"Shoot," my grandmother said, waving a butcher knife at me. "That old fool don't know any more about livin' off the land than he does about workin'.
Now take those sandwiches and don't give me any sass."
On my way over to Rancid's cabin, I stuffed the sandwiches down the front of my shirt, hoping he wouldn't notice I was carrying contraband.
"What you hidin' thar?" the old mountain man said the instant he caught sight of me. "You got a watermelon under yer shart?"
"Naw," I answered, embarrassed. "Gram made me bring along a couple of sandwiches in case I got hungry."
Rancid hooted. "Thet ol' widder woman, when she gonna cut you loose from her apron strings and let you be a man?"
"I don't know," I said. "I told her you were going to teach me how to live off the land, but she pulled a knife and made me take the sandwiches anyway."
"Yup, she's a mean one, all right," Rancid said. "Wall, them samwiches won't hurt nothin, and might come in handy in case we has an emargency."
I should explain that Gram and Rancid were natural enemies. Gram possessed all the qualities Rancid despised in a person. She was practical, hardworking, neat, clean, methodical, and never smoked, drank, or told lies.
"She ain't hoomin," Rancid often complained. Gram claimed Rancid was the only person she had ever known who was totally lacking in character. By "character" she meant a tendency toward work. A man could rustle cows, steal chickens, and rob banks in his spare time, and Gram would say of him, "Rufus may have some bad ways, but I'll tell you this, he's a good worker. He ain't totally no good like some folks by the name of Rancid Crabtree I could mention, but I won't."
To Gram, being a good worker excused a lot of shortcomings, but it wasn't the sort of lifestyle that appealed to me at the age of twelve.
Since Rancid was the only person I'd ever known who hadn't once been caught red-handed in an act of holding a job, I figured he must have some secret, and I studied him the way other kids in school studied their arithmetic. Because he didn't work, Rancid always had time to give you, not just little pinched-off minutes but hours and days and even whole weeks. He was a fine example for a kid to pattern himself after.
On this particular day, Rancid and I were going to hike back in the mountains and spend the night in a lean-to we would build ourselves.
All we would take with us were some fishline and hooks, some twine and our knives, and, as it turned out, the two four-pound sandwiches. The morning was one of those impeccable specimens found only in early July in the Rocky Mountains, particularly when it is only the twelfth July you have known in your life.
That was back in the old days before environment had been discovered, and there were only trees and blue sky and water moving swift and clear. Hiking along behind the lean old woodsman, I listened to the soft humming of summer and paid attention to keeping my toes pointed Indian fashion as I splashed through the shallow pools of sunlight on the trail. It was a very pleasant day to start learning how to live off the land so I would never have to work.
We hiked hard for the first hour to shake off the last lingering shards of civilization, and then slowed our paces as the trail began winding up into the mountains. Far down below in the patchwork of fields, we could see the farmers wrestling with their hay crops. We laughed.
After a while, Rancid started giving me living-off-the-land lessons.
The first thing he had me do was to smear my face with mud.
"This hyar mud will keep off the moss-kee-toos," Rancid explained.
I smeared on a copious quantity of mud, because if there was one thing in the world I was interested in keeping off, it was moss-kee-toos. I had heard plenty about moss-kee-toos from Rancid before. They were vicious flying creatures that sometimes would swarm out of the woods and suck the blood from your body. Since I had spent a good deal of time in the woods and never seen a moss-kee-too, I hoped they were merely a figment of Rancid's imagination.
(His imagination was crammed with all sorts of weird and interesting figments.) If moss-kee-toos did exist, the mud did a good job of keeping them off. It even worked pretty well on the mosquitoes.
Another rare creature apparently known only to Rancid was the iggle.
He pointed to a large bird circling high above the mountain peak.
"Look thar, boy! Thas a iggle." The bird was too high for me to make out any of its features, but in the years since, I have frequently seen high-flying birds that I assumed to be iggles, so I'm pretty sure they exist. Rancid told me that iggles were so big they often carried off half-grown cows in their claws, and as a result were not much loved by ranchers. "But hell," he said, "iggles got a right to a livin' too."
Rancid had his own system of ornithological classification. There were three basic groups of birds: little birds, medium-sized birds, and big birds.
A few birds were referred to by their common names: ducks, doves, grouse, pheasants, and iggles. Rancid's system of ornithology worked just as well on identifying rarer birds.
"What's that bird?" I would ask Rancid.
"Thet thar is what ya calls yer little black-and-white bird with a red head," he would tell me authoritatively. I never ceased to marvel at how Rancid knew all the different kinds of birds. just by looking at them you could tell he knew what he was talking about.
Along about noon I began to feel the first pangs of hunger. I suggested to Rancid that maybe the time had come for us to knock off the nature study and start living off the land and if it wasn't too much trouble I'd like to take a look at the lunch menu. Rancid looked around the land.
"Ah figured we'd have huckleburries fer lunch, but they's still green.
