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deer season in November, we’d go to Mama’s office at school and use the copy machine to print permits to sell for a dollar apiece to the hunters who wanted to come on the McEntire land. This is how we got our Christmas money every year. We’d put a rope up on our side of the cattle guard—boards like a bridge over the creek that keep livestock from walking across the creek—and when we’d hear a pickup approaching, we’d hop right up with our permits.
    Then the lies and excuses would begin.
    “Oh, we hunted on here last year and Clark said we could hunt again,” someone might say.
    “You can, but it will cost you a dollar,” one of us kids would reply.
    “Don’t you recognize me?” another might say. “I’m your kinfolk. I’m Uncle So-and-So.”
    “Nice to see you, Uncle So-and-So, have you got your dollar?” Despite our serious efforts, sometimes hunters would come onto our place with us not knowing. So at night, us four kids and Daddy would load up in his pickup to raid the deer camps. Daddy knew the land better than anybody, and I don’t think we could have found our wayaround up there at night without him. Daddy always knew where the camps would be.
    There we were, bouncing over the roughness that was our land, searching for the brightness of a campfire. When we spotted one, Daddy would stop, and us kids would pile out of the truck.
    “How you fellers doing?” Daddy would say, leaving the collecting to us.
    “Have you got your permit?” Pake would say. Once again, the excuses and lies.
    Most of the responses were in fun, because everybody always paid. Some years, we’d do very well, clearing twenty to forty dollars a day. But Mama remembers that Pake got discouraged when we first started collecting. He thought the men were really trying to cheat him, and if he hadn’t persisted, who knows if they would have paid? It was Pake’s first lesson in grown-ups’ dishonesty, as he had never previously known anything but the integrity of the McEntires and their friends, most of whom could use their word as their bond.

    D ADDY ALWAYS SAID THAT, BEING AN ONLY CHILD, HE WANTED to have enough kids to have his own baseball team. But after having four kids that made as much racket as we did—that was enough.
    And being normal kids, we were full of mischief. Next to the barn, for instance, was a shed where Daddy kept his sick yearlings. We would tie a rope to the rafters on the barn and Alice and Pake would swing from the top of the shed over the haystack. At the height of their swing, they’d let go and fall into the mountain of loose hay.
    I always wanted to try doing things like that, but never had the courage. When I was ten, I stood on top of the shed and braced myself for the swing. Alice and Pake had already gone into the house for dinner. I had assured them I was going to take the swing, but I was simply too scared. Iclimbed down the way I had come up, and never did take the plunge that was the McEntire version of bungee jumping twenty-five years ago. I wasn’t ashamed of being chicken. I felt it was the smart thing to do—not to get hurt.
    But Alice and Pake called me a sissy for days.
    Pake, especially, used to pull these derring-do stunts all the time. I recall feeling my heart in my stomach watching him climb up and down a three-hundred-foot tower just to prove to us he could.
    Sometimes we’d play in the hay barn, where Daddy had stacked the hay from the ground to the rafters. There was no way for the smallest breeze to penetrate the hay when it was that tightly packed. Us kids dug tunnels through that mountain of hay. We’d crawl on our hands and knees through the maze of passages, which may stand as the dumbest thing we ever did. If the hay had shifted one bit, we would have been trapped inside and smothered to death. Haystacks are also a hiding place for snakes and skunks that burrow inside. It’s a thousand wonders we weren’t crawling through a tunnel to come face-to-face with a