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

  (3) Fear of Collateral Damage

  Excuses like this portray you in a favorable light.

  • I was just about to pull the trigger on a 10-pointer with a nice drop tine when I noticed a doe right behind him. I just couldn’t bring myself to take the shot.

  (4) Too Wild to Be Contradicted

  You need to say something so outrageous that your listener must either accept it at face value or call your bluff. This works best with guys who are smaller than you. Assume a somewhat belligerent tone, as if you’re tired of explaining the obvious.

  • That bullet hit a gravity sump. Oh, yeah, they’re all over the place. See, gravity acts a lot like a liquid. You didn’t know that? Yeah, and there are spots where the force of gravity pools up and concentrates. You can’t map them because they migrate. I could shoot over one and it would just about eat my bullet up—drop it like a stone halfway to a deer. Next day, that sump would have moved on. You could shoot there and everything would be fine.

  (5) Verbal Jujitsu

  Use your listener’s own momentum against him in a way he doesn’t expect, causing him to fly out the window. Look to the left and right when he asks how you failed to get your deer, as if making sure nobody else can eavesdrop on the profound secret you’re about to reveal. Take a step closer to the person and motion for him to bend in toward you. Take another look around, lean in toward his ear, and whisper so softly that even he will not be sure you actually had the audacity to say the following:

  • I missed.

  The truth, used sparingly, can be the most astounding excuse of all.

  Water Torture

  I have absolutely no business being here. None of us do. But on an unseasonably warm spring day like this one, when the sun decides to punch in for work for the first time in five months, it happens. You head out on some fool household errand and the next thing you know your car has driven you down to the river. And there, standing around the boathouse parking lot like convicts counting the days until their release, are half a dozen guys just like you. We are wearing pinstriped suits and plumber’s coveralls, leaning against waxed Suburbans and rusted panel trucks. And to a man we are tantalized and transfixed by that water sliding away just out of reach.

  It’s too soon. It’s still winter, season of extra layers, road salt, and despair. The water is too high, too muddy, and too cold. The first decent chance you have of something hitting a hook is two weeks away, minimum. We know this. We know it’s spring doing her annual striptease, that the universe is just yanking our chains. It’s just that we’re fishermen and we can’t help ourselves. So we’ve come to stare at the water as if we can speed up spring by telepathy.

  Here’s the drill where I live. The first perch don’t even think about migrating up the river until the water temperature hits 47, and they don’t start biting in earnest until it’s in the low to mid-50s. Then come the other migratory fish, the shad and herring. Only after that do the bass, crappie, and catfish turn on.

  It would be easier all around if fish lived in the air. Air’s a pushover. You throw it a little sunlight and it snuggles into your arms and coos, My place or yours? Even soil heats up fairly fast. A single warm day like this one has no problem coaxing the daffodils and forsythia into promiscuous behavior they’ll regret with tomorrow’s cold snap. But water remembers what Mama told her. She requires the prolonged application of warmth before she comes around.

  Danny, who has worked at the boathouse all his life, is busy with the annual repainting of the rowboats. Today he’s got three up on sawhorses, like giant turtles stranded on their backs in the sun. They’re 14½ feet long and made of white oak. Some are 60 years old. They’ve been painted the same colors for as long as anyone can remember: brick red to the waterline, battleship gray beneath.

  “The color never changes, only what they call it,” Danny says. “Most years it’s been ‘tile’ or ‘brick,’ sometimes ‘burnt brick.’ But lately they’ve been going a little overboard. Guess the marketing guys have to earn their pay. Last year it was ‘Hessian.’”

  “What the heck is a Hessian?” I ask.

  “I was wondering that, too. So I looked it up. It’s a German mercenary serving in the British forces during the American Revolution.”

  I guess Danny’s got too much time on his hands, too. I ask what the color is this year.

  “‘Matador,’” he says.

  “No. Come on.”

  He gestures to the can, and I bend over to look. Sure enough, matador. So now we’re waiting for the water to get warm enough for the running of the bulls. Fine. Whatever. Just hurry it up.

  By now, most of the stranded anglers have drifted over to watch Danny. We envy him. At least he’s got something to do with his hands. The group watches silently as a fat honeybee sets down on a section he has just painted.

