Werewolf #1: Deer Grandpa

I was out walking through the woods with my grandpa and his black lab, hunting for deer. I was maybe 14, not really comfortable with killing a big animal. This was a late morning in late fall, so lots of yellow grass and a brisk wind.

Suddenly, a huge stag stepped out maybe 50 yards away. This thing was massive. It didn’t even see my grandpa as he took aim — but just before he fired, I tickled him on the ear with a long stalk of this feathery grass I’d been swinging around. The shot went wide and I grinned stupidly as my grandfather turned around in disgust. I bopped him one more time on the nose and surprisingly got a laugh out of him.

Didn’t see any more deer, so we left early. I think my grandpa figured out I wasn’t all that interested in hunting. On the way back he teased me about sleeping through all the noise that morning. While I was asleep, the muffler had actually fallen off the back of the car. And it turned out that it was only half torn off, so the metal was all twisted and bent. My grandpa couldn’t remove it by himself, so he’d just tied the muffler to a tree with a bit of rope and drove away, ripping the scrap pipe right off.

“And you slept through it all!” my grandfather said incredulously.

“Yeah, but we left at like five am…”

“And then you hit me on the ear with that stalk of grass right when I was about to shoot the biggest stag of the season. Boy, I’m never gonna let you live this down. I’m gonna tease you about this every day I see you till the day I die.”

It was a long drive back home. Later that afternoon, my grandfather pulled over on the side of the road. He told me to wait in the car a minute, then stepped outside and walked across the ditch into the woods. I figured he must have gone in the bushes to relieve himself or something, so I just looked out the other window.

He never returned to the car.

I got out and investigated the bushes where I’d last seen him. My grandpa was gone. I couldn’t find anything unusual, but of course I had no idea what to look for.

I called his name as loudly as I could, again and again. I even honked the horn a bunch of times, but it was so echoey in that wild place it really spooked me. I begged his dog to sniff out the trail; it just whined and sat in the car. I waited there by the edge of the road for a long time, but I decided I wouldn’t go off exploring the woods — no sense in us both getting lost.

When it started getting dark, I got scared, so I left. I promised myself to come back and bring help, but I honestly didn’t even know how to return — I was asleep the entire ride out here.

It was a miracle that I did find a local gas station and a nice fellow to help me. A search party was later organized, but my grandfather’s body never was found.

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