Deceased outdoorsman's presence still felt

Scott Cooksley of rural Quasqueton, a fairly scientific guy who does not believe in ghosts or communication with the dead per se, is not ruling out the occasional sign from a deceased loved one.

Cooksley, 40, and his brother, Urbana resident Bob Cooksley Jr., who died suddenly on March 7 at age 43, grew up close in the Rowley area and stayed close through their mutual love of hunting and fishing.

When Bob keeled over and died of an aneurysm while shooting his bow in the Sunday evening archery league at the Quasqueton Legion Hall, Scott was as bereft as Bob's wife and three children, all of whom witnessed their loved one's shocking death.

Scott said his brother was an upbeat, can-do guy who was fond of saying, “‘Life can suck on occasion. Deal with it.”

Dealing with his brother's death has been hard, he said, but little flickers of his brother's presence have made the first year without him easier to bear.

Flicker one came during the spring turkey season, a month after Bob's death and shortly after Scott and Bob's two teenage sons, Tyler and Ryan, divided up his arrows.

Scott, an accomplished archer with eight turkeys to his credit, said he was leery about shooting one of his brother's arrows, which were considerably lighter than his and would require substantial sighting adjustments. But when a gobbler approached his decoy, he killed it with one of his brother's arrows.

Flicker two came in early July when Bob's sons invited Scott on a trout fishing expedition to Joy Springs in Clayton County.

Scott said he later learned that the fishing trip was really just a pretext to get him out of the way in advance of his surprise birthday party. But it turned out to be exciting when the anglers spotted a big trout in a pool and took turns trying to catch it.

After Tyler failed to entice the giant brown trout, Scott, using one of his brother's fishing rods, hooked it on a tinsel jig. After much close-quarter threshing, he steered the trout's head into the opening of a tiny landing net and wrestled the 28-incher onto the bank.

Flicker three came a week before Christmas when Scott and his nephews joined forces for a deer hunt on the last weekend of the second shotgun season.

“We've always been bow hunters and have never really had much luck during the shotgun season,” Scott said. But that changed when Tyler and Ryan pushed through a pair of woody draws that converged where Scott was waiting.

When the eight-point buck emerged, Scott shot it and his nephews helped him track and recover it.

Scott acknowledges that the buck and the trout and the turkey would not qualify as trophies by most people's standards. “I would call them memories, mementos of my brother,” he said.

Though Scott never felt any otherworldly guidance of his bow, rod or shotgun, his brother's presence was often felt in the nine months since his untimely death, and the bond is as strong as ever, Scott Cooksley said.