The Geiger Counter

So. We hear tales of courage in days gone by. Stories of valor and bravery. Of monsters slain and good people rescued. We are told that heroes once walked the same Earth as us, breathed the same air we pull into our mortal lungs. That halflings, elves, dwarves, giants, and even humans adventured in the same dark forests we just barely see through the murk of night when we gaze out our windows from our cozy homes and cars.  

But those are tales of long ago, stories of other people in other times. The age of heroes has long since passed into history, and ours is the time of ragebait tweets and A.I. slop. Ours is an epoch when our eyes wear down from the strain of little screens, while our legs grow weak for they never carry us over rough deadfall and deep drainages. Ours is an age when our bodies never suffer but our minds and souls grow frail. 

Then one night we hear of a hero who walks the Earth (with a limp) right now. Who bleeds and nearly dies in the blackest forest in the cosmic solitude of night. And we take heart. For maybe our time has heroes yet. Maybe, if we gather round the hearth, if we plop down on our mead benches and hear and retell these tales, we can be heroes, too. First in mind, then in body, and someday even in spirit.

Such is the tale of my friend, Matthew Jefko, a Mount Horeb native who some of our readers might remember as the weird little guy who once wrote a passionate op-ed arguing that people shouldn’t have to wear shoes in the public library. He is a fool. And a hero. I’ll explain...

People have about five liters of blood in them. Matthew ended up with significantly less when he accidentally stabbed himself in the knee far from civilization. Whitetail deer have roughly a gallon of blood, and the buck he shot with an arrow poured most of his onto the forest floor that has been fertilized for millions of years with the viscous heat of spilled life and all it represents.

The story starts with a text message from Matthew to me.

“I shot a buck,” he said.

He was hunting in the 4,000-acre Yellowstone Wilderness Area in Southwest Wisconsin. I was hunting near Mount Horeb, about 40 minutes away. I climbed down from my tree stand and headed home to prepare the butcher station where we usually cut up our deer together.

As I climbed into my car, I called Matthew. He told me he took a good shot on a young buck and quickly recovered it. But in between his elated words, I heard strange, atavistic grunts and gasps of pain.  

“Hey buddy, you okay?” I asked.

“You know,” he replied philosophically. “Sometimes I’m a pretty cool guy. I do cool things sometimes, at least, I think. But sometimes I’m a real idiot.”

“Uh, what?”

“I kneeled on my knife when I was gutting the deer. It’s okay. I think. I made a tourniquet with a ratchet strap I had in my pack.”

In fact, an icy sharp and slightly rusty Swedish carbon steel knife (which I had given him) fell to the ground when he was removing the deer’s entrails. Matthew dropped from a standing position to his knees, and the blade, held upright by some tall, dead grass and invisible to him, penetrated seven centimeters into his knee, slicing deep beneath the kneecap.

I asked if he needed me to come get him or come get his deer, and he said no. He said he wanted to drag the deer out by himself.

“I think I can do it,” he said, as if asking himself a timid question. Then, as if answering hiw own voice in a more stalwart one: “I can do it.”

I asked Matthew to drop a location pin and share it with me on OnX Hunt, the GPS mapping app. That way I knew exactly where he was, even if he happened to be in the middle of nowhere. I looked and quickly realized he was way more than a mile from any trailhead. I asked him to send me regular updates and said that if I didn’t hear from him for a period of more than 30 minutes I was coming to get him.

The time was just after sunset. What followed was a saga for the ages, a tale that should, if anything is right with the world, eventually become the stuff of poem and song.  

Matthew dragged his bow, his tree stand, and his useless, blood-soaked leg back to his car, where he dropped off everything but the leg, drank some water and ate an apple, then grabbed a plastic ice fishing sled and plunged - if one can plunge very slowly and with great limping and whimpering - back into the thorny, up-and-down topography of Wisconsin’s rugged Driftless Region. All in all, he walked somewhere around five miles through the wilderness on a single leg, with little blood left, for much of the way dragging a beast that weighed far more than he does even when he has a full tank of blood.

Here are just a few of our text messages from that evening.

Matthew (4:26 p.m.) “I shot a little buck”

Matthew (5:03) a photo of the broadhead

Matthew (5:30) a photo of his gear and the deer’s head 

Matthew (5:32) OnX Shared Location

Me (5:45) “You should text me every 30 minutes so I know you haven’t bled out. And if you need me to get your deer just tell me.”

Matthew (5:50) “I’ll keep you posted.”

Me (5:51) “It will be fitting if I have to use Cowboy [that’s my dog] to find your body.”

Matthew (6:02) “I will be nude. You’ve been warned.”

Me (7:16) “Still alive?”

Matthew (7:27) “Alive and kicking.” (There is no way he was kicking anything with that leg, in retrospect.)

Matthew (7:27) “I’m 2/3 of the way back to the deer with the sled.”

Matthew (7:27) “Hobbling like the Fool in the moonlight.”

Matthew (8:27) “I’m struggling. Still one mile from the car.”

Me (8:35) “Want to leave the deer and I can come get it?”

Matthew (9:23) “Nah. I’m almost to the car. I don’t think I can cut him up tonight.”

Me (9:27) “I’ll butcher it for you. I’ve got cold beers and sharp knives.” (In hindsight, it might have been a little too soon for a sharp knife joke.)

