Even when I'm at home people are constantly offering me aid and comfort.
The other morning I was staring vacantly out the window, a hobby I personally find more entertaining than, say, stamp collecting or golf.
"What's the matter?" my wife asked. "Nothing," I said. "Why?"
"You're staring vacantly out the window." Her tone suggested that this is an activity engaged in only by persons on the verge of leaping feet first into the garbage disposal. "What's the matter?"
In order to bring a brief but merciful end to the discussion, I made up a mildly risque cock-and-bull story about a premonition, the villain of which was a sadistic crocodile.
"But why do you keep staring out the window like that?" she persisted.
"I'm watching for the SOB!" I told her.
Not only am I not free to stare vacantly out one of my own windows, I'm afraid even to go outside and lie down on my own grass. If I did, one of the neighbors would call an ambulance for me or, worse yet (with a couple of notable exceptions), rush over and try to give me mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
Now that's the sort of thing that happens to me around my own home, on city streets, and in office buildings. If I wander anywhere off the beaten paths, my would-be rescuers become so numerous they have to circle me in holding patterns in order to await their turns.
When a hunter meets another hunter in the woods, he will usually greet him with some inoffensive remark like, "Any luck?" or "How ya doin'?"
and let it go at that. With me, other hunters instantly assume I am lost, injured, or being sought by the Mafia. They launch into intricate directions on how I can make my way to the nearest road, hospital, or hiding place. If I didn't deal somewhat firmly with them, they would boil me a pot of soup, set my leg in a splint, and carry me piggyback to my car.
Even my hunting partners of long years standing are quick to assume that if I'm out of sight, I'm lost. Such an assumption is entirely unfounded.
Occasionally I will discover that a road or trail or mountain is not where I last left it, but that is not my fault. If a mountain wishes to change its location, there is nothing I can do to prevent it.
On a hunting trip a few years ago I spent most of the day looking for a road that had mysteriously moved. Upon finding another road, I made my way down to the highway and walked to the nearest diner, where I ordered myself a steak dinner. No sooner had I been served than one of my hunting partners burst into the diner and shouted that he needed some men for a search party to look for some poor devil who was lost in the mountains. I immediately made my steak into a sandwich and stood up to offer my services. It turned out I was the fellow I was supposed to search for. Such incidents are embarrassing.
I should like to make clear here that I am no more incompetent or susceptible to trouble than the average person, no matter what my friends might say. I have managed pretty much on my own to survive a big-league depression, numerous recessions, creeping inflations, and even a couple of phases. I have never been tested in military combat, but I did spend several years teaching English composition to college freshmen. As a police reporter, I had experiences that would give a grave robber goose bumps and a hungry hyena a fit of the dry heaves. I offer this bit of personal history as evidence that I am not totally helpless and inexperienced; I just look that way.
From years of almost constant rescuing I have arrived at the firm conviction that if one can possibly avoid being rescued he should by all means do so. As a rule, suffering the consequences of one's predicament is preferable to the risks of being rescued.
One day last summer I had fished a couple of miles of mountain stream and was just starting to hoof it back up the road to my car when a pickup truck pulled up alongside and stopped. Two men and a woman were in the front seat.
A load of firewood was stacked high in the back of the truck.
"You look plumb wore out," one of them said despite the fact that I felt quite fresh and vigorous, and was enjoying the little hike. "Hop onto the wood back there and we'll give you a lift."
The speaker was one of those burly, broad-shouldered types--unshaven, voice like a bass drum, and hard, squinty eyes. The two men weren't exactly cream-puffs either. I knew they would brook no nonsense about my declining to be rescued, so I climbed up on top of the firewood.
The wood was split into large chunks, each of which was equipped with an abundance of edges approximately as sharp as the blade of a skinning knife. I eased myself down on the fewest number possible, attempting through an act of will to keep most of my weight suspended in air.
