As boys growing up in Smithwick, we always had venison in the freezer. In order to do that we had to take advantage of every opportunity to shoot a deer. We had been working down around Jonestown and we’re headed home. When we got to the top of the hill just before getting to Turkey Bend, Kenny looked out across a clearing and saw a nice fat doe and threw on the brakes. We always had a deer rifle in a gun rack behind the seat in those days. He learned across me and made a clean shot out of the right side window. She dropped.

He jumped out with the rifle still in his hand. He told me to drive down the road a couple miles and give him a chance to drag her back to the fence. I slid across and as I pulled onto to road, I looked back and there was a game warden right on my bumper. There was no way he hadn’t seen Kenny.

What I didn’t know was Kenny had seen him before he was seen and he dropped the rifle and just waved at the game warden. Not knowing this I kept driving. I wasn’t pulling off until he turned the light on me. They didn’t have all the lights on the vehicles back then, they just had a spotlight and they would flip it on as a signal for you to stop. The light never came on, so I continued to drive. I was mortified. I couldn’t figure out why he didn’t stop me. I didn’t want to pull over and turn around, afraid he’d know what I was doing. I kept driving the 10 miles on home. He finally pulled out around me and continued on.

I’m not sure what my logic was but I swapped pickups and then went back to get Kenny. With the amount of time that lapsed Kenny thought I had been apprehended. That was the reason I hadn’t come back. When I finally returned, it was too a mad brother that was upset because I hadn’t immediately returned to get him. Go figure!

That wasn’t the first or the last time that Kenny’s little brother, me, didn’t do exactly what he thought I should have.