If You Didn't Bring Jerky, What Did I Just Eat? Read online

  “Gimme that thing back. And don’t you tell anybody about it, or I’ll break your fingers. Now beat it.” Last I saw him, he was 24 yards out and headed toward Aunt Laura. I made a beeline for the door.

  The Access Consultant

  The lady of the farm—with a chain saw, sun hat, and a look on her face like she hasn’t had a good laugh since the Johnstown Flood—makes me 20 yards out as I pull into the farm’s rutted drive. She yanks the chain saw into being and walks away. Almost as an afterthought, she sticks her free hand in the air and twirls one finger in a circle. It’s a miracle of nonverbal communication, that twirling finger. It says, Don’t even think about asking to hunt deer here. Just turn your car around and git. I do.

  The next place has a gravel road lined with honey locust trees and woods on either side. Even from my car, I can see deer trails everywhere. Around back is a man sitting in the shade with a glass of beer and the sports section. I introduce myself awkwardly and ask if he has a problem with deer eating his plants. “Eat the hell outta my wife’s garden,” he says cheerfully.

  I move to Stage Two, telling him that maybe we can help each other. He raises a hand just as I’m getting to the part about how responsible I am. “At least you asked. I’ll give you that. But last year, some bowhunter took out a horse we’ve had for 16 years. Broke my wife’s heart. You seem like a nice enough feller, but I can’t let you hunt here.”

  At the last try of the day, I trudge unhopefully to knock on the door of what looks like an empty house. Only it isn’t empty. In fact, there’s a woman standing stone still in the dimness of the screen porch. “Ma’am?” I say. “My name’s Bill Hea—”

  “I don’t care if your name’s Pat Sajak. Nobody hunts here.”

  I smile. I pivot. I leave.

  Two weeks later, I’m at it again. Only this time I have a secret weapon—my father. My dad is 80. He doesn’t hunt, doesn’t fish, doesn’t even approve of people who do. But he’s as extroverted as they come.

  When I pick him up, he’s wearing a coat and tie and pants. When I mention that he might be a tad overdressed to talk to farmers, he says, “Always look your best for a sales call.”

  “This is a sales call?” I ask.

  He stops and looks at me funny. “What the heck d’you think it is?”

  No one is home at the first place. No one seems to be at home at the second. The two of us stand on the front porch after knocking and listen for signs of life. “I’ll check around back,” he says. Two minutes later, I hear laughter coming from the other side of the house. On the flagstones out behind the back door, I see my father holding a glass of iced tea and talking to a couple about my age, who are so entranced they barely notice me. My father is already well into the story about how he accidentally burned down the refectory of the Church of the Redeemer on North Charles Street in Baltimore at a high school dance in the late 1930s.

  The couple laugh and for the first time turn to have a look at me. “Oh, that’s my son,” my dad says offhandedly. “He’d like to bowhunt here if it’s okay with you. He’s a good boy.” The two say sure, refill my father’s glass, ask if he’d like a chair. And then he tells them the one about how the Rita Hayworth movie on the destroyer got mistaken for a German air attack.

  “We’d just pulled into the harbor at Mers-el-Kebir in Algeria after a lot of combat in the North Atlantic,” he says. “A supply ship had pulled up alongside and sent over Rita Hayworth in the movie Blood and Sand. The harbor had been recently attacked and was completely blacked out, but the men were dying to see Rita Hayworth, so we rigged an overhead tarp up on deck and showed the movie under cover. Things were going fine until some knucklehead tossed a lit cigarette into the aluminum box where the film was stored. That thing went up like a torch, flames 20 feet in the air. And everybody in the harbor, thinking we were under attack, opened up with everything they had. After half an hour of fireworks, the harbormaster, thinking my ship had been hit, came over to assess the damage. I made the mistake of telling him exactly what happened, and he said, ‘Mister, we just shot off five million bucks’ worth of munitions so your men could watch Rita Hayworth. You get out of here, and don’t come back.’”

  As we’re driving home, my father smiling at the thought of the new friends he’s made, I’m thinking I could rent my father out to bowhunters as an “access consultant.” I’d charge $300 an hour. I know guys who’d pay in a heartbeat.

