I have mentioned before that I have two brothers. Mike is a year behind me in age, and David is a year behind him. We all three grew up in the same house and pretty much did the same things growing up, but each one of is grew up to be very different. We all grew up fishing and camping, but my father did not hunt. We were all introduced to hunting by our maternal grandfather and friends. My brother David never really enjoyed hunting, and I think fishing was something he enjoyed, but did not actively pursue as an interest. My brother Mike and I were different. We both enjoyed hunting and fishing, and make no mistake about it, my brother Mike was probably the best hunter and fisherman I have ever been around. A as a teenager, he would accomplish amazing things as an outdoorsman. For example, one spring he came home from fishing with a really nice 6lb Bass (this was way before catch and release). At that point, none of us had caught a largemouth of that size. The next day he came home with a 7lb Bass! It was a really nice fish. The next day he came home with A 9LB BASS!! Amazing. He just had a knack for knowing where to find fish. It was the same way with hunting. We lived in South Carolina when we were teenagers, and one winter he came home with a massive Greater Canada Goose. I know what you are thinking; "big deal, he shot a goose", but his was back in the 70's when geese on the eastern flyway were rare and you had to have a tag to shoot ONE goose a year. I mean, you rarely saw geese back in those days. He killed a 6pt buck with a 45lb recurve bow when he was 15. Again, back in those days that was a big deal! I mean he climbed a tree along a game trail, no stand, no real camo except for some olive drab army surplus pants and an army surplus woodland camo shirt. He was just gifted when it came to being in the right place at the right time. He even worked and did chores for this old man that lived near us in South Carolina as a trade off for a bird dog pup. He got a black and white GSP and trained it himself. You cannot imagine the number of quail that he and "Blackjack" brought home. Really and truly, Mike was my first hunting guide. I was always a good shot, but Mike showed me how to hunt. He taught me how to duck hunt, quail hunt, deer hunt, squirrel hunt......you name it. As teenagers we started a tradition of duck hunting on Thanksgiving morning. My mother always fixed dinner and we ate around 2 o' clock, so we would get up, go out and jump ponds every Thanksgiving day. We would always make it home just in time for dinner, but would get a butt chewing for cutting it so close. I don't think Mom would have had it any other way.

As we grew up, Mike did a four year stint in the Navy, and during that time my parents moved to Texas. When Mike got out of the Navy, he chose to come to Texas, and when he did, he made up for the lost time hunting and fishing. During that time, I did a stint in the Air Force, and was stationed in England. I was lucky because I got to hunt pheasant and rabbits while living there. I had also gotten married, Mike stayed single. Mike lived here in Texas and became a cabinet maker, and I lived in the corporate world, moving all over the United States, raising two kids, and putting myself in a position where I could afford to hunt and fish in some high quality places. Mike worked hard, got married, and had a little girl in '95. But every Thanksgiving, I would come to Texas and Mike and I would go duck hunting. That is the way it went until 1997.

In '97, I got transferred to Dallas by my company. It was great. I was back close to my parents, and most of all, back with my brother. Mike had moved with his family to Burnet, TX, which is 3 to 4 hours from where I lived, but I knew that we would tear it up. We did. We hunted, and fished all over the state. Mike did not make a lot of money as a cabinet maker, but he did alright. He was really good at finding free places to hunt. We always hunted dove on places he had gotten permission for or traded services to get access. I got on leases and had memberships at waterfowl clubs, and I always brought Mike along. My son Bobby loved when "Uncle Meatsa" would join us on hunting trips. My brother is hilarious, and Bobby relished the fact that I was always the butt of my brothers jokes. We had some fun times. One time, I was taking a friend of Bobby's deer hunting, and he and Bobby crept up under our tower stand, and Mike shot the deer out from under us! It scared the crap out of us, but we still laugh about it to this day. The kid did get a nice deer anyway! It was really great having my brother around to relive our younger days, and introduce our kids to the sport. We fished and hunted from the Red River to Port Aransas, and between the two of us, we always did well.

In June of 2004, Mike was up in Plano visiting my parents. He was spending the night with them before he and my father went on a camping/fishing trip to northwest Arkansas for a couple of weeks. The morning they were to leave, my mother was in the kitchen making breakfast when she heard Mike coughing upstairs. She then heard a thud like something hit the floor. Normally my mother would have just assumed he dropped his suitcase of was just moving around, but she just had a feeling....call it a mothers intuition. She went upstairs to check on Mike, and found him on the floor unconscious, not breathing. My mother is a nurse, and immediately began trying to resuccitate Mike, and screamed for my father to call 911. She and my father worked to perform CPR on Mike, and it was difficult because he is a big man, and they struggled to keep his head back, and his tongue had swollen, closing his airway. Fortunately, my parents live close to Plano Presbyterian hospital, and the ambulance got there within 6 minutes. They worked on Mike and rushed him to the hospital. That is when I got the phone call.

