat frying on the stove. It was probably a good thing too as we were out of macaroni and cheese.

Uncle Dave (at 12)