  “The color,” he murmurs to no one in particular. “They think it’s a flower.” There is not much to be done about a honeybee who tries to suck nectar from a red rowboat, just as there isn’t much to be done about an angler who tries to pull fish from a too-cold river. Danny turns to load his brush, and when he looks back the bee is gone.

  “Oh, good,” he says. “She got away.”

  The phone rings and he answers it. “’Bout two weeks,” he says. “But keep checking with us because you never know when they’ll start moving.” He listens for a moment. “Look, I could give you dates. I try to predict it every year, and I’ve never been right yet.” He listens again, making a circular motion with his free hand to indicate that the guy just doesn’t get it. Finally he sighs and says, “Sure, you can go fishing now. You just have to lower your expectations. Heck, I’m standing here with six guys. And every one of us is dying to go fishing.”

  To a man, we smile ruefully, shove our hands that much deeper into our pockets, and stare out at the water.

  Stalking Walt Disney

  It all began innocently enough. Okay, maybe not so innocently.

  It was Sunday. My wife had just headed off to hunt the malls. The deal we have is that Jane takes care of Emma, our 3-½-year-old, when I hunt. And vice versa (Latin for “clean up the kitchen, too”) when she goes out. In short, I was looking at six hours of solo baby duty. I scanned the house for resources and found the usual suspects: videocassettes manufactured by the Walt Disney Corp. or its imitators, each of which Emma has seen 9,000 times.

  One of her current favorites is Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, in which a “wild” horse declares his kinship to all living things, asserting that his kind had always belonged in the West and always would. The horses in Spirit speak only in voice-overs, but they have enormous eyebrows to mime their moral outrage at the white men who are building railroads through their lands. They have a burning desire—not like real horses, which want merely to eat, sleep, and avoid feeding their foals to coyotes—to run free, “like the wind in the buffalo grass.”

  There is also The Fox and the Hound, in which all the animals of the forest—carnivores included—live in a kind of vegetarian paradise until unseen hunters orphan an adorable little fox named Todd. The one hunter who does appear in the movie has a big mustache made entirely of nose hair. At one point, we see him approach a posted fence that reads, NO HUNTING, GAME PRESERVE. His eyes narrow. “Well, now, we ain’t gonna do none o’ that, are we, Copper?” he says sweetly to his dog. “We’re just gonna get us a no-good fox!”

  It suddenly struck me that Emma’s hunting soul was in mortal danger. And that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil in this world is for enough good men to allow Walt Disney to explain the outdoors to their children.

  “Monkey!” I cried, “this is your lucky day. We’re going hunting!” Emma didn’t know what the words meant, but she liked my enthusiasm. I checked the short-term survival kit: diapers, wipes, juice boxes, and cheese sticks. I strapped her in the baby seat. Off we roared to some deer woods I’d been meaning to scout.

  “Where going?” Emma asked at one point.

/>   “Hunting!” I said.

  “Hunting!” Emma echoed.

  We were actually only going scouting, of course. But I didn’t want to confuse her with details. These particular woods were loaded with sign: old rubs and scrapes, fresh droppings, loads of trails.

  “Emma!” I said. “Pay dirt! There are deer everywhere here!” We started down a tunnel-like trail. Emma, at just under 30 pounds and just over 30 inches tall, is built for this. She sprinted down the tunnels, delighted at my inability to keep up. At a place where two trails crossed, I explained that this was a good spot to put a tree stand, so you could ambush the deer with a bow and arrow.

  “Like yours?” she asked. Sure, I replied, only we’d have to get her a smaller bow and little arrows. She beamed. “Little arrows for me!”

  We followed tracks. We practiced sneaking through the woods. Every so often, I would pretend to spot a deer running away and lift Emma up to look at it. She always saw it. Then she started seeing her own imaginary deer and pointing them out to me just as they faded into nothingness. Long story short, we had a blast. Best of all, she was hooked on hunting without seeing anything more than deer sign.