Now almost everyone knows that it is impossible to drive a pickup load of firewood sixty miles an hour over a washboard road. The driver of the truck proved to be one of the few persons in the world not in possession of this knowledge. The blocks of wood began to dance around and I began to dance around with them and sometimes the wood was on top and sometimes I was. One hefty chunk did a nifty little foxtrot along the left side of my rib cage while another practiced the tango with my hip bone. A clownish piece of tamarack went past wearing my hat, and six or seven other chunks were attempting to perform the same trick with my waders and fishing vest. Still, I didn't want to yell out any of the choice phrases blossoming in my head for fear of offending my rescuers. (There is nothing worse than an offended rescuer.) By the time we reached a car "This is it!" I yelled out.), I felt as though I had spent the day participating in an avalanche.
Some of the minor rescues are only slightly less disastrous. I am perfectly capable of negotiating barbwire fences on my own, and on occasions--particularly in pastures with resident bulls--have done so with considerable speed. Nevertheless it frequently happens that a complete stranger will be standing next to a fence which I must climb through, and he will insist upon holding up the wire for me. It almost never fails that this kindly chap immediately reveals himself to have either exceptionally bad timing, a perverted sense of humor, or a handgrip slightly weaker than that of a deep-fried prawn.
Then there are the direction-givers. I am convinced that there are people who, upon hearing that I am trying to find out how to get to Lost Lake, would climb out of an oxygen tent and run barefooted three miles through the snow for the opportunity of giving me directions to it. Now I would appreciate this sacrifice on their part except for one thing: not only have they never been to Lost Lake in their lives' they didn't even know it existed until they heard I wanted to go there. But I shouldn't be too harsh on these people. Even though I don't find Lost Lake by following their directions I do discover some truly great swamps, vast stretches of country distinguished by a total absence of water, campsites with rock-to-rock rattlesnakes, and sometimes a little mountain valley inhabited only by a family of giant bears, all of whom are suffering from acute irritability.
There are times, of course, when I actually have need of rescue. One of these times occurred last fall on Lake Pend Oreille. Mort Haggard and I had stalled our outboard in the middle of the lake just as we noticed the thin black line of a storm edging toward us. There is only one sensible way to ride out a storm on Lake Pend Oreille and that is astride a barstool in the nearest resort. With this object in mind, we were taking turns flailing away on the pull cord when the damn thing broke. The storm was just about upon us and I got out a can and started bailing as fast as I could. We weren't taking any water over the sides yet, but the bottom of the boat was awash in cold sweat.
There was only one other boat in sight and we hailed it by gesturing with our arms in a fashion that the casual observer might have supposed to be frantic. We also loudly repeated the word "help" at regular intervals of a half second and in a somewhat shrill pitch so as to be heard above the wind.
The two occupants of the other boat responded promptly to these signals, and soon had pulled their rather sleek craft up alongside our rather dumpy one. They were husband and wife, both up in their seventies, lean as lances and deeply tanned. The man was conservatively dressed in bib overalls and his wife wore a long flow
ery dress. Both of them looked safe enough.
Mort and I immediately made the mistake common to persons being rescued, which is to defer in all matters of logic and common sense to the rescuers, the assumption being that because a person is at this moment displaying a keen sense of goodwill, he is therefore not (a) a madman, (b) an imbecile, or (c) a mugger on vacation. Our rescuers, it turned out, were none of these three.
They were something else.
"Can you give us a tow to shore?" I shouted at them.
"Oh not too good," the old man said. "We caught two or three earlier, but they was pretty small."
Mort and I grinned uncomfortably and shot nervous glances at each other and the storm.
"Clifford's a mite hard of hearing," said the woman, whose name, we learned, was Alma. "THEY WANT A TOW TO SHORE!" Alma said to Clifford.
"Fine, fine," Clifford said. "You fellas just grab ahold on the side of our boat and we'll tow you in."
This suggestion did not seem to be one of the ten best ideas I had ever heard.
"Don't you think it would be better to rig up a tow line?" I asked.
"They was all silvers," Clifford said. "But they was small."
Mort and I took another look at the