I live north of Plano about 20 miles, and got to the hospital as fast as I could. When I got there, the emergency room staff directed me to a small waiting room off from the regular waiting room. I knew that was a bad sign. The attending physician for the emergency room came into the room and told us point blank that Mike had suffered a massive "level 4" aneurysm of the brain, and that he did not expect him to survive the day. I felt as if I had been hit with a baseball bat. Time stopped. The doctor told me I could go into the room to see him, and I did. To this day I wish I had not gone in there. He was restrained, and was in a state of seizure. His eyes and tongue were bugging out of his head due to the massive pressure of the blood trapped in his skull. An artery in his brain had burst, and there was blood seeping out of his nose and ears. That image will haunt me for the rest of my life. I snapped into a very calm and logical state of mind. I realized that my parents were suffering greatly and needed help. I left the hospital with my wife to go home, get cleaned up, and make phone calls to family. Mike's wife was on her way up, and I was preparing myself for the reality that I would be making funeral arrangements that day.

On the way back to the hospital my phone rang. It was my father. He informed me that a neurosurgeon was being brought in to operate on Mike. A scan had revealed that the artery that burst was right between his eyes, and not too deep in the brain. They were going to operate, but the prognosis was still grim. Only one out of every 25,000 people that have a level 4 aneurysm survive, and 70% of those that survive suffer serious brain damage. They gave Mike a one in ten chance of surviving the operation. He made it out of the operation alive. They placed him into critical care, which is a special unit with one nurse assigned to the patient around the clock. That started a vigil that lasted over a month. Every day the doctors told us he could die at any time, and every day he hung on. For some strange reason, as Mike started to respond to outside voices, he responded and recognized me the most. Even as he woke up out of a two week coma, he did not recognize his own mother, but for some reason knew who I was. Every day I would go to the hospital after work (my mother never left), and we were only allowed to see him for 15 minutes every hour, one at a time. Every day I would sit by his bed and tell him that if he got better I would take him dove hunting in Argentina (something he always dreamed of doing), and every day he would beg me to let him up (he was in restraints to keep him from pulling out all the tubes and wires). Mike was in the hospital for 3 months, and against all the odds, he survived.

When someone has a brain injury, you never know what part of the brain is going to be affected, and exactly what the deficts or outcome will be. Mike seemed remarkably recovered, except for what seemed to be a few years of memory loss. He remembered his first daughter, but did not remember his two younger children that had been born since '99. He also seemed to struggle with knowing what was proper to say and not say. To illustrate, if someone ugly walked into the room he would just say "dang, that is the ugliest woman I have ever seen". It is funny in a way, but can make for some darned uncomfortable social situations. But if you did not know Mike before, or could not see the scar on his head, you probably would not know anything had happened to him. That truly is a miracle.

When November rolled around, Mike had been home with his family for a couple of months, but was still going to some occupational rehabilitation. I called Mike and asked him if he wanted to come out and do some duck and deer hunting. He said yes, and we made the arrangements. I had decided that Mike would kill my trophy that year. Mike came out and we went deer hunting, and that first morning, a very nice 9 point walked right out. I asked Mike if he wanted to take the deer and he said yes, but he just sat there. I telling him that he could take the buck, and he would keep saying, "O.K.", but he would just keep watching the deer. He seemed to struggle with the decision making process. He sat and watched the buck and talked about what a nice deer it was, but there were several deer on the food plot, but he could not make the decision to take the buck. I could tell that if I pressed him, he got uncomfortable and uneasy. We just watched the deer feed until they moved on, and went back to camp. I asked him if he felt up to a duck hunt the next morning, and again he said yes.

We got up early and got in the duck blind. Mike has always shot a Remington 870 pump. Always. Mike could shoot that 870 with the speed of any semi-auto, and he was a superlative wing shooter. I am pretty decent, but he made me look like a rank amateur. He had it with him, and when the first ducks came in, we raised up and fired......everybody but Mike. He said he did not see the ducks. Unfortunately, we have come to find out that he has lost some peripheral vision and he struggles with catching movement out of the corner of his eye. I could tell that Mike was frustrated, so we ended the hunt early and took him back to camp. That was the last time Mike ever hunted again. He doesn't hunt or fish anymore. If you ask him why he will tell you that he has "lost the fever", or if he is in a real surly mood he will say that he has turned gay. I believe that he does not fish any more because he is afraid of being alone. I think he fears it happening again, and no one being there to get him to the hospital.

I often sit and wonder why God chose to take Mike's "fever" for the outdoors. Mike was a free spirit, and did live life on the edge. He was one of those people that did what he wanted, when he wanted, and how he wanted. He didn't make the best decisions as a young man. Maybe that "fever" was part of the animal that God chose to tame.

Either way, I lost my best and lifelong hunting partner. Life will never be the same. Sometimes I get mad about it, and this story is the first time I have really shared my feelings with anyone. I tend to keep things inside. But in all honesty, I was mad at God for taking Mike away from me. It will be three years in June, and it still bothers me. I always tell myself I should just be grateful he is still alive and with our family, and I truly am, but every now and then when I dwell on it, I feel like I am being punished as well.

I just keep telling myself that everything happens for a reason, and someday I will know that reason.

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