I had a feral childhood, and my best friend, Joe, was also a feral kid. We lived near the edge of my small hometown and we ranged on foot or bicycle for miles. We spent most of our time exploring the bluffs, caves, sloughs, and woods along the Cumberland River, which was a half-mile wide where we lived. We spent a lot of time in caves, ad we built fires and camped. We did things that are unthinkable for children today.

After about the fifth grade, we were allowed to be gone camping overnight on our own. In the summers, we were often gone for several days. No one knew where we were and didn’t seem to care. We packed sleeping bags, battered pans, canned beans, vegetables, canned meats. We got our water from the flowing springs along the bottom of the bluffs. We camped in one of the numerous caves that riddled the bluffs of the karst landscape we inhabited.

In my eighth grade year, Halloween fell on a Saturday, and there was no school that Friday because of a teacher’s convention. We were having a beautiful stretch of Indian summer, and Joe and I planned to take off camping early on Friday and return home on Sunday. A younger kid, Ronny, had pestered his mother and somehow convinced her to let him go with us. Off we went on Friday morning toward King and Queen Bluffs, which were well over 100 feet high.

Saturday, which was Halloween, was another beautiful Indian summer day. We ate crackers and canned sausages for breakfast and headed out. We lost track of time and the sun was getting low when we headed back into the woods to another cave where we were going to spend the night.

We had to descend to the bottom the cliff by one route then climb up about 20 feet by another way to get to the cave. We were about 15 feet from the bottom on our descent when Ronny fell right into a deadfall pine tree that had blown down years ago. He landed on a limb that was the size of a pencil at the end and perhaps 2 inches in diameter at the trunk. It pierced his armpit, went under the skin over his rib cage and came out through his chest. Had it gone under his ribs, he would have died.

Now he was impaled and screaming and bleeding. We knew something about first aid and we knew we had to get him home. We cut the limb off at the trunk with a hatchet we always carried. Ronny screamed with each axe stroke. Once we cut the limb, we stanched the bleeding with our T-shirts at each wound site as best we could. Here was a kid in a bloody shirt with four feet of limb stuck through him, and it was getting dark fast. We each took an arm and somehow got him up the bluffs using and easy route that was fortunately nearby, and off we went toward his home about a mile away.

As we neared the beginning of houses, we started to encounter costumed children out for trick-or-treating. Two older boys supporting a kid in a bloody T-shirt with a stick through him attracted attention from the groups of trick-or-treaters, some of whom thought it was a neat costume. We reached Ronny’s house and knocked loudly. His mother answered the door with a bag of candy and a big smile that immediately morphed into a scream. We shoved Ronny forward toward her, but he wouldn’t fit through the door because of, well, you know, the stick. This brought fresh screams of pain. We ran like rabbits toward home.

We later learned that he was patched up in the emergency room and wasn’t seriously injured except for an impressive scar the he later became rather proud of and was fond of showing to other kids as a badge of courage or stupidity. Our mothers were notified, but unlike today, there were no calls for money, guns, and lawyers, and the incident faded fast.

I loved Halloween when my children were small and I love taking my grandchildren out from time to time, but in general, it ranks at the bottom of holidays for me. But every Halloween, when it’s dusk and costumed children start roaming the neighborhood, I always look for a kid with a stick through him.

Brady Foust is a geographer, bon vivant, and raconteur who taught at UW-Eau Claire for 38 years.