When walking around a dead man’s hunting camp, each glance and every step seems to stir up old stories, memories and unasked questions from decades-long friendships.
When the day ends and you’re back in camp with those who knew him longer, you hear new tales and tributes while sipping scotch and eating bratwursts. Some such accounts answer years-old questions, while others expose assumed “secrets” as common knowledge among some crew members.
Still other details fill gaps and broaden perspectives as one memory branches into the next. Tom Heberlein, for instance, lies buried on a knoll about 200 yards south of Old T, his old shack in Ashland County. His gravesite overlooks a swale that flattens out and rolls eastward through the national forest’s pines and poplars toward the Iron River. Heberlein called the Nicolet-Chequamegon “the American Sector,” and posted signs where his two faint walking trails left federal property and entered his 40 acres (https://www.patrickdurkinoutdoors.com/post/hunters-gather-for-october-grouse-at-checkpoint-charlie).
You can’t see those signs from his gravesite on the knoll, but maybe you could 25 years ago after loggers clear-cut the swale. Old T’s hunters still pause on the knoll to look for deer before proceeding east to the “Orange Trail” or south to the “Blue Trail.” But healthy forests quickly shutter such vistas, sprouting poplar saplings to create a twiggy nightmare that’s impassable by foot and impenetrable by eye.
Heberlein and his friends weren’t the camp’s first hunters to watch for game from the knoll. When Heberlein’s father, Charlie, was nearing the end of life’s trail 35 years ago, he often hunted deer from this high ground. And though the site is but a short walk from the hunting shack, Charlie Heberlein told friends he was “heading back in there” when leaving to hunt, trusting they’d get the irony.
Tom Heberlein liked the site, too. In 2014 he attracted bears to the knoll in late summer with old candy and other bait when drawing a bear-hunting tag after applying annually the previous decade. A day or two into his September hunt, Heberlein shot a big black bear while watching his bait from 60 yards atop another knoll to the southwest, his rifle barrel sticking out the window of a two-story shack dubbed the “writing stuga.”
Heberlein and his friends built this “high-rise” cabin in the mid-1970s so he could house more friends whenever they fled Madison, however briefly, to hunt, fish or canoe the Northwoods. As much as Heberlein admired his homebuilt cabin, he later wallowed in guilt for “Tom Sawyering” all that free labor.
“I didn’t deserve such good friends,” he lamented when describing how his gang built the cabin’s walls and floors near Madison, trucked them to Ashland County, and assembled everything atop cement pilings they poured on previous trips.
This second cabin didn’t become the “writing stuga” until sometime in the 2000s when Heberlein sequestered himself to write his book, “Navigating Environmental Attitudes.” About that same time, when mulling plans for a new outhouse, he learned latrines had grown more complex than the one built decades earlier by the original shack.
County governments now set and enforce building codes on outhouses, which means niceties like a ventilation pipe extending from the pit to high above the roof. Still, Heberlein conceded that building standards make sense, and considered his new privy the Taj Mahal of Northwoods outhouses.
Heberlein was proud of his secluded writing compound, and the views it provided from his property’s highest point. Likewise, the structures nestle nicely into the landscape, surrounded by a stately stand of red pines Heberlein helped plant as a boy in April 1958. Those seedlings grew into tall trees, creating an easily identified landmark for distant hunters poking around the Iron River and the soggy meadows and beaver flowages draining into it.
Far closer to the stuga, perhaps even within slingshot distance, lies “Heberlein Lake,” one of two bulldozer-built wildlife ponds he contracted 20 years ago. The ponds attract ducks, coots, frogs, geese, herons, beavers, kingfishers, snapping turtles and even trumpeter swans. Heberlein took pleasure in those inhabitants, scoffing at wildlife professionals who consider such ponds watery vanities, of dubious value to the surrounding ecosystem.
But Heberlein viewed his ponds as cogs in his conservation efforts, quoting Aldo Leopold for justification: “A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke (of the ax) he is writing his signature on the face of the land.”
The most poignant Heberlein stories, however, circulate from the camp’s original shack. This is the sagging tarpaper cabin that Heberlein’s father and uncles built 85 years ago with lumber salvaged from bunkhouses long forsaken in an abandoned logging camp. A narrow closet in the shack’s “captain’s quarters” held Heberlein’s old hunting hats, orange coats, plaid shirts, camouflaged shirts, red longhandles and brown brush-pants.
Rich Stedman, Heberlein’s longtime friend and camp heir, forayed into the closet on a warm mid-October afternoon last week, emerging at intervals to hang and drape everything outside on tables, benches and backrests. Stedman then announced everything must go, and directed his friends to claim whatever they wished, provided they didn’t leapfrog their designated turns.
As the pile dwindled, we focused on an orange, down-filled “puffy” jacket Heberlein hadn’t worn in ages, but we recognized it as an iconic coat from 50-year-old camp photos. Heberlein wore the coat on Nov. 21, 1976, when still-hunting and shooting a buck he tracked much of the day. The buck, which he dubbed “My Deer” in the camp’s logbook, fell dead from Heberlein’s bullet after a 40-yard run at dusk. Heberlein field-dressed the buck, wrapped its heart and liver in a shirt, and returned to camp.
He returned the next morning, dragged the buck to a nearby railroad track, and helped another hunter with a homemade handcart haul the buck to Heberlein’s car. A photo taken that day shows Heberlein in his orange puffy coat waiting beside his buck as the good Samaritan pulls his railroad cart into view.
Stedman knew Heberlein’s “My Deer” story better than anyone. Therefore, he pulled on the old orange coat, and modeled it for us while checking its fit. He then shed the coat and claimed it as his own, prompting loud applause.
Somewhere, we’re sure, Heberlein nodded appreciatively and clapped, too.
Tom Heberlein, left foreground, waits with a buck he shot in November 1976 near Cayuga, while another hunter approaches with a handcart to pull the buck to the nearest road. Nearly 50 years later, Heberlein’s friend Rich Stedman, right inset, found Heberlein's old jacket and claimed it. Heberlein died earlier this year, on Jan. 4.
— Tom Heberlein & Patrick Durkin photos
An unknown hunter hauls out Tom Heberlein’s buck in November 1976 on a railroad track in Ashland County.
Rich Stedman hauls out shirts and coats from a closet inside his hunting shack, formerly owned by his friend Tom Heberlein.