One of the things I love most about living in Utah is the clear definition of four distinct seasons. As one season begins to wane, I am always ready for the one that is coming.

Of the four, the two that best ring the bell are Spring and Fall.

April means the end of the wettest and muddiest parts of winter and the beginning of baseball and clear, sunny, blue skies. Six months later, October brings beautiful colors, crisp, cool air, and the excitement of the pending Holiday season.

And to ramp up the festivities, schools throughout the land shut down for a week-long break for both.

When I was going through the school system, we didn’t enjoy the luxuries of Spring and Fall Breaks. However, October did come with some benefits.

On the second Thursday and Friday of each October, the teachers packed up and attended the Utah Education Association’s annual conference in Salt Lake, creating a fantastic four-day weekend. That was followed by a four-day week as the school’s shut down for October’s third Friday – the opening of Utah’s deer hunt.

To some this was a hallowed weekend – a pilgrimage of sorts to find the biggest buck on the mountain. Two years ago, I wrote about our own Williams Family Deer Hunt.

That October weekend was hallowed for us as well, albeit for very different reasons. My Dad and his three brothers had always gone deer hunting with their own father and they continued the tradition with my cousins and me.

However, after Grandpa passed away, there wasn’t a serious hunter in the bunch. We were there to be together – and to eat ourselves into oblivion along the way.

The opening day strategy was replicated each year; hike to the same knoll, start a fire to keep the deer away, enjoy a Julia Childs-like lunch spread and listen to a football game. We weren’t against hunting; we just enjoyed the traditions more than knocking off a deer.       

The deer hunt actually began during the second week of October when my dad and his brothers met for lunch at Salt Lake City’s Little America Coffee Shop to plan the meals.

My mom once asked my dad why they went to lunch every year and my dad said, “Well Maxine, we have to plan the meals.”

My mom just rolled her eyes and walked down the hallway.

You see, the meals were the same, year in and year out. On Friday night we sat down inside Uncle Bert’s camper to a dinner of Dinty Moore stew, rolls, and soda while Saturday night’s menu included steak, fried potatoes, and creamed corn.

You will notice the absence of deer meat. Someone once asked my dad if we ever had deer meat and he just laughed at them and wandered away.

Speaking of Uncle Bert’s camper, it was the heartbeat of the weekend. Just big enough to hold us but quaint enough to keep us close, it had a table which folded into a bed, a bunk above the table, a small kitchenette, smaller bathroom, and the quintessential bed over the cab.

I recall one Friday night when we all finally settled in so my older cousin Bruce could roll out his sleeping bag on the floor – an offer he graciously made so the rest of us could have beds.

A few minutes after Bruce settled in, a voice from over the cab stirred the quiet, dark night. It was my Uncle Bert, apologetically saying, “Oh shoot Bruce. I have to use the bathroom.” It was one more trinket on our deer hunting charm bracelet of memories.       

On Saturday morning, we were up before dawn with the rest of the hunters, ready to go.

While they went off in search of the prize, we had our own important work to do. We had a knoll to hike to and a fire to start before lunch and the 12:00 kickoff.

It was magic.

At least it was until the year of my fourteenth birthday when dad and his brothers did the unbelievable.

They shot a deer.  

I was already on heightened alert when they tossed aside tradition and drove up the gravel road so they could hike to a different spot. It was nice enough, a clearing situated on a lower part of the mountain surrounded by leafless Quaking Aspen trees.

Everything had gone according to plan; the fire was ablaze, lunch was put away, the game was on the radio, and Uncle Neldon and Uncle Bert were fast asleep.

Despite a slight breeze, the sleeping sighs of Uncles Neldon and Bert, and the play by play of college football, all seemed eerily quiet.

Then chaos set in.

My eight-year-old brother, David, went behind a tree to do what hunters do behind trees, when he suddenly came bursting from a small grove, with one hand pulling up his pants and the other waving the roll of toilet paper in the air yelling, “There’s a deer! There’s a deer!”      

With that refrain from our miniature, horse-less Paul Revere, my dad and my Uncle Burnell grabbed their rifles as Uncle Neldon and Uncle Bert awoke and grabbed theirs.

As the deer leapt past David, the magnificent four lined up, dropped to one knee and fired like they were firing on the British on the old North Bridge.

As I looked at my brother, waving the toilet paper like a flag in glory, the smoke-filled air, and the four “brethren”, all down on one knee firing away at the enemy, it looked as though the minutemen were back in town with their own eight-year-old fife and drum man.

Somehow, by the grace of the Almighty, Dave didn’t get shot.

And somehow, the deer didn’t either.

As my eyes shifted away from the slow-motion patriotic scene I was witnessing back to reality, I saw that deer jump over the fire and pronk away from the clearing.

Then, as fast as it started, it ended when one of the minutemen dropped the runaway buck as it began climbing the mountain a good football field away.

Heaven forbid they nab it when it was twenty yards in front of them.

No, the adventure had to continue.

I thought time might stand still or I might hear bells ringing in the far distance.

The Williams Brothers had bagged a deer. Who knew. It appeared that my Uncle Bert, who always said he brought one bullet to make sure his gun still worked, had brought one too many bullets.

It was the shot heard round the world you might say. Or at least, the shot heard round the family.

Not to be confused with Bobby Thompson’s shot heard round the world when his ninth inning home run in the 1951 playoffs sent the Brooklyn Dodgers back to Brooklyn.

But this was the real deal. So, up the hill we went with each rifleman denying they pulled the fatal trigger.

By the time we got that deer down through all the roughage back to the truck, a passerby wouldn’t have known if we had shot a four point or ordered a new roll of brown shag carpet.

Funny, we never went to that spot again. We had learned the hard truth about messing with tradition.

With all that though, the day ended well.

We had a new story to tell, grateful recipients would have freezers full of deer meat, and David was hailed the conquering hero.

As for the rest of us, it was back to camp for steak, fried potatoes, and creamed corn. Some traditions just never go away.

Read more stories like this and learn valuable lessons from the book Fatherhood: The Role of a Lifetime. Available now on Amazon!