  Smells of the Season

  It is late November. Mom is off at a meeting and Molly, my 12-year-old stepdaughter, is late for her modern dance class. No problem, I tell her. I’ll drive.

  She plops down in the front seat, gags, and frantically unrolls the window. “Gross! Your car smells like the elephant house at the zoo!”

  I’m a new and naive stepdad. I try the reasonable approach. Actually, I tell her, it’s doe-in-estrus urine.

  “Doe in extras?” she asks. “Like, there’s more than one? And you spray their pee in your car?”

  It’s suddenly very important that this child not think I’m a mental patient in training. I launch into the simplified explanation of the rut. I tell her that when the girl deer are ready to be friends with the boy deer in the fall, their pee smells different than it does the rest of the year. This really excites the boy deer. And if you happen to be a hunter trying to lure the boy deer in, you can sometimes do this by putting a little doe-inestrus on a rag tied to your feet when you walk to your stand.

  She takes this all in and thinks it over for a few moments. Then she says, “That is so disgusting I can’t even tell you.” Her nose twitches again. “Are you carrying dirt in here?”

  Uh-oh. She sniffs some more, then looks down at her feet and fishes up a little black disk from among the wrappers that once held Ring Dings, peanut-butter crackers, and toe warmers. I explain that it’s the earth-scent wafer I put in the big Ziploc bag with my hunting clothes.

  “How do they make a piece of plastic smell like dirt?”

  I tell her I have no idea.

  “So let me get this straight,” she says finally. “You want where you’ve walked to smell like deer pee, but you want your clothes to smell like dirt.”

  “Yeah,” I say at last. “That’s basically it.”

  For a while, Molly is content to ride in silence. But my stepdaughter is blessed with a persistent curiosity. She turns and scans the backseat, plucking an unopened blister pack of red fox urine from the jumble.

  “And this?” she demands.

  “It’s a cover scent. You spray a little of that on your shoes before you go in the woods.”

  “So dirt and doe pee aren’t enough?” she probes. “You also want to smell like a fox has whizzed on your shoes?”

  “Well, sorta,” I mumble.

  Molly has had enough. “Does Mommy know you do all this stuff?” she asks.

  Mommy knows, I tell her. I’m praying she doesn’t turn around again. There are scrape drippers back there. And Wrap-A-Rubs, scent neutralizers, and a busted bag of white buck-wallow powder on the floor.

  Just as we are pulling up to the parking lot, she does turn around again. Guided by some invisible laser ray of curiosity, she heads right for pay dirt, the deer hunter’s neutron bomb. Molly holds up two little tufts of nearly black deer hair encased within three layers of Ziploc bags. For a moment it looks as if she’s about to open them and take a good whiff.

  “Good gosh, child! Don’t!” I blurt out. Inside the bags are two fresh tarsal glands from a 9-pointer a friend killed recently. One hit off those babies would knock Molly into the middle of next week.

  “Jeez,” she says. “I wasn’t gonna hurt ’em.”

  “Those are tarsal glands,” I tell her.

  “So?” she asks.

  “You better go, kiddo. We’ll talk about those next time.”

  Molly sighs. “They’re just another kind of pee, aren’t they?” she says. It’s not really a question. She already knows the answer. “At least I know what to get you for C
hristmas,” she says.

  “What?”

  “Soap. A lot of it.”

  Death by Multitool

  If you’ve been on an airplane recently,* you’ve noticed the following phenomenon: The moment the announcement starts that it’s okay to use portable electronic devices, nearly every person over the age of 8 simultaneously opens a laptop computer and disappears into it. Me, I reach for my new portable amusement park, my multitool.

  Mine is a 21-function Schrade Tough Tool, designed for a lifetime of faithful service. The warranty says you’re not supposed to throw it, use the blade as a screwdriver, or try to hammer things with it. Other than that, you’re pretty much on your own. I open and close it about 50 times, watching it do multitool jumping jacks and transform itself from a small hunk of stainless steel into an instrument of awesome capability. This alone is pretty entertaining. My only regret is that at the moment I have no cans to open, wires to strip, or anything in immediate need of sawing, scraping, filing, measuring, scribing, or disgorging. A multitool fairly radiates purpose, and it seems a shame not to be able to help it realize its full potential. I do use the Phillips head to tighten a loose screw in the Airfone in the seat back in front of me, prompting the guy ahead to turn around and glare.

