My daughter Shania and I pull up to our hunting shack.

“Give me a few minutes,” she says as she jumps out. “I’ll get the heat on.”

Our shack has a wood stove that can keep us warm in temperatures far below zero. Soon I see smoke from the chimney and a thumbs-up coming from Shania in the shack’s window. I hit the button on the dash and the van’s door slides open, the ramp unfolds and I wheel onto the deck and into a warm, comfy shack.

A skillet full of last year’s deer sausage fills the shack with a delicious aroma, conjuring memories of previous hunts. The wildlife is still an hour or two away from stirring, so we pour a couple of coffees and smile as we gaze out the windows overlooking some of the best deer hunting territory in Central Alberta.

This slick setup was a whole year in the making. It started with post-hunt wisdom exchanged in the fall of 2020 …

I missed my old van. The trusty old white Ford 350 diesel had faithfully carried me along for 300,000 miles with only a few hiccups. It had towed a trailer over mountains and across prairies, crossed the continent a few times, escaped a few winters by going south, and in her last years, with tire chains on, she had taken me to some hunting grounds that made 4WD vehicles shudder and shake their heads. I thought she was invincible, but a couple of years ago, she finally succumbed to a fire that took most of what my wife and I owned.

While rebuilding our lives, we picked up a new adapted Toyota van. It has all the bells and whistles — GPS, backup camera, sensors galore, nice sound system — it doesn’t smell like diesel, has no loud 4-inch exhaust and steers itself back into its lane with a polite warning when I wander over the lines. It even hits the brakes if I miss the lever. It’s pretty spiffy, but for hunting …

My sweetheart suggested — in her subtle way — that I should perhaps consider not taking the shiny, new-smelling van, with its lowered floor, through muskeg to get stuck and winched out, only to haul a stinky old deer back home.

She had a point. Man, I missed Old White. I decided to scour the ads. I knew from experience that finding a lowered-floor van with low-effort steering that I could drive from a power wheelchair was next to impossible, especially in an affordable price range. I searched and searched, and just when the hunting season was upon us, there it was.

At first, I didn’t call — it seemed like a typo. A 2006 Chevrolet Uplander with low mileage, decked out for a quad to drive, for a reasonable price. I was super skeptical, but my eventual call to the number revealed a friendly fellow with a nearly identical injury. He was selling his old, neglected van he’d stored on his farm. We agreed to meet.

When we got there, the van didn’t look too bad. It had a few dings, bumps and scrapes from caregivers’ experimentations with hand controls, but that would just save me the effort of having to do it myself. My daughter started it and quietly drove it around the yard. It ran like a top. We gladly paid, and my buddy Dave and Shania picked it up a few days later.

Dave summed up the situation when he parked the van in my garage. “Well, we have a tinker project,” he said. “She has a shimmy, there are no shock absorbers, and she needs a major cleaning. Then we’ll reevaluate.”

I wasn’t surprised. We’d rolled away with a new hunting van for about the cost of a new tie-down. I didn’t expect it to be perfect. We replaced the shocks and the wheel bearings, fixed the door and tinkered with a few other things, and wouldn’t you know it, Old Blue ran pretty darn good.

I realized that it would be difficult to access our current shack, which sits four feet off the ground, with the new, lowered minivan. When I mentioned this to my friend Joe, a hunting-shack-builder extraordinaire, he remembered the 10-year-old shack we had built on a tent trailer. That shack had been retired for a few years, but Joe had an easy solution: “You have the old shack-on-wheels. Let’s bury it in the ground at van height along the fence line and out of the way.”

“Great idea!” I said.

Dave and Joe pulled the old shack to a prime location we discovered while hunting the year before. Joe drove a borrowed skid-steer to the site, Dave took his truck, and I jumped in Old Blue and zoomed out to see the progress. Just being able to drive out to watch was liberating.

Joe was busy moving dirt. He’d already dug a trench for the shack and was leveling the terrain around it. The high-speed “to-ing and fro-ing” continued for an hour or more. I think he was having fun.

When they completed the job a few days later, Old Blue could back up beside a ground-level deck. I could wheel off the van’s ramp and roll barrier-free right into the heated shack.

Hunting in the new shack gives my daughter and me time to catch up on the past year. The wheelchair-accessible hunting shack and Old Blue are a perfect fit to enjoy the chilly days from a warm, comfortable space. We can drive right up and unload me into it, even on the coldest blizzardy days. I’m so incredibly thankful to have friends and family that make these great times happen. I don’t miss Old White so much now.