A Fine & Pleasant Misery

by Patrick McManus

  The only thing that bulls have any respect for at all is the stick, and many knowledgeable cow-pasture fishermen carry one slipped under their belt for easy access in an emergency. This is known as the "bull stick" or sometimes simply "BS." When the bull approaches, the BS is first waved threateningly in the air and then thrown. (This is not to be confused with the BS thrown by hunters.) A couple of fishermen I know like to brag about their narrow escape from a grizzly bear, Ursus horribilis, but I'm not impressed. A man just hasn't done any real escaping until he has escaped from a grizzly cow, Bovinus horribilis. I am probably the world's leading authority on the subject, having studied it since my childhood days.

  In my mind's eyes, now somewhat astigmatic but Wide Screen and Tru-Color, I see myself as a young boy, fishing pole in one hand, worm can in the other, making my way down to the creek. My phlegmatic and flatulent old dog, Stranger, is close upon my bare heels and close upon his heels is our neighbor's bull, known in those parts as The Bull, and we are all running to beat hell. Strange, his jaws set in a grim smile, runs between me and The Bull not out of any sense of loyalty or protection but because of old age and a shortness of breath. Arriving at the fence the dog and I hurl ourselves into the sanctuary beyond and The Bull screeches to a stop in a cloud of dust and slobber just short of the wire. Stranger, sweat streaming down his face, pulls himself together long enough to take credit for once again having saved my life--"Well, bailed you out of another bad spot didn't I?"--and then he and The Bull stand on opposite sides of the fence and say cruel and obscene things to each other while I ignore them and get on with the day's fishing.

  Why did I risk frequent confrontations with such a malevolent creature as The Bull? The reason is one that perhaps only a trout fisherman would understand. Little Sand Creek was a great trout stream, probably one of the finest in the nation at that time, but with the humility of all the truly great it meandered its regal course through a series of humble and unpretentious--not to say miserable--farms, one of which was ours. The stream was fished with such ardor and love and perseverance by so many anglers that by mid-season any worthwhile trout who had survived the onslaught would strike at nothing that did not show obvious signs of life and then only after taking its pulse. That section of the stream which ran through the farm owned and operated by The Bull, however, remained virtually untouched--except, of course, by me, known affectionately throughout the region as "That Fool Kid."

  These sorties across the pasture were not nearly so hazardous as the chance observer might suppose. The Bull's top speed was a good deal faster than mine, no doubt because he didn't have to carry a fishing rod and a can of worms or worry about his dog's heart. But we had the element of surprise on our side, and by the time The Bull caught sight of us we already would be well accelerated. If The Bull closed the gap too quickly, I would jettison rod and worms, and Stranger would jettison everything he could, and we would give it our all, every man for himself, right up to the fence, and hurl ourselves over, under or through the barbed wires. Such instances were rare, however, and most of the time we could get through the fence in a manner that was more dignified and much less painful.

  I learned a great deal about plane geometry from these exercises with The Bull. I discovered that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, an idea that The Bull either could not fathom or he was reading Einsteinian theory in his spare time. At any rate, he almost always ran in a long, arching, curve. This resulted from his knowing nothing about leading a moving target; he always held dead on.

  Consequently, a diagram of our converging lines of motion would show his course as a long curved line intersecting and merging with my short straight line. Successful evasion thus was largely a matter of predicting given the proper angles, distances, relative speeds, and variable handicaps, the point at which our two converging lines of motion would intersect. As I say, I was a master of such calculations.

  My talent went wholly unrecognized, however, and people continued to refer to me as "That Fool Kid."

  It came to pass that my widowed mother took up with a man and married him, offering the feeble excuse that "the boy needed a father." Both she and I knew that was an out-and-out lie. She had pulled off a clever coup d'etat, designed to deprive me of my place of power and authority over the family, which I had been ruling with a firm but just hand since the age of eight. The mercenary imported to depose me proved to be a tough customer, and I saw that I would have to play it cool and watch for the main chance. It came sooner than I expected.

  Hank, as he was called, one morning sent a peace feeler in my direction: "Don't know of a spot where we could catch some fish, do you?" he asked.

  Well, it seemed like no time at all before the mercenary and I were standing at the fence to The Bull's pasture. I thought it best to warn him.

  "That ol' cow out there seems to be lookin' our way," I said.

  "That ain't no cow," the mercenary said. "That's a bull. But land, boy, you don't have to be afraid of a bull. All you gotta do is show 'im who's boss."

  It seemed a comfort to him to see me smile, the first time since being deposed. What he didn't notice was that Strange and The Bull were smiling too. It became kind of an "in" joke, afterwards. That is, after the mercenary had climbed through the fence and demonstrated to all of us just who was boss. It turned out that the boss was just exactly who I and Strange and The Bull had known all along was boss.

