Kurt looked down at the frost for a long moment. Then he took one slow step toward Dale.
I’d known Kurt Ostrowski for eleven years. He’d stood at my wedding with a carnation pinned crooked on his lapel. He’d eaten my chili at a dozen Packers games. He’d hunted my grandfather’s ridge every November since Brad first brought him out there in a borrowed truck.
I’d never once seen him look the way he looked that morning, standing at the edge of Grandpa’s cornfield in the gray light with frost on his boots.
Behind him, Mike Pruett and Russ Lindahl stood with their rifles slung, breath smoking in the cold, their eyes moving from me to the three blaze-orange hats in the trees and back again.
Dale didn’t move. He stood next to me at the foot of the old wooden ladder stand with his empty hands at his sides and his gray beard frosted white at the chin. He was fifty-eight years old and stood about six-two, and he had the stillness of a man who’d been in rooms far worse than a cornfield.
Kurt stopped about three feet from him. He studied Dale’s face, then the faded patch sewn on the left shoulder of Dale’s canvas hunting coat: a black horse head on a yellow shield, a diagonal stripe across it.
“First Cav,” Kurt said quietly.
Dale’s eyebrows went up a fraction. “That’s right.”
“Desert Storm?”
“Desert Storm. Then Iraq twice.”
Kurt stood there for a long time, breathing white clouds into the cold. Then he pulled off his right glove, finger by finger, and held out his bare hand.
“Twenty-fourth Infantry,” he said. “Ninety-one. I was nineteen.”
Dale looked at the hand. Then he took off his own glove and shook it.
Nobody said anything. A mile off, a second shot cracked across the hills, and then a third.
Kurt let go of Dale’s hand and turned to me. His face had gone red, and not from the cold.
“Amy,” he said. “What do you mean you didn’t cool off? Brad told us you were fine with it. He said you agreed to it.”
“Agreed to what?”
Kurt reached inside his blaze-orange vest, pulled out a folded piece of paper, and handed it to me. It was soft at the creases, like it had been in and out of that pocket a lot.
I unfolded it in the gray light. At the top, in bold letters somebody had typed on a computer, it said HUNTING LEASE AGREEMENT.
Below that was a legal description of my eighty acres, copied word for word off the deed: the Southwest Quarter of the Northeast Quarter and the Northwest Quarter of the Southeast Quarter of Section 14, Township 27 North, Range 4 West. Then: Lessor, Amy L. Halvorsen. Lessee, Kurt Ostrowski, on behalf of hunting party. Term, November 2026 gun season. Consideration, $4,000, paid in cash.
At the bottom were two signatures.
One was Kurt’s.
The other said “Amy L. Halvorsen,” in a loopy, slanted hand that looked nothing like mine.
I’ve signed my name the same way since I was twelve, when Grandpa Arvid taught me to write it on the back of a savings bond. I didn’t sign that paper. I’d never seen it in my life.
“Brad gave us that in August,” Kurt said. “He said you signed it at his place when you came to pick up the rest of your boxes. He said you were glad for the money, with property taxes and all.”
My hands were shaking so hard the paper rattled.
“I didn’t sign this, Kurt,” I said. “I haven’t been to Brad’s place since the divorce. I haven’t spoken to him except on the phone in August, when he told me I don’t even hunt and hung up on me.”
Kurt stared at me. Behind him, Mike swore under his breath.
“Then where’d our four grand go?” Russ asked.
Nobody had to answer that.
To understand how I ended up standing on that ridge at dawn with three Army veterans and a forged lease, you need to know about my grandfather.
Arvid Halvorsen was born in 1932 in the farmhouse that still stands at the bottom of that land, a mile and a half outside Elk Mound, Wisconsin. He served in Korea with the Second Infantry Division and came home in 1953 with a Purple Heart and a limp in his left leg that never went away. He married my grandmother, Ingrid, in 1955 and farmed that land for fifty years. They grew corn and soybeans, kept a few beef cattle, and raised three kids on what the eighty acres would give.
But what he loved most was the ridge.
The north forty is mostly hardwoods: big white oaks, a few red, and a creek bottom thick with cedar. Every fall the deer came down off that ridge to feed in the picked corn. Grandpa said it was the best deer ground in Dunn County, and nobody ever argued with him, mostly because nobody else had a ridge like it.
He never charged anyone a dime to hunt it.
Every opening morning, from 1961 until the year before he died, he walked his hunters in himself. Most of them were veterans: Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf, then the younger ones from Iraq and Afghanistan. He kept a little green ledger in the kitchen drawer with every name in it, the year they hunted, and whether they got a deer. Sometimes there was a line or two more. “Jim Haugen, Vietnam, 1969. First hunt since he came home. Didn’t shoot. Sat all day. Said it was the first time he slept since Khe Sanh.”
When I was little, he let me walk behind him on those mornings. I’d carry his steel thermos, nearly as big as I was, and he’d tell me to step where he stepped so I wouldn’t crunch the leaves.
“Why don’t you charge them, Grandpa?” I asked him once. I was maybe nine. “The Larsons charge people to hunt their land. Uncle Gary says they make a lot of money.”
He stopped on the field edge in the dark and looked down at me.
“Some things you don’t sell, Amy,” he said. “These men already paid.”
Grandpa died three years ago in March. He was eighty-nine. His will had been drawn up by an old lawyer in Menomonie named Harold Brekke, who’d handled the Halvorsen family’s affairs since the sixties. It left the farmhouse and the eighty acres to me, his only granddaughter, in my name alone.
At the time I was married to Brad Kessler.
We’d been married nine years. Brad was a sales manager at the John Deere dealership in Menomonie. He was charming and easygoing, and the kind of man who could sell a combine to a dairy farmer who didn’t need one. Everybody liked Brad. I liked Brad, for a long time.
When Grandpa’s will went through probate in Dunn County, Brad sat beside me in Harold Brekke’s office while Harold read it out loud. When Harold got to the part about the land, Brad squeezed my knee.
Afterward, in the parking lot, he said, “That’s our land now, babe.”
“It’s my land,” I said, half joking. “Grandpa left it to me.”
He laughed. “Same thing, right? We’re married.”
It wasn’t the same thing. I found that out a year later, when the marriage came apart.