March 22 2008
An odd little story this week gang. A couple of the boys, Jack Braveheart and Vernon Stout, decided to hike into a difficult to access pond to do a little fishing.
It was so far off the beaten track that the operation required two nights of camping out. One going in, and one coming out.
Jack had a new tent and Vern had a new stove, and they both loved getting away in the woods every now and then.
It was going to be a great time.
Since lugging beer and a cooler of ice were out of the question, they packed a liter of Wild Turkey bourbon for those hours spent around the campfire.
When their geo-tracker or locator or whatever the hell it was, told them that they were about half way, give or take nine inches or so, they set up camp.
The new tent was no problem. They set that up first. Then they built a campfire to keep the bugs away, cooked up some Wolf Brand chili on the new stove, and brought out the Wild Turkey just as the sun was going down. And they started shooting the breeze.
Ordinary stuff at first. Like somebody should make a wood smoke after-shave. It would keep the bugs away. After a few days in the woods, you wouldn’t notice your fellow woodsman quite as much either. And since deer, for instance, were used to the occasional fire anyway, it would mask the human smell from them too. Depending on the area, you could have different scents. Like juniper, oak, mesquite and all like that.
After they got through politics, football, baseball, and hunting and fishing, they had put quite a dent in the bottle of Wild Turkey.
Leaving their pie plate dinner ware by the campfire "till next day, they hit the sack.
About 3:30 AM Jack awakened to a sound over by the campfire site. It sounded exactly like something was playing around with the pie plates that the boys had left for the next day.
Well, even though they shouldn’t have left the plates out, nobody was going to mess around with Jack Braveheart’s campsite.
He grabbed a flashlight, crawled out of the tent, picked up a nice sized rock, and headed for the campfire.
He was ready for some fang and claw.
There was no moon and at what he thought was a couple of feet from the campfire, he tightened his grip on the rock, and clicked on the flashlight.
With the light, his heroic resolve vanished. He was not about to, under any circumstances, duke it out with a skunk.
He let out a strangled woeful scream, and wheeled toward the protection of the tent.
Vern, who had heard Jack leave the tent, also heard the scream, and knowing Jack as he did, quickly surmised that it was more than likely in his best interests to focus all of his energies on the strategy often referred to as "headlong flight".
That flight would have been more efficacious had he not tried to run through the wall of the tent and had made use of the front flap. But as it turned out, he discovered in his attempt at escape that the woods behind the tent were loaded with "cat"s claw" bushes.
Information that would come in handy when it came time for the next morning’s ablutions.
The tent was ruined, so they rebuilt the fire and reopened the Wild Turkey, chuckling in a sheepish kind of way. Some of the Wild Turkey went on the "cats claw" scratches.
Boy! That’s nasty stuff!

Till next week
Helga Biermeister
Secretary