  With nothing mechanical in need of fixing, I turn to my personal appearance. Very discreetly, I shield my face with the airline magazine and go after a stray nose hair with the needle-nose pliers. At the exact moment I’m about to pull, the flight attendant’s quizzical face appears about a foot above me. This startles me so much that I yank much harder than I meant to on the tool, which by this time is attached to much more real estate than I had planned. I basically clearcut an entire forest of nasal hairs at once, which causes tears to well up in my eyes in great abundance. Flight attendants witness so many strange things that it’s hard to know where the sight of a man with an 8-inch multitool halfway up his nose ranks on the Weird-O-Meter.

  “Something to drink?” she asks, recovering nicely.

  Half an hour later, having learned nothing from the experience, I’m at it again. A manicure this time. I use the fine flathead for a first pass under my nails and the leather bore to get to those hard-to-reach places. So far, so good. The large locking flathead is just the thing for an initial assault on the cuticles, followed by the scraping blade to clean up the rough parts left behind. This is actually going quite well. But we hit an air pocket or something just as I am applying pressure, and the scraping blade bites into my thumb. Like everything else on a multitool, it’s sharper than it seems at first. I stick my thumb in my mouth to stop the bleeding, then figure that my rum and Coke is a better alternative. The alcohol will kill germs, and the ice will shrink the busted capillaries.

  * * *

  Anybody with an ounce of sense would have stopped there, but it was a long flight. Unfortunately, multitools have no specific implement for hangnails. So I choose to use the serrated portion of the knife blade at a 90-degree angle to the hangnails—for safety—and sort of abrade them off. This appears to work pretty well, and I’m on my third one when the guy playing Slave Zero next to me attempts a particularly fast evasive move and bumps my elbow. I now have wounds in nose, thumb, and ring finger.

  At this point, some slight change in cabin pressure sets all three of my cuts bleeding. I go back to the bathroom and wrap my injured digits in toilet paper and pack my nostril with more toilet paper to stanch the flow. After the plane lands, I work my way down the aisle, multitool in its holster, me swathed in toilet tissue, looking like a mummy that’s been in a fight. At the door is the attendant who was working the beverage cart.

  “Bye-bye, now, sir,” she says. Then she takes my arm and whispers, “The gate agent outside can direct you to the nearest medical station.”

  Don’t Even Ask About My Turkey Season

  This has not been my best spring gobbler season. With a week left, I have been out 11 times and fired my gun exactly not at all. In fact, the same three No. 4s have been in and out of my autoloader so often it looks like some demented midget has taken a ball-peen hammer to the brass. My six-pocket pants in this year’s must-have camo, Realtree Hardwoods 20-200, have a newly installed rip next to the fly. I’m proud to say I can now work a friction call and pee at the same time. There are weepy poison-ivy blisters on both of my arms and the right rear quadrant of my head. Everywhere else is territory being fought over by DEET-resistant factions of the chigger and mosquito kingdoms.

  It didn’t start out this way, of course. I began the season comparing taxidermists’ rates for a flying gobbler mount and wondering which corner of my office might afford the best light to show off its imposing length of beard and spur. Failure? Unthinkable. I had too much stuff to fail. There was the vest with padded back and more pockets than a pool table. There were the eight diaphragm calls that fit into nifty slanted boxes. Friction calls in slate, glass, and aluminum. Strikers of hickory, acrylic, and carbon. I had box calls, a gobbler tube, calls imitating the owl, hawk, woodpecker, and crow. I had two face masks and three sets of gobbler gloves. Jake and hen decoys that looked like brown Fruit Roll-ups when stowed. I had turkey socks. I even had one of those padded gun rests you buckle to your knee so that when you finally stand up to retrieve your bird you fall right down again and injure your hip. Failure? Not bloody likely.

