Mike and Sandy Bentler with a Namibian gemsbok.

Hunting stories usually convey good news. Even when the big one gets away, wilderness scenery, wildlife encounters, and time afield with friends and family offer plenty of compensation. But I have to acknowledge that my 2006 bow season didn’t all work out that way.

I spent the first half of September in Alaska, working on writing assignments involving shotguns and fly rods rather than bows and arrows. No regrets. But by the time I returned to Montana, I was ready for some face time with the local pronghorns and elk. An unseasonable deluge made antelope country inaccessible, and then I lost access to my favorite elk cover. Toward the end of archery season, I developed a nasty infection that required a week of IV antibiotics. By that time, there was nothing left to hunt but deer.

Fortunately, I’d drawn an Iowa tag, so I could look forward to tackling not one, but two whitetail bucks during the November rut. Dick LeBlond, my oldest friend, is now a professor of medicine at the University of Iowa, and he and I planned to spend early November with mutual friend Mike Bentler and his family in the southeastern corner of the state.

Mike and I go back a long way; he’d hunted bears with me in Alaska and cougars in Montana, and he and his wife, Sandy, had joined us on safari in Namibia several years earlier. I’d hunted with him at his place once before, and in my dreams I could still hear the sounds of big corn-fed bucks approaching through the fallen oak leaves. Only Iowa’s nonresident drawing process kept me from visiting yearly.

I was scheduled to leave for Iowa November 3. Mid-October, Mike called to confirm that he’d seen some great bucks on his property. The thought of visiting Mike, Sandy, and their three delightful teenage daughters Sheena, Shelby, and Shayne was more than enough to rally my spirits.

On the morning of October 15, I arrived home after a morning bird hunt to find my wife, Lori, with a worried look on her face. “Dick left a message on the answering machine,” she explained. “He wants you to call. He says it’s urgent.”

Dick doesn’t leave such messages casually, and I felt a sense of foreboding as I dialed his number. He answered on the first ring.

“Sit down,” he said, and I did. “Mike Bentler and his family were murdered last night,” he announced in a shaken voice.

No one knew much at the time, but details of the tragedy emerged over the national news the next day. Although his guilt has yet to be proven, Mike and Sandra’s eldest son has been charged with the crime. According to allegations, he walked into the house early in the morning and shot his mother, father, and three sisters in cold blood.

Mike had a number of friends here in central Montana. During the following week, Rosey and Lisa Roseland, Don Davidson, and I all tried to make sense of this incomprehensible act. We couldn’t. At the time of this writing, I can’t pretend to understand what happened, and I doubt I ever will. Needless to say, all thoughts of Iowa whitetails evaporated. I cancelled my airline ticket and left that anxiously awaited Iowa tag to gather dust in my desk drawer.