The wild razzburries should be ripe up in the meadows, though. Fer the time bein', whyn't you give me one of them samwiches yer granny packed?"
"Who do you take me for, Mother Nature?" I said angrily. "You're supposed to teach me how to live off the land."
"Don't gitcher tail in a knot," Rancid said. "Livin' off the land takes a powerful lot of thinkin', and ah thinks better if ahim chompin' on a samwich. Now what did thet ol' widder woman fix us?"
We split one of the sandwiches, and sure enough, Rancid started thinking better. "As soon as we gets done with lunch, we better find us some mushrooms to cook with our game for supper. Thar's a burn up ahead and we kin probably find some mushrooms thar."
I was a bit worried about the mushrooms, since my grandmother had told me Rancid didn't know his fungi from a hole in the ground.
"Gram says one good way to tell if a mushroom ain't poisonous is to see if the deer have been eating them," I offered.
"Thet's the dumbest thing ah ever heard tell of," Rancid said with disgust. "Deer don't know much more than yer granny does. Mushrooms is little wrinkled pointy things, and toadstools is all the rest. Deer eat toadstools all the time and it don't bother 'em none. A hoomin bean eat a toadstool, the Just thang he knows he's knockin' on the Parly Gate with one hand and still pickin' his teeth with t' other."
Fortunately, we were unable to find any mushrooms in the burn, although I did happen to come across a patch of little wrinkled pointy things not worth the trouble of calling to Rancid's attention.
The raspberries in the high mountain meadow were ripe, as Rancid had predicted, but not especially plentiful. Nevertheless, I got a keen sense of living off the land from eating them. Rancid explained at considerable length how to pick and eat wild raspberries, and seemed very pleased with himself.
"Lots of folks don't know wild razzburries is good to eat," he said. I personally had never encountered anyone who didn't know they were good to eat, but I didn't say anything.
"Gram says even cattails are good to eat," I offered.
"Ha!" Rancid laughed. "Thet silly ol' woman, it's a wonder she's lived to be a hunnert and five, what with all her notions about eatin' pisonous plants."
"I don't think she's that old," I said.
"Thet just goes to show you," Rancid said. "Now don't let me hear no more of
thet talk about eatin' cattails."
Next Rancid showed me how to set snares for rabbits, an absolute essential for anyone intending to live off the land. Although I knew the basic principle and technology of snares, I never quite understood how you induced the game to stick his head into the loop and trigger the contraption.
"How do you know the rabbit is going to run into the snare?" I asked, peering intently over Rancid's shoulder as he worked. "He's got a million other places to run."
"Wall, Just of all, you have to be smarter than the rabbit," he said with a chuckle. "You got to be smarter than the rabbit. Now hep me move these logs and rocks. What we is gonna do is funnel thet ol' rabbit right into our snare, see?"
We dragged rocks and logs and tree limbs and brush and piled them up in a giant open-ended V that pointed right at the snare. By the time the V was finished, both of us were so hot and tired we were staggering, but I didn't complain because I was learning how to live off the land so I would never ever have to work.
After we had rested a while, Rancid said, "Now hyar's what you do. You climb down behind thet thicket over thar and make a racket so that you drive the rabbits into the funnel."
"How come we both don't climb down and make a racket?" I asked.
"'Cause ah have to sit on thet log up thar and shoosh any rabbits thet come thet way back into the snare."
"Why can't I do that and you drive the rabbits out?"
Rancid thought a moment, mopping the sweat off his face with his shirt sleeve. "You had any experience shooshing wild rabbits?"
"No."
"Wall, thar you are! Now git yerself down in the thicket and start making a racket."
A half-hour later I emerged from the thicket. Rancid was sitting on the log, his elbows resting on his knees, staring vacantly down at the snare.
"How ... pant ... big a one ... pant pant ... did we catch?" I asked, sinking to the ground.
Rancid rolled a chaw of tobacco around in his cheek. "Wall, ah kin say one thang about these blankety-blank rabbits. They is powerful smart!"
"You mean to say we didn't catch any?"
"What would you think about chompin' down some nice tender trout roasted over a fahr?" Rancid said brightly. "Don't thet sound good!"
Early in the afternoon we arrived at a little lake tucked away between two mountain peaks. Rancid cut two willow poles and tied fishline to them.
Then we started looking around for grubs to bait the hooks with. As Rancid said, you can never find a grub when you really need one.
Savagely, we tore apart rotted logs looking for grubs, the essential link between us and a fish supper. I was beginning to think working might be easier than living off the land.
At last we found a small deposit of grubs, tossed them into Rancid's hat and hurried back down to the lake. By the time we got there, the grubs were choking and gagging but otherwise in good shape. The trout brazenly committed grand larceny on most of our bait supply but we managed to land a couple of eight-inchers.