  Dawn on the season opener found me at the edge of a field, listening. At six o’clock, I raised the owl call to my lips and hooted. A gobbler answered up the ridge, sounding like some mad devil banging on a xylophone of human vertebrae. Heart pounding, I took off after him. At my first step, a stupendous gobbler flapped calmly out of the tree almost directly overhead and flew silently down the mountain. It was an omen I chose to ignore. But I never did hear or see the other bird again.

  Seven more fruitless days afield passed. I did manage to call in a box turtle. I made him 20 feet out and watched him steadily close the distance to 16 over the course of an hour. He had little red eyes and seemed to be trying to tell me something, his jaw working soundlessly.

  Throwing caution and wallet to the wind, I booked a three-day hunt at the Fort Lewis Lodge in the hills of southern Virginia with a different guide each day. My first was Frank, a certified mountain man, 6-foot-4 with flaming red hair and a beard you could have stashed a set of flatware in.

  Frank is serious about turkeys. He not only hunts all 35 days of the season but also goes out 25 mornings straight before it opens to locate birds. Frank’s a big believer in black cotton sewing thread to make his decoys bob up and down like they’re feeding. “It’s deadly,” he promised. We got on a bird early and worked it for three hours, moving five times. On the bird’s last gobble before shutting up for good, Frank said, “Ah think ah know that bird. That’s one smart old gobbler. He’s just jerkin’ our chain.”

  My second guide—I’m not making this up—was an Amway salesman. No turkeys, but he did offer me some excellent cleaning products at competitive prices.

  My scheduled guide for the last day had to cancel at the last minute, so I ended up hunting with the local preacher. “I’ve done 14 funerals so far this spring,” he told me. “I need to go turkey hunting.” About 11 o’clock, we were blind calling on top of a mountain when a gobbler answered. He pointed to a tree for me to set up by, then double-timed it 20 yards away to set up the decoys. Halfway back, the bird gobbled again, closer. I got my special knee pad buckled, my gun in position, and tried to stop shaking. Just as the preacher reached the tree and was sitting down, the bird made us, putted, and ran off. The preacher and I exchanged heartsick looks. “My fault,” he said.

  “I can’t believe that bird came in so quick,” he said. I managed a weak smile.

  “Hey, that’s turkey hunting,” I tried to say cheerfully. I staggered to my feet and promptly fell down.

  GPS: Global Perplexing System

  I have in my hand a small, gray electronic instrument that is revolutionizing the way sportsmen navigate the woods and waters, e
nabling us to get lost with greater precision than our forefathers ever dreamed possible. It’s a GPS, which I purchased after a friend claimed that any idiot could learn to use it. I have since concluded that I’m not just any idiot and GPS stands for Global Perpetuation of Stupidity.

  I was suspicious of the thing at first. For starters, it looks like an electric razor with an LCD display in its side and weighs in at a whopping 6 ounces. Nevertheless, this baby contains more stuff than I take on extended camping trips: a 12-channel, full-function electronic system that tracks 24 satellites orbiting Earth. (The satellites are reputed to be 11,000 nautical miles overhead, whizzing around the planet at 1.8 miles per second in six different paths. When the unit locks on to three satellites, it can give your position to within 60 feet or so. With four satellites, it can tell your elevation. With five satellites, it advises you on lure selection, determines whether you have any outstanding parking tickets, and tells you if you are harboring the hanta virus.)

  It has an antenna, electronic compass, and barometric altimeter, a computer that records 500 waypoints, an automatic track log that leaves electronic “bread crumbs,” and a routing system that lets you navigate up to 50 waypoints in sequence. By my count, that much equipment ought to weigh about 6,000 pounds.

  The GPS can tell you where you are, where you’re headed, and where you’ve been. It can tell you how fast you’re traveling (current, maximum, and average speeds), how far to your destination, how many feet you’ve climbed or descended, and when the sun will rise and set. The map scale is adjustable from 200 feet to 800 miles. The only thing the unit lacks is a meat thermometer.

  For some outdoorsmen, this may give peace of mind. In my own case what the GPS provided—with the help of Evan, the 10-year-old down the street—was a large dose of confusion laced with humiliation.