Around 11:30 p.m. he rumbled up to my house in his old Subaru, which is currently devoid of a muffler. He was covered in blood and his face was alabaster pale in the glow of the dispassionate and eternal moon. I dragged the deer out of his trunk, took one look at his wound, and said, as calmly as possible but absolutely flabbergasted by the severity of it on the inside, “Hey buddy, you need to go to the Emergency Room…” I offered to drive him, and he said no, then he hobbled back to his car, howled in pain as he sat down, and drove away into the night. 20 minutes later I texted him again.

Me (11:55) “You alive buddy?”

Matthew (11:59) a photo of the exterior of the Emergency Room building in Madison.

Me (12:09 a.m.) “All your steaks are labelled with one word: ‘Stab.’”

Matthew (12:11) “Perfect.”

Matthew (12:12) a photograph of his bloody leg in a wheelchair.

Me (12:14) “Aside from the whimpering this is the toughest thing any of my friends has ever done.”

Matthew (12:26) “They are going to numb me up and clean out this wound.” (It was at this point the doctors and nurses gave our story’s hero a very stern lecture about going to the hospital immediately after a stabbing and not going on an epic journey in the interim. They said he might have died and still might get sepsis. They also gave him morphine, so he thought the things they were telling him were all pretty interesting in a fairly abstract kind of way.)

Me (12:28) I finished butchering his deer and packed all the meat into the freezer. After that, I sent Matthew a passage from one of our favorite books. It is from a character named John Sheddan, who is about to die: “I have never thought this life particularly salubrious or benign and I have never understood in the slightest why I was here. If there is an afterlife - and I pray most fervently that there is not - I can only hope that they wont sing. Be of good cheer, Squire. This was the ongoing adjuration of the early Christians and in this at least they were right. You know that I›ve always thought your history unnecessarily embittered. Suffering is a part of the human condition and must be borne. But misery is a choice.”

Me (12:28) “Suffering without misery is the key, little buddy. Good luck.”

Matthew (12:51 a.m.) His final text message of the night: “No misery here.”

I spoke with Matthew’s wife the following morning. She told me an Uber pulled up outside her house in the gray dawn light and Matthew hobbled out of it, then walked into the house, still pale as a chimera, said “Good Morning” and promptly fell asleep. The paperwork from the hospital revealed that the Swedish carbon steel blade penetrated a horrifying seven centimeters into his leg, plunging deep beneath the kneecap. By some miracle, it missed every ligament.

The episode quickly became the stuff of legend. Matthew was featured on MeatEater.com. The Sharing the Land initiative and Decked gifted him a first aid kit to keep in his car. He was interviewed on the Wisconsin Sportsman podcast.

On that podcast he revealed how close he came to giving up that night, how much pain he felt, how many times he reached the very edge of what he could physically and emotionally endure. How many times he experienced the sentiment expressed by Samuel Becket: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

“And then you just get that feeling of, ‘I can’t do this.’ Like, it’s hard for me to drag a deer out over all the deadfall, through these drainages, even when I’m able bodied, let alone when my leg is throbbing,” he said. “And at that point I’m starting to feel a little funny – I don’t know if it’s shock or just the pain is becoming so visceral – but I’m having a hard time facing emotionally, in a positive way, the situation. I’m starting to feel doubt. I’m starting to feel woe is me. And one of the things that kept me going was just that this is part of the game. You are in a bloodsport. This is part of what you signed up for. You just killed this deer with an arrow and then slit its throat, and you are going to bow out with like, a little wound to your knee? Come on, man, what are you doing? If you want to hunt you should be able to accept the consequences of what that entails.”

He had recently talked to his brother-in-law about World War I, and as he quivered on the edge of giving up, he thought back to that, “and how many people had it way worse than me and endured way worse things than I have ever even begun to endure, and this is such a minor thing.”

“And with that in mind,” he said to himself, “Let’s go.” 

On that night, he answered questions about himself that can only be answered in the woods. Great adventures are told and retold around hearths in cities, towns and villages. But they are always born in the wilderness. That is where you discover what you are made of. That is where you ask yourself life’s important questions, and that is where you answer them with primordial honesty. 

“Bad things are going to happen to you,” Matthew later said. “How you respond is up to you.”

He was, and he is, of good cheer.

Anyone who reads or hears this story will understand just how seriously we hunters care about the lives we take in the wilderness. Once you kill an animal for food, the two of you are inexorably linked. Your fates and stars are intertwined. Just as importantly, it is a reminder how unseriously we – all people – should take ourselves. For we are all fools in the moonlight, one way or another, unable to go on, and then going on despite it, awash in the dispassionate and eternal glow of the moon and the sun alike.

For years now, Matthew has been listed in my phone contacts as “Holy Fool Matthew.” It’s a reference to the Holy Fools that wandered the East in days of old, Russian Orthodox monks, sages and lunatics who trudged through snow with domesticated bears and knew that harmony with the real world and what society views as insanity are often one and the same thing.

And when he and his wife and daughters gather around the table and talk and laugh and tell funny stories as they feast for months on the venison that he carried and dragged for them, and for himself, and for the deer and for all of us, on one leg through the darkest and coldest places far off the edge of the civilized map, he will be many things at once. A hero and a fool. A fool and a hero. Human all the while. 

He walks with a slight limp these days, yet Matthew is far lighter on his feet than ever before. He has the spring in his step of an adventurer, a fool in the moonlight, a Squire of good cheer. He, like all heroes, is a living reminder that perhaps we are still in the days of monsters and heroes and grand quests, each of us capable of the deeds of poem and song. For ours are the tales of long ago, of other people in other times, and of everyone and everything, now and forever.