"Now ahim gonna show you how to build a fahr without matches," Rancid said. He made a little bow-and-stick contraption of the sort I had seen in my Boy Scout handbook. The handbook, however, had not indicated all the good words you were supposed to say in order to get a fire going. Rancid sawed the little bow furiously back and forth on the stick, the spinning of which was supposed to ignite a little pile of shavings. It was all very complicated, and Rancid sweated and panted and swore until his eyes bugged out even more than usual. At last a little curl of smoke drifted up from the shavings.
Rancid threw down the bow, dropped on his belly and started blowing on the shavings, whereupon the curl of smoke instantly vanished. He rolled over on his back and crumpled the bow and stick in his hands.
"Let this be a lesson to you, boy. Don't never go out in the woods without a fistful of matches."
"That's what Gram told me," I said. "She made me bring a bunch of matches even though I told her we wouldn't be needing them."
"Gol-dang know-it-all ol' woman! Gimmie one of them matches!"
In a second Rancid had a fire going. His hands were shaking from exhaustion and rage as he built a little willow grill to cook our fish on. As the flames licked around the two little trout, Rancid stared moodily into the fire.
"When we gonna build the lean-to?" I asked.
"Don't bother me about no lean-to," he growled. He seemed a bit surly, so I decided not to pursue the subject.
Then the two fish slipped through the grill into the fire. I stepped back, sneaking a glance at Rancid's face. His eyes, widening slightly, stared at the bits of blackened skin on the willow grill. A tiny quiver ran the length of his lower lip.
After a long moment of silence, Rancid said, "We best eat thet last samwich, 'cause we is gonna need lots of energy."
"To build the lean-to?" I asked.
"No," he said. "So we kin walk real fast. Ah figures if we leave now we kin get back to yer house in time for supper."
"Gram said she'd set a couple places for us," I said, "even though I tried to tell her we'd be gone all night."
"Thet ol' know-it-all," Rancid said. "Ah wonder what she's fixin' fer supper anyhow. Ah shore hope it ain't gonna be a mess of pisonous cattails!"
The Great cow Plot
When I came in from fishing the other day, my wife asked, "Have any luck?"
"Great," I said. "I saw only two cows and got away from both of them."
I hadn't caught any fish, but that was beside the point. The success or failure of my fishing trips depends not upon the size of the catch but the number of cows encountered.
Some people do most of their fishing on lakes or the ocean, where cows are seldom if ever encountered. Most of my fishing is done in cow pastures, the natural habitat of cows.
Even when I plan a fishing trip forty miles back into the wilderness a herd of cows will usually get wind of it and go on a forced march to get there before I do and turn the place into a cow pasture. Sometimes the cows get the word a little late, and I'll pass them on the way.
Invariably a few of the poor losers will gallop along in front of the car, still trying to get there ahead of me and do what they can on short notice and empty stomachs.
"I've given up hope of finding any place to fish where a cow won't manage to show up and put in her oar. If I was in the pet shop on the nineteenth floor of a department store and stopped to net a guppy out of an aquarium, a cow would get off the elevator and rush over to offer advice.
My wife insists that I've become paranoiac from over-exposure to cows.
She tries to tell me that the intricate and near-impenetrable patterns of cow spoor laid down around my favorite fishing holes are a result of nothing more than random chance. Even granting high probability from the number of placements per square yard, which is altogether ample, I remain unconvinced that these bovine mine fields are not the product of conspiracy and cunning.
There's probably a small island in the Caribbean where cows are given a six-week course in the design and manufacture of mine fields before being turned out to pasture alongside fine trout streams. The whole thing is a plot by Castro to lower our national morale.
All cows are fishing enthusiasts, although their idea of fishing might better be described as "Chase the Fisherman." The object of the sport is to see how many times the fisherman can be made to cross the creek.
Five points are earned if he wades across, ten points if he splashes only once, and twenty-five if he hurls himself across without touching the water. The last is achieved by first running him twice around the pasture to pick up momentum and then making a straight shot for the creek. This maneuver is usually good for a score, provided the fisherman can be driven past the other team's goalie.
As fishing enthusiasts, cows can be divided roughly into two groups: participants and aficionados. Another grouping I find useful is simply Fast Mean Cows (FMC) and Slow Mean Cows (SMC). The SMC, mediocre athletes at best, are usually content to watch the main events be
tween the FMC and fishermen (thus the expression "contented cows"). They participate only to the extent of doing everything in their power to ruin an otherwise good running turf, apparently in the belief that a slow field improves the spectator sport. The FMC are frequently referred to as "bulls." The term is usually preceded by harsh but accurately descriptive adjectives. It is sometimes argued that "bulls" is not an appropriate term for FMC since some of them are known to give milk. I disagree. Upon hearing the shout "Here comes a bull!" I have yet to see any of my companions wait around to argue over the sex of the beast.
No effective cow repellent has ever been developed for the comfort of fishermen. Simply from the standpoint of size alone, one would think that cow repellent would have priority over mosquito repellent. I don't know if it would work, but someone with a knack for chemistry might try distilling and bottling the aroma of a well-done sirloin.
A Fine & Pleasant Misery Page 12
