Anderson: Wisconsin hunting camp was as much about people as it was about deer

BARRONETT, WIS. – A few days back I wandered into the shack where for long decades I sought refuge at this time of year. The occasion of those visits was the opening weekend of Wisconsin firearms deer hunting, and the place looked like it did when I left it a few seasons ago. A wood-burning stove. A handful of plywood bunks. And a wobbly table on which sat a vintage radio I’d bought for $1 plus tax, straight cash homey.

Crackling like fingernails dragged across chalkboards, the radio nevertheless connected on the season’s first morning to a Rice Lake, Wis., station, which at 6:05 a.m. would play, “Da Turdy Point Buck,’’ a memorable ditty by the whacky bunch, Bananas at Large.

“Now I’m not much for thinkin’

no I don’t do it often

but I had an idea

to put that turdy pointer in his coffin.’’

On all of these first days of Wisconsin whitetail hunting, until they went away to college, my two sons were with me. By tradition on those openers I’d awake first and stoke the fire, a little oak, a little popple, and when they could no longer see their breath the boys emerged from their sleeping bags asking whether their French toast and sausage were ready.

The older boy, Trevor, shot a .30-06, while Cole, the younger, carried a .243. These and my .270 leaned neatly in a corner of the shack, their chambers empty, while the wood stove glowed red and we washed breakfast down with orange juice and cowboy coffee.

This wasn’t my shack and we weren’t hunting alone. A mile away was a converted barn that housed a dozen or so hunters who in the still-dark of opening morning would fan out in different directions from my sons and me. Yet we were all one bunch, and the kingpin of our outfit and the owner of the barn, the shack and the land surrounding them was Norb Berg, a bona fide good guy who figured out a lot of things in his long life, but to the day he died earlier this year at age 92 he never fully understood deer, not completely.

Thus, I guess, the attraction.

When Norb, of St. Paul, and I first met in 1980 we became fast friends. An interesting mix of really smart yet steadfastly curious and consummately kind, Norb was a successful executive who had made some money. Those achievements might have been foretold, given his qualifications. Yet throughout Norb’s lifetime he remained at heart a small-town kid from Edgar, Wis., who was transfixed by the plights of others less fortunate. Man or woman, boy or girl, Native American or Black. Grounded in his Catholic faith, his forever puzzle was how he could help these people, and others.

I’d been to a number of deer camps before I hunted with Norb. But I’d never been to a happier one. Or a louder one.

In those first years, circa the early 1980s, a restaurant in Barronett that has since been renamed went by the moniker Spanky’s, and on the night before the opener Norb’s brother Dave, a country crooner and songwriter whose memorable pennings include “George Jones and Jack Daniels,” would often entertain, singing and strumming.

Another brother, Marv, would join in enthusiastically, as would Norb, together with the cast of other characters who were in the Berg deer camp that year, a list that in time would include Norb’s sons Kevin, Mitch, Tony and Paul, and other friends and relatives, some of them shirttail.

Add to this at Spanky’s a similarly enthused bunch of locals and the effect was that of a flash mob before flash mobs were cool, with everyone dressed in blaze orange.

That said, Norb and his bunch took deer and deer hunting seriously.

A visionary, Norb figured out early on that if he could leave his sons a place to hunt, that might be the best he could do. So when a tract of land would come up for sale and he had some extra money, he’d buy it. He’d also managed the lands for wildlife, as his sons do now, thinning trees and seeding food plots while constructing a fleet of hunting stands with names like Elaine, Denali, Clip, Patti Jo and Scope Eye, among many others.

Scope Eye, in fact, was the stand not far from the shack where my sons and I headquartered from which on one opening morning they both shot bucks.

The stand was big enough for the three of us and I was present when Trevor felled his. Then I disappeared for a time and before I returned Cole had touched the trigger on his .243, dropping a six-pointer at 90 yards.

I have no idea how my dad felt when I shot my first deer as a kid in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. He was sick too long and died too young for me to ask.

But while watching Trevor and Cole drag one of their deer back to the shack, I felt good. Real good. And at dinner that night, when the boys told Norb about their deer, he felt good, too.

“That’s great,” Norb said. “Just great.”

Consider now the extremely talented hillbilly Tyler Childers, who sings a tune he wrote called “Follow You To Virgie (Virginia),” about schoolboy chums who later in life drop what they are doing and come home for the funeral of one of the boy’s grandmothers.

When the boys were young, the woman had shown them love and support. It was all she had — and everything they needed.

“And I will follow you to Virgie

‘Cause that’s what us boys are for

To help you out when you get weary

And you can’t go no more.’’

When Norb died, I was in Alaska and it wasn’t easy for me to get to his funeral. But I was glad I did, because all the boys were there, the deer hunters, and many of the others he had helped, whose numbers were legion.

I thought about all of this the other day when I visited the shack. I won’t be hunting in Wisconsin this year because I scheduled a bow hunt elsewhere. But I had a few hours to spare and I wanted to look around the shack nevertheless, if nothing else than to recall old times.

So I drove from the Twin Cities to Barronett, and from there to the shack.

A wood-burning stove. A handful of plywood bunks. And a wobbly table on which sat a vintage radio I’d bought for $1 plus tax, straight cash homey.

The place hadn’t changed.

Except for one thing.

Before I shut the door, I left a note.

“Thanks, Norb.”