  Three hours later, when Mom came home, Emma and I were glued to a different kind of video: Whitetail Madness 5, featuring 13 hunts with bow and gun. Emma was trans-fixed. “Here comes the buck,” she whispered as a big 12-pointer lumbered into range. I’d already gone online and ordered a Genesis bow, a wonderful invention that accommodates draw lengths from 15 to 30 inches and that can have its draw weight adjusted to as low as 10 pounds.

  “Mommy, c’mere!” Emma squealed. “Watch ’em get this buck!”

  Jane dropped her packages on the kitchen counter and sighed. She is from a nonhunting background, and while she has struggled to understand my passion for deer, she would just as soon not have the other preschool moms know that I am creating a shameless outdoorswoman.

  “Mommy!” Emma called again. “They got him! Dubba lung shot! Whoo-ooh!”

  Jane exited the room, shaking her head. “Watch it again?” Emma suggested, grinning.

  “You bet,” I said, and we high-fived.

  “Daddy?” she asked a minute later. “Take this movie to school for show-and-tell?”

  I could see it now: outraged phone calls from the Volvo moms, an emergency PTA meeting, a resolution that I not be allowed within 500 feet of preschool.

  “Maybe not,” I told Emma. I put my head next to hers and whispered, “But I like your spirit, Monkey. You and me, we’re hunters.”

  “Oooh,” she said, lost in the video. “Here comes the buck.”

  2004: A Huntin’ Odyssey

  The time has come to admit that traditional hunting no longer fits the lifestyle of the modern recreator. Why? First, because it occurs outdoors. No place is more subject to rapid and uncomfortable changes in temperature. Nowhere are you more likely to encounter as many snakes, ticks, or harmful bacteria.

  Second—a major inconvenience—in traditional hunting you are not the one who determines when you hunt. A bunch of illiterate quadrupeds are in charge of scheduling. So you rise in the middle of the night, put on badly tailored orange clothing, and head out. Then, just to make it really fun, you hike until you’re hypothermic (elk), squint through powerful optics until you have a headache (mule deer), or sit motionless in a tree stand until a brown recluse spider builds a web in your ear (whitetails). And while you sit there like some fluorescent Buddha—unable even to scratch your butt, much less use your cell phone—your wallet is very active. It is hemorrhaging money, gushing an endless stream of cash for gear, licenses, leases, vehicles, and the beer you require to numb the pain after you have finished for the day and have nothing to show for it.

  To sum up traditional hunting: tedium, discomfort, and the loss of disposable income. If this is really what you’re after, try matrimony. But we live in an age of miracles. The technology and entertainment industries have come to our rescue with a new and better way to hunt. All a person needs is a personal computer: Fire it up, slap in a disc, and go virtual huntin’.

  The preview opens with pristine mountains, a tranquil lake, and, in the distance, a monumental brown bear gorging on blueberries. Up comes the pounding rock music that hunting has lacked until now, and the screen turns into crosshairs. Then comes the crack of a rifle and—whoa!—suddenly you’re riding the bullet cam, the landscape streaking by before the round slams into the shoulder of the grizzly. The bear drops like a cement truck. Sweet. HEART SHOT! reads the screen as celebratory fireworks explode. The game takes a photo of the hunter and bear. Then it drags the already taxidermied animal to a pedestal in the trophy room of a log cabin. Awesome.

  Now it’s my turn. So many choices. I select elk from the game-animal menu, and Montana for a location. But first, a quick stop by the weapons locker for, oh, maybe a .338 Winchester Mag. Sure, it’s a lot of gun. But virtual recoil is real easy on the shoulder. I take a moment to familiarize myself with the controls. I particularly like the “strafe left” and “strafe right” functions. And there are three gauges at the bottom of the screen, indicating my strength, level of fitness, and … what looks like oil pressure. Whatever. I’m not a detail guy.

  The computer loads the geometry, geography, and artificial intelligence—very cutting edge. Next thing I know, I’m at the little hunting shack in Montana I will never own. There is an ATV idling a few feet away. I hop on and roar away. But I keep hitting rocks and trees. Then I fall off, sustain a broken arm, and have to start over. This time I hike to the top of a small mountain and do some glassing. There’s lots of nice scenery but no elk. Then I accidentally right-click the mouse and discharge my weapon. The game voice says, “I don’t think so.” Even sarcasm is built in.

