A 15 minute read.

          This is a controversial story, I know. In reality there is very little actual hunting involved, and it would be best to read it before passing judgment on it. If you are totally against guns and hunting, I suggest you skip reading it. I am writing this because it is an integral part of my family’s history and I figure if I write a story I will share it with an audience because they might find it both amusing and educational.

          The 30.06 (pronounced “thirty aught six” ) is a beautiful tool. My father purchased one a long time ago and it has always been his nicest gun. For some time I had been planning on buying it when he died but have recently come to the conclusion it should go to the oldest son, my brother Andrew, and it should be continuously handed down through the generations. The 30.06 is probably accurate to about 600 yards with the right scope. The bullet diameter is .308 inches and the .06 has to do with the case length.

          My parents butchered all their own meat, purchasing pigs and steers at a local auction. We built a rack for the back of the pickup and would put the animals on our truck and bring them home. My dad would get out his old .22 rifle, a small gun really, but he knew right where to shoot so the animal would die instantly. I remember one year though when we brought home a steer and took off the rack on the tailgate and dropped the tailgate. The truck was high enough off the ground that the steers were afraid to jump off, except for this one. He jumped off and stood there looking around, gathering his wits. He gathered his wits before my dad gathered his and took off west toward the neighbor. My dad started running after him with the .22 and then thought better of it.  He turned and walked calmly into the house and came back out with the 30.06. The neighbor, David Bontrager saw the steer when it came over near his house and jumped in his truck to head it off. There was a harvested cornfield between us and David drove into it, heading the steer north. My dad saw it going back towards the woods and headed north near our property line. When the steer got near the end of the field my dad was about parallel to it, and David turned it towards him with his truck. The steer was about a hundred yards out when it saw my dad and stopped. My dad had been waiting for this chance and planted his feet, put the crosshairs between the steers eyes, let out his breath slowly and squeezed the trigger. The steer dropped in it’s tracks. This gun has always been a part of my family’s history and probably will always be.

          Enter more characters. My cousin Enos and his brother John had left the Amish church when they were about 20 and moved in with my parents. Their father Rudy is still alive but my dad, their uncle, has been kind of like a second dad to them for a long time. They had another brother Ananias that will play a part later on but most important is their friend Robert Miller. Robert was also from the Amish church. I think there are two types of children in the Amish church; those that are timid enough that they really believe the Amish doctrine, and those that are so repressed by it that when they finally get loose they go crazy (figuratively). Robert, Enos, John, and Ananias were the latter. Robert was an especially wild child. In the late 70’s and early 80’s these boys were in the prime of their life physically. They had grown up on the farm and were in good shape and in spite of the fact that they had gotten married and were settling down, they still looked for trouble on the weekends. Every year around Halloween my parents would suffer the brunt of their shenanigans.

          One night around Halloween my mom heard a rattle on the roof. She was kind of a light sleeper and it woke her. She lay there listening and heard nothing. Then a bump on the roof and something rolling off. She got up to see what was going on. She didn’t turn on any lights so she could see outside and she saw a car setting there with it’s lights on. She went in to wake dad and he got dressed in a hurry and ran out the front door to hop in his truck. The car tore off down the road. It was a dirt road so there was no squealing, just flying gravel as it took off. The first thing my dad saw was that the swing set was setting behind his truck. Then he noticed that all his truck tires were flat. Then he noticed that all the tires on the other two cars were flat as well, and all the trees had toilet paper hanging down in streams. I really wish I had a picture of his face at this moment. They went back to bed.

          The next morning was Sunday morning so normally we wouldn’t work. However we had to inflate our tires and move the swing back into place so we could use our vehicles. We didn’t go to church that day. My dad had essentially built his own air compressor using an old water tank. It was a big tank, probably a hundred gallon tank, and took a long time to pump full. We carried the tank to the front of the garage and set up the pump; we used our lawnmower engine to run the pump and had to remove the belt from the deck and hook it onto the air pump. It was about noon when we finished pumping up all the tires. We found they had put little rocks in the caps that go on the valves so screwing them back on made the air release. We didn’t clean up the toilet paper on Sunday because it wasn’t necessary work; we waited till after school on Monday. We put it in bags, seventeen rolls of toilet paper, and for a long time had bags of toilet paper in the bathroom to use. My dad called the police Sunday morning but of course nobody was ever caught. However we all knew who had done it.

          That was the worst of the Halloween pranks, but they went on for years. Finally us boys (my three brothers and I) were old enough to think for ourselves and came up with a plan. My brother slept in the basement and had a stereo. We ran a fish line about 6 inches off the ground across the front of the yard, from a tree to a switch. If they hit the line it would flip the switch and turn on the stereo in the basement. The stereo would wake up my brother but wasn’t loud enough to be heard outside. I remember not being able to sleep that night and then suddenly, about midnight, my brother was in the room telling us to wake up. The stereo had gone off and he had checked and seen some people TP’ing us. The four of us burst out the front door at a run. I had a nine inch filet knife and a good flash light but they had about 30 yards head start on us. I went across the road into the neighbor’s field and began walking east towards the next road, flashing around to see if I could see anyone. I went about halfway across the field before giving up, realizing they could be anywhere. I turned and went home. My mom was up wondering what was going on but one of my brothers had beat me home and already told her. I sat down, wide awake, and shortly a car pulled into the driveway. One of my brothers, I don’t remember which one, was smarter than I was and had simply set out to find their car. He ran east to the next road, about 2 tenths of a mile, and then went right a little bit and found their car. All he had to do was wait for them to show up. When Enos and John got there he told them they were caught. Robert was not with them at this time, I think he had moved back to Ohio already. They came up to the house and mom made some coffee and they laughed about it a little. They were getting a little old anyway and I think the only Halloween pranks after that were instigated by my brother Jonathan’s girlfriend.

