THE ART OF STORYTELLING AND THE CHERRY TREE BUCK

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And then one year, late in the fall and during the hunting season, we were walking around in the cornfield and I heard a sound up in the woods. It sounded like a modem rifle. We ran up there and discovered that a hunter had trespassed on our land. I don't know where he came from, but he was standing on the edge of the comfield, looking down at something at his feet. When we ran closer, we could see that it was the cherry tree buck that he had killed.

I never saw my grandfather lose his temper like he did that day. He grabbed that man by the scruff of his neck and the seat of his pants and dragged him off our land. When he came back, we examined the deer.

We could see he was dead. Now, normally in a case like that, we would have taken the deer's skin and made something out of it: moccasins or bags. We would have taken the meat and given it to my grandmother and she would have cooked it for us. We would have used a lot of other parts of the deer, but we didn't do that this time.

Instead, my grandfather went and got two shovels and we dug a hole there in the cornfield and we buried the deer right there with his legs folded under, his nose facing east, and his cherry tree sticking out of the ground.

And sure enough, that next spring the tree grew just fine right there, right over the deer's grave. We got a beautiful crop of cherries that year. I can remember walking out there when they were just coming into red. I walked out, reached up to select one of the cherr ies, put it in my mouth and—ow!!! There was something hard in my mouth! A little twig or something.

I picked another one and owww!! Another little twiggy thing. And then I looked and I could see every one of those little individual cherries had a little set of deer antlers in them.

And they were perfectly good cherries. The only problem was, by the time you had de-pitted and de-antlered all those cherries, it would take you a whole afternoon to get enough to make a pie. But as far as I know, that cherry tree is still growing there, and I hope it grows there a long, long time.

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