  On the third try I discover a really cool thing: When I hit a river, I do a breaststroke right through it and don’t even get wet. But then the opposite bank is so steep I can’t climb out. I flail around for a while until I drown, sinking slowly into the murky blue depths. Bummer. Back to start.

  Okay, no more ATV, no more swimming. Now I hunt smart. I walk for about six days and finally see a herd of elk in the distance. There is a bull with antlers the size of telephone poles. I drop to a prone position and am sneaking into range when a tremor in my finger accidentally clicks the mouse and I blow off my virtual kneecap. My oil pressure drops to nothing, my computer emits a warning that does not sound like part of the game, and the screen turns bright blue. Then an error message appears: This program has performed an illegal operation and cannot be restarted.

  Defeated, I glance outside. The scenery is all incredibly realistic: the yellow leaves, the cracked bark on the trees, the soft whoosh of the wind. Suddenly, an electrical impulse runs through my cranial hardware: I could actually try hunting outdoors. The idea is so far outside the box that some might call it crazy. But like many gamers, I’m a wild man at heart.

  The Book of John

  Around this time each year a loud thump outside the house announces to millions of American sportsmen that the new Cabela’s catalog has just hit the front porch, flattening any flowerpot, bicycle, or dog on which it lands. After burying Duke in the vegetable patch, the breathless recipients attach a heavy chain from their ATV to the document and drag it into the bathroom for a first look. This lasts, on average, half an hour. Then, a simultaneous flushing of toilets causes reservoirs nationwide to fall 6 inches, injuring thousands of Jet Skiers and proving once again the existence of a just and loving God.

  The word catalog comes from the Greek katalogos, literally “words causing income to vanish.” But catalog hardly begins to describe this magical work. A quick perusal yields information to live by. For instance, raise your hand if you knew any of the following three facts:

  • A box of Weatherby Magnum Ultra-Velocity ammo in .30/378 Weatherby Mag., 200-grain Nosler Partition, will run you $90, or about $4.50 per shell. At that price, you might want to let that Cape buffalo get really close before wasting a shot
.

  • For about 50 bucks more you can get a pair of Cabela’s Kangaroo Upland Bird Boots, which weigh almost nothing, are a whopping 62 percent stronger than cowhide, and will still be going strong when you are pushing up chokecherry. Of course, state law prohibits their shipment to California for fear of offending celebrity animal rights activists.

  • Nothing screams “good taste” to your houseguests like a $60 clear-acrylic toilet seat in which fishing lures, bullets, or hooks are embedded.

  The most recent catalog runs to 711 pages and weighs more than some Korean automobiles. The day is coming when a cabela will refer to a unit of weight. You will buy crushed stone and pig iron by the cabela. Diet pills will promise to help you shed those unwanted cabelas. Olympic lifters will bow their heads in silent tribute to the brave Ukrainian champion who was crushed when he attempted to clean and jerk what would have been a new world record of 100 cabelas.

  Dick Cabela’s empire started out small. Back in 1961, he placed a three-line ad in a magazine offering five hand-tied flies to any customer who would cover the 25-cent postage. Orders were processed at the company headquarters, Dick’s kitchen table in Chapell, Nebraska. The flies were sent back with a mimeographed sheet listing other sporting items for purchase. The operation has been so successful that nearly 6,000 employees now work in that kitchen. Mary, Dick’s wife, is said to be tired of having to make them sandwiches every day and thinks it’s about time to build a cafeteria.

  The Cabela’s catalog has long exercised a strange power over otherwise rational men. As you consider it in the privacy of the best seat in the house, it starts to seem like a good idea—no, a responsibility—to buy not only what you need immediately but also gear that you might need some day. Thus, guys who live on fishing boats in Alaska suddenly crave 17-inch camo snake boots. Others who have difficulty opening the hood of their truck covet the titanium-handled Leatherman Charge XTi with nine double-end bits should they ever run out of gas in the wilderness and have to drill for oil. Guys who’ve never bushwhacked through cover worse than the azaleas in their front yard must have the Filson Double Tin Cloth Chaps that stop the smaller shotgun loads at close range.