          These incidents are kind of an indication of the type of characters we are dealing with. I am not sure where the deer poaching story falls into the timeline but it was sometime during this period but prior to all our tires getting flattened. I was probably about 10 years old at the time. It involves my cousin Ananias and his wife plays a bit part, my cousin Enos, their friend Robert, and my dad. Ananias, Enos, and Robert were all married and should have known better. My dad was married and had eight children and should have known better. It was in the fall during hunting season I think. My dad had no license to hunt deer; they were kind of expensive and we were poor. My dad had grown up hunting large areas of land freely around the Amish in Tennessee and the restrictions of private land in Indiana in a more populated area I think was frustrating to him, as it is to me. Robert and Enos were talking to dad one Saturday morning and they hatched a plan. Dad had purchased a nice spotlight and had the 30.06. Robert had a big old Lincoln. Robert would drive that night, Enos would spot the deer, and dad would shoot. They decided that Enos and Robert would pick up dad that night at around 10:00 at our place. Later that afternoon they met Enos’ brother Ananias and decided they would play a trick on dad. Robert and Enos told Ananias where they would be that night. Ananias had a big flashlight and a red handkerchief. He talked his wife Mary into going along and they parked at Pine Ridge Church about 9:45 pm. They waited quietly, chuckling a little sometimes thinking about how much fun they were going to have.

          They didn’t have long to wait. The big Lincoln came through cruising slowly. It was a bright moonlit night and Ananias could see clearly to drive without headlights. He waited till the Lincoln went past about a hundred yards then pulled in behind it. He followed it north across US 20, crossing the state highway in the dark with no problem; in those days there was very little traffic that late at night. The Lincoln went on north to the next road then turned west and slowed down to a crawl. They came to a spot where the woods met an open field and stopped. Dad and Enos rolled down their windows and Enos turned on the spotlight. Ananias slowly rolled up behind them. He told Mary to cover the flashlight bulb with the red handkerchief. She started flipping the switch on the flashlight, making it blink like a police light, and he flipped on the headlights simultaneously.

          Now my dad understood that if you get caught poaching deer it’s a major offense. The gun would be permanently confiscated, the same with Robert’s car, there would be major fines to pay, possibly some jail time. He might even lose his job if he had to go to jail. He should have thought about this before going out to poach deer, but it never occurred to him he would actually get caught. And now here it was, time to pay the piper. He could clearly see all eight of his children at home, and his wife; what would happen to them? His mind couldn’t quite handle the implications and he went into shock.

          Of course the others all knew it was meant as a joke; he was the only one out of the loop. Ananias put his car in park and got out. As he was walking up to the Lincoln Robert rolled down his window. Ananias looked in and said “Please step out of the car.” Robert and Enos opened their doors and stepped out. Dad was in shock; he sat in the back seat with the gun across his knees, hunched over a bit and staring at the floor. He just set there. After a minute Ananias opened the door and said “Sir, you’re going to have to step out of the car.” Finally dad moved; he set the gun down and stepped out. This all makes me a little sad now, picturing his mental state, but we laughed about it for years afterwards. The story is absolutely true, the way I heard it last Sunday night from the culprits themselves. Dad stood at the side of the road beaten, staring down at his feet, not knowing how he was going to pay his mortgage payment that month after paying the fine for poaching. He is a big man, tough as nails. He laughed at us boys hammering nails when we were building our house. When he was our age he used a 20 ounce hammer for framing and a 16 penny spike was started with one tap and then set all the way into the wood with the next blow. But now he stood beaten by a blinking red light, knowing he had done what wasn’t legal.

          Ananias finally spoke up; he knew dad had enough. In Pennsylvania Dutch he said “Vas di hanga menshed iss un do bischt?”  (Approximately translated to “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” ) (Dutch is spelled phonetically) . The dutch registered slowly in my dad’s brain, seeping through the shock. A Conservation Officer wouldn’t speak dutch to his suspects. He started coming out of the shocked state and looked up. Here was his nephew Ananias grinning at him. My dad drew back his hand to strike a blow that would have sent Ananias flying but dad was too slow. Ananias stayed out of reach and they all started laughing. I think dad was probably thankful that he hadn’t really been caught. The adrenaline in his system from the whole ordeal, now the realization that he wasn’t really caught must have been really something. I can’t imagine the high he was on. After laughing their fill things settled down, Ananias and his wife went home, and my dad asked Robert to take him back home. Robert and Enos laughed and said “come on, we haven’t got our deer yet.” Later that night they shot a nice six point buck and took it to our place and butchered it hidden away in the basement.

          With this incident and all the incidents to follow that Robert would help pull on dad, my dad developed a kind of enmity with Robert. My dad always thought Robert was kind of the ringleader in those happenings. My dad had grown up and settled down, something that Robert refused to do, and dad never had much good to say about him. This is why I was half expecting fireworks to explode last Sunday when I was sitting at my parents house eating popcorn and Robert walked in. My dad has aged now and was sitting in his wheelchair. Robert has aged too with the girth that goes along with it and is supposed to be on oxygen. Robert sat beside me and he and my dad started talking about things. After chatting about various happenings for a while dad looked at Robert and said “A while back the preacher was talking about loving your enemies. I’ve been thinking about that and now I can truly say that I love you.” I was more than a little shocked, seeing as how my dad has never in my life told me that he loves me. I mean, I know he does, but he has never actually said it. Today I am wondering how much better our life would be if we all made peace with our enemies; it’s as simple as forgiving them for what they have done and telling them we love them. Hopefully I won’t wait to do that until I am sitting in a wheelchair. 

December 21, 2012

Moses D. Yoder