"You hurt my feelings"

Jack said as he and Slim sat in the Adirondack chairs in the back yard overlooking the red, orange and green fall foliage on the Stillwater River.

"Well, why do you say that, Jack?" Slim innocently inquired (he knows why, as he knows how thin skinned Jack really is).  

Jack is Slim's younger friend around sixty five years old.  Jack is retired, and likes to frequent the local sportsman's club.  Sometimes he'll bring over a deer hide, which Slim hauls out onto the ice to give the bears and coyotes something to nibble on.

"Well, you say I don't know how to hunt.  Why don't you believe me when I tell you there are no deer out there this year?", Jack said, almost with tears in his eyes.

"Well, Jack" Slim began, "what time do you go out in the morning?"

"Early" Jack replied, "Sometimes at day break,  or by nine at the latest."

Slim asked "Do you bring a lunch with you?"

"Well, no" Jack said, "I like to go home, and the wife makes me dinner."

Slim has always wanted to tell Jack, but has at least enough grace not to, that Jack will be lost if he ever loses his wife.

"Let me tell you why you don't know how to hunt" Slim continued.  "You drive over to your spot, and get out of your car with your gun, and you stay close to the car so you can jump in it and go home for lunch.  That ain't how we used to hunt."

"Well, what do you mean?" asked Jack, "That's how everyone I know hunts".

"Everybody don't hunt that way Jack"  Slim explained.  "When a hunter wants to find deer, he is ready to spend a whole day out in the woods.  One year, in Maine, we spent three days looking for Al's son.  He went so far out from the camp, he got lost.  We called the game wardens, and they had airplanes and people out looking for him.  On the third day, and we were just looking for him, not looking for deer, we heard a shot.  Al says to me, he says, 'I think it came from that way' and he points up the mountain.  I says 'No, I think it came from down there.'"

Jack interrupted "Well, what's this got to do with how to hunt?".

Slim went on "I'm telling you Jack, you gotta be ready for anything, you don't just wander off from your car a few yards and expect to see any deer.  Not if you're hunting to feed the family, anyway."  "You see what I'm telling you Jack?  Things were different back then."

A small rabbit hopped over and sat under Jack's Adirondack chair.  "Lookit that" said Slim.  "What?  Lookit what?" asked Jack.  "That friggin rabbit sitting under your chair" Slim said.  "You call yourself a hunter, and you didn't see that rabbit?".  Bill stuttered, stammered and shut up.

"So, we made a big circle down to where I thought I heard the shot." Slim went on, "We runs ito a buncha game wardens and stuff, and one guy he's got a radio, and I think he's talking to the guy in the aeroplane. The game warden says to me, he says 'Where'dya think you heard the shot?  And I says down that way.  And he says something to the guy in the airplane, and then he tells me and Al, 'you guys head down there'.  Al and me went down there, and I seen the airplane go over and I says to Al, 'I think  he wants us to go back.'  We turns around and the aeroplane comes over again, but this time, he wiggles the wings to tell us we're going the right way.  We gets back to where all the game wardens are, and they said the plane had found Al's son.

He went on... "One year, I was out by the Quabbin.  At five, I headed out, and about eight, when the sun came up, I put the bullets in the gun, 'cause you're not supposed to carry a loaded shotgun in the dark."

Jack asked "Well, why the hell did you do that?  Nobody's gonna know."

Slim was getting a bit annoyed by Jacks ijterruptions.  "Jack, will you shut the hell up and listen to me?  How are you gonna learn anything if you keep interrupting?"

Jack did that annoying 'tick' thing, where he sticks his tongue out, as though he were trying to tie a cherry stem in a knot with it.

"Now, are you gonna listen to me?" Slim begged for Jack's better senses to keep quiet.  "So I was headed in, about four aclock, and I runs into this kid about 19 years old.  He's lost and he's all messed up.  It's about zero degrees out, but he's got no jacket on."

"What was wrong with him?" Jack asked.

"Well, he was lost!" Slim exclaimed.  "Dese young kids don't know anything about how to survive in the woods.  He was so crazy, I had to ask him how many bullets he had.  He told me five, and to I told him to hand them over."

"Why'd you do that?" Jack asked.

"Jack, the kid was acting so crazy, I knew he'd shoot me if he had the chance.  I had to, well I didn't point it at him, but, I sorta swing my gun around in his direction.  He gave me the rest of the bullets, and I heaved them as far as I could off into the snow.   His gun, I couldn't throw away,  I never seen a gun like that.  I could tell it was thousands of dollars."

Slim continued, Jacks interruptions having ceased temporarily.

"We walked until midnight.  He kept wanting to go in the wrong direction.  He'd point down an easy looking path, but I'd pull out my compass and tell him, no it's the other way.  He kept wanting to go find the bread from the sandwich he had earlier.  He told me that he ate the meat outta the sandwich, but now he wanted the bread. "

"Wow" Jack said.

"He kept lying down in the snow" Slim went on, "A coupla times, I had to give him a swift kick in the ass.  I mean he was laying down in the snow, telling me how nice and warm it was, and it was below zero, and he had no coat on.  And I kicked him until he got up again."

"Did you make it out of the woods?" Jack asked.

Slim starts to finish up:

"Well, I remembered a set of power lines from the morning.  It was too dark to see any trees or mountains to use as a marker to keep in a straight line.  Let me tell you, Jack, one time, I found that I had turned a full circle, because I knew it was my tracks from earlier that I was crossing.  You ever hear about that?  But, I figure it was... what the hell do they call that stuff that screws up your compass?"

"Uhhh.  Lodestone?"  Jack says the first sensible thing of the day.

"Lodestone!" Slim exclaimed.  "Yah, so whatever it was frigged up my compass.  That time, there was enough light to see, and, I took out the compass and sighted in on a tree about a half mile away, and headed towards it.  About half way there, I takes out the compass again, and it's pointing the other way!.  After I figured that out, I walked myself out OK."

"So what about the kid?" Jack asked.

"Well, I finds the power line I remembered from that morning, and I knew my car was only a quarter mile away.  We gets near where my car was, and there's lights and cars and trucks, and it turns out the airplane we had seen earlier was part of it.  We talks to the game wardens,. and the kid's father is there and he hugs the kid, and he was all crying".

"No hugs for you?"  Jack asked.

"I guess I didn't deserve any"  Slim is always that sort.  "Anyways, afterwards, I finds out that the kid's father is a millionaire.  That's why they got all those game wardens and airplanes, all that".

"Well, I gotta go.  The wife has dinner waiting."  Jack predictably stated.

"Don't forget what I told ya," Slim admonished.  "Maybe you'll learn something some day."

Joe Wronski 10/30/2010