  The mercenary, we smugly observed, wasn't much of a hand at fighting bulls. On the other hand, he proved to be the best broken-field runner ever to hit our county. To this day I have never seen a grown man who could run so fast, even one who wasn't carrying a fishing rod and creel, and wearing hipboots. A kid just had to admire a man who could run like that.

  From then on Hank and I and Stranger ran from The Bull together, and we went far afield and ran from other bulls and sometimes cows and even whole herds of cows, and we forgot all about power and authority and the like. We were willing to risk the wrath of any cow who stood guard over a stretch of good fishing water, and it wasn't long before we were being referred to as "That Fool Kid and That Fool Man." But we paid her no mind; she had her hands full, what with being the head of the family and all.

  The Mountain Man

  My chief career ambition as a youngster was to bE a mountain man, but somehow it never worked out. I'm not sure why.

  One problem was my family. They were dead set against the idea of my going into the fur trade, and never passed up an opportunity to point out the drawbacks of the profession.

  My grandmother had actually known some real mountain men back in the old days, but she had never taken a liking to them. She said they drank and swore and spit tobacco and never took baths and fought and bragged and lied all the time. I don't recall, however, that she ever mentioned what was bad about them.

  "There ain't no money in bein' a mountain man," Gram would tell me.

  She was fond of pointing out that she had never known a mountain man who was the proprietor of the basest vessel of domesticity and personal hygiene. Her exact words escape me at the moment.

  I was all for leaving school and getting started in the fur trade as soon as possible, but my mother wouldn't hear of it. She said I would have to wait until I was through the third grade or reached the age of eighteen, whichever came first. "It's the law," she would say. The suggestion was put forth that we might find a loophole in the law if we looked hard enough, but Mom said she didn't think it was proper for a third-grade teacher to be putting forth suggestions like that.

  My older sister, who liked to boast that she knew how to turn small boys into frogs and offered me as evidence, was always there to put in her oar and rile the waters of argument.

  "You can't be a mountain man," she would say. "You're afraid of the dark."

  Well, I certainly didn't see how she knew so much about what mountain men were afraid of and what they weren't. There were probably plenty of mountain men who were afraid of the dark
, even though the length of their expeditions into the wilderness may have been somewhat limited by the handicap. One could easily imagine a grizzled old trapper asking, "Any sign of beaver a half-day's ride from the fort?"

  In spite of these difficulties, I persisted in preparing myself for a career in the mountain man profession. Every spare moment was spent either in the library extracting the theory from books or out in the woods conducting laboratory experiments.

  One thing I learned from the books was that a mountain man had to master three basic skills if he wanted to survive in the wilds. He had to know how to squint his eyes just right, spit through his teeth, and say dry, humorous things anytime he was in pain or danger. (You'd be surprised how difficult it is to think of something dry and humorous to say when, for example, a big furry beast is eating one of your legs.) Much time was spent perfecting squinting and spitting, and I learned that it's easy to say dry if not humorous things after one has spent the day spitting through his teeth.

  I had at my disposal about forty-seven rusty traps, which I kept in a neat snarl in our woodshed. From time to time, I would go out and practice setting these traps. It almost never failed that the practice session would end with a trap snapping shut on one portion or another of my anatomy. Now it was part of the mountain man code that you could never cry when caught by one of your own traps, but there was no rule against doing as much loud yelling as you wanted, particularly if you were a mountain man who didn't know how to swear well enough to do a trapped finger much good. Quite often I would become confused on these occasions and go about for some time afterwards squinting my teeth and spitting through my eyes. I could always think of something dry and humorous to say, but it was usually about three days later, and I wasn't sure if that counted.

  Besides the traps, I practiced a lot with snares. Since beavers seldom if ever passed through our yard, I impressed my crotchety old dog, Stranger, into service. I would rig up a snare outside his house, where he would be sleeping off a night of drunken debauchery. Then I would raise some kind of racket until he staggered out asking for tomato juice and a little peace and quiet, and the snare would close limply around his neck. He would curse me roundly and go back into his den of iniquity, dragging the snare with him to be chewed up at his leisure and when his stomach felt better.

  The only deadfall I ever constructed utilized an old railroad tie and almost ended the promising career of one of my mother's laying hens.

  The hen survived the ordeal, but for some time we had the distinction of owning the only flat chicken in the neighborhood. I exhausted my entire supply of ingenuity proposing theories about how a four-pound chicken could manage to crawl under a hundred-pound railroad tie. To this day I'm not sure how she could have triggered the contraption, unless perhaps she was standing under it running tests on the engineering.

  One area of information about mountain men that caused me a good deal of confusion was buffalo chips. From my extensive reading on the subject, I knew that mountain men preferred this fuel above all others.

  The books never came right out and said what buffalo chips were, nor did they give any recommendations about the proper procedure for chipping a buffalo. One thing for certain, it would be dang hard work chipping one of the ornery critters.

  It was no wonder to me that buffalo were all the time stampeding the way they did, what with mountain men constantly hacking their fuel supply off of them.

  When I eventually learned the true nature of buffalo chips, I could scarcely believe it. I had known all along that mountain men were tough but not just how tough.

  Most mountain men died off back in the nineteenth century, once again displaying their uncommon good sense but also depriving students of the profession, such as myself, of live models to pattern themselves after.

  From time to time, someone would attempt to pass himself off to me as a mountain man, but I always found him out. One of these impostors was my older cousin Buck, who was big and husky and had perfected all the mannerisms of the mountain man. He was a good squinter and spitter and spoke mountain man passingly well. He liked to say things like, "Fetch us some water, ol' hoss, and ah'Il build us a fahr and bile up some coffee."

  For a long time, Buck had me fooled. Then one day we went fishing up Hoodoo Canyon, a place that is spooky even in daylight. We fooled around most of the day, catching a few trout, poking at tracks, studying bent blades of grass, squinting and spitting, saying dry, humorous things, and the like, and before I knew it, I had broken a long-standing promise to myself, which was never to get caught up in Hoodoo Canyon after dark. I comforted myself with the thought that I was in the company of a trained and knowledgeable mountain man. Then I glimpsed Buck's face. I knew without having to ask that he had just broken a long-standing promise to himself.

  We started picking our way down the overgrown trail at a pace Buck referred to as a dogtrot, even though I personally have never been acquainted with a dog that could trot that fast. As we dogtrotted along, leaping logs four feet in the air without having to speed up, I began to get the impression we were being followed. Buck received the report of this news with no great enthusiasm, but he stopped to size up the situation. After all, if you are being tracked by something large and hairy, it's a good idea to know how large and how hairy. Every true mountain man knows that the worst thing you can do is let your imagination drive you into a panic. You want to look at your situation coldly and realistically, and that's exactly what Buck and I were doing when a long, cold and very realistic scream drifted down off the mountain above us. As sounds go, it registered right up near the top of the hideous scale. (The only time I had heard anything like it was when a small, harmless snake managed to sneak into our house and hide in the drawer where my sister kept her underwear.) "Whazzat?" I asked, attempting to feign idle curiosity.

  Buck was silent. Then, drawing upon his vast knowledge, he identified the sound.

  "That was a blinkety-blank scream!" he said, thereby confirming my worst suspicions.

  No more had this been said than there was the sound of a large animal bolting off down the canyon, snapping off young lodgepole pine like they were matchsticks, bounding over huge logs, smashing its way blindly through thickets, snorting, grunting, and wheezing for all it was worth. It took several seconds before I realized the large animal was Buck.

  Although I was fully sympathetic with his motives, I simply could not accept Buck's undignified departure from Hoodoo Canyon as being consistent with the calm, cool manner of a mountain man. His abandoning of his loyal partner in a time of danger was also a serious infraction of the rules. That the loyal partner, despite a late start and short legs, managed to beat him out of the mouth of the canyon by a good forty yards in no way mitigated the offense, at least in my judgment.

  My early training as a mountain man has stood me in good stead over all the years I've spent prowling about the wilds on one pretext or another. But in the end, I failed to become a full-time, card-carrying mountain man. The obstacles seemed to increase as the years went by, and there's no question that a mountain man today would have a hard time of it. First of all, he would have difficulty finding a mountain unadorned with ski lodges, condominiums, television towers, and the like. Then he would have to carry a briefcase for all his licenses, registrations, permits, draft and social security cards, health insurances and so on, and that would take a lot of the fun out of it.

  There would be all the hassles with the fish and game departments, and the Forest Service would be forever flying over and spraying him with one kind of pesticide or another. The USFS recreation officers would probably hound him to use the prepared campsites for his own safety (he might get himself clearcut up on the mountains), and providing he could even find a few buffalo chips to ignite, he would have to run the risk of getting doused with a bomber load of fire retardant.

  It's probably just as well that I never became a mountain man. Still, some days on the streets of the city, dodging stampedes of taxis and herds of mugg
ers, squinting my eyes just right against the smog, sidestepping dog chips, and all the time trying to think of something dry and humorous to say, I frequently wonder where I went wrong.

  The Rescue There are people who constantly look as if they are in dire need of help.

  I am one of them.

  Men, women and children, and even scraggly dogs are forever coming up to me to ask if they might be of some assistance. I don't mind if I'm in some sort of real trouble. Usually, though, my predicament is nothing more serious than waiting on a street corner for the light to change, or perhaps trying to look disinterested while the service station attendant tries to remember what he did with the key.

  Once I was standing in front of a candy-vending machine, trying to decide between a Nut Crunchy and a Whang-o Bar. A pert young lady came up and asked if she might be of service. I said no, that I had already decided on a Whang-o. You could tell from the look on her face that she was disappointed at having arrived too late to help with the decision. If I'm not mistaken, she went off in a bit of a huff.