Out of Grand Rapids area...
Dick Hollebeek hoped to get out and hunt on his 83rd birthday, the opening day of Michigan's bowhunting season. But it rained so hard he had to put it off.
So it was a few days later when the Grand Rapids hunter got out with his son Dave Hollebeek and got the best birthday present yet: his first deer, a six-point buck.
"At least I got it during my birthday week," said Hollebeek who began hunting deer just after World War II, using an 8 mm Mauser, the German army rifle he brought back from the war.
Hollebeek still has the Mauser. In fact, he plans to go back out and try again during the November firearm season.
But his inaugural buck was dropped using a crossbow. Hollebeek gave up hunting with a regular bow some years ago after developing detached biceps tendons. The malady made him eligible for a state permit to hunt with a crossbow. He could no longer pull back the string on a regular bow.
Hollebeek had no idea that the peep site recently installed on his bow would be far more accurate than the faulty red-dot sight he had been missing with for several years.
"I didn't expect to get one," he said. In fact Hollebeek, who has hunted deer regularly since the war, except when in ill health, has grown fond of telling people, "There's more to hunting than killing a deer,"
Of course, Dave Hollebeek chides his father, saying that's what everyone says when they come up empty.
So starting five years ago, the younger Hollebeek made it his mission to see that his father got a deer.
"If I never get another deer in my life that would be fine," said Dave Hollebeek. "When I said, 'We finally did it' and gave him a big hug. His eyes started welling up. He just couldn't believe it."
It was 10 years ago that elder Hollebeek began joining his three sons at their deer camp near Baldwin. His health was better then. He was able to climb a ladder stand. He could still draw a bow. He just never got a chance to shoot a deer, said Dave Hollebeek.
As his father's health deteriorated, Hollebeek worried about leaving his father sitting alone in a blind.
"So I started sitting with him," Hollebeek said. "I'd bring my bow, but never shoot. I just wanted to make sure he was safe. That's how it has been the last four or five years."
Until the morning of Oct. 6, that is. The pair got out in the field at 6:30 a.m., hunting on private land in Talmadge Township. A doe and two yearlings came and went. Then a buck showed up and started coming straight for the blind.
"He hits me on the leg and says, "Buck. Buck,' " Dave Hollebeek said. "I said, 'Shoot!' and heard the safety come off."
The rest, as they say, is family history.
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