I once joined a deer club in eastern Texas, the specific area known thereabouts as “Deep East Texas.” The designation is meant to suggest many things, among them being a land of the piney woods, a sparse population of Bible Belt/salt of the earth type folks, muddy pickup trucks and hunting hounds.

This being the season for climbing into deer stands such as shoot houses, tree stands, climbing stands or ground blinds, my mind recently wandered back to another member of that East Texas hunting club. He became a good friend of mine and a good man through and through.

Mr. Mayfield, as everyone called him, was an older, quiet man of slight build. His build was so slight that I wondered if he even had a build, or if in fact he was just a shadow, or perhaps a photocopy. The man weighed about 80 pounds I guess, but I am not sure, for I never saw him with his clothes off. Yes, we all undressed for bed at the deer camp, but Mr. Mayfield was so slow removing his clothes, and he wore many layers that made him look normal size, that I always fell asleep before he finished. And he got up so early that he was always dressed when I awoke.

Mr. Mayfield moved at the pace of a snail on Valium and his speech was slow and almost inaudible. So if he said or did something funny, the humor was always double.

His slowness was remarkable, but today’s story is about his weight; or should I say lack of weight. One day he told me I could sit in his tree stand which was in a particular thicket near my own stand and therefore should be easy to find. He told me just how many steps to take beyond a certain tree on a dim trail.

I found the guide tree and counted the steps and then looked about for the tree stand. There, above me, was a tiny board no larger than a loaf of bread, nailed between two frail limbs on a sapling no bigger than my arm! “This is what he calls a stand?” I thought.

Having never seen a stand I couldn’t get into back then, I set about climbing the limber tree by stepping on protruding 20 penny nails he had driven nearly through the tree’s trunk to form steps.

After a couple of steps, the sprout began to lean sharply. When I reached the seat, the tree had bent halfway to the ground and as I sat down, it completed its trip groundward and I simply stepped off onto the earth much as one does when stepping off the Ferris wheel at the fair. The sapling slowly rose back into place, and I suppose Mr. Mayfield hunted in it until he died.

I teased him about the little board in the sprout and told others in his presence that he had a stand down in the woods nailed to a blackberry vine. We could visualize him scaling the little bush without so much as shaking a leaf and sitting there like a sparrow on a vine.

But his diminutive frame may have saved Mr. Mayfield from severe injury one early frosty morning. In the freezing pre-dawn darkness he had followed his son in law to a giant sweet gum tree which held an enclosed shoot house high on one of its limbs. The tree was in the swampy marsh beside a small creek where the briars and undergrowth were a thick tangle.

The son in law shined a flashlight beam up the sweet gum while Mr. Mayfield climbed, stepping onto huge nails driven part way into the tree. Up and up he climbed with his gun on a sling over a shoulder. Finally, at the top, he slowly opened the door of the box stand and shined his tiny flashlight inside.

Then, in slow motion, he released his grip and fell backward from the tree! Down he came, face upward, arms outstretched as one does when floating in a swimming pool, crashing through small limbs and smashing into the undergrowth beside an astonished son in law. The fall made a lot of noise, but the tiny man fell much like a feather, the limbs and undergrowth breaking his fall, and he had on so many cold weather clothes that he hardly felt the landing.

His companion fished him out of the briars and asked what happened. The disheveled old fellow spit out a piece of bark and replied slowly, “Tthheerre wwaass uuh D_ _ _ _ bboobbcaatt inn tthhaatt ssttaannd!

I don’t know if he ever tried to get into that tree house stand again.

But whenever the subject of deer stands arises, I’ll wager the story of Mr. Mayfield and the bobcat is still being told around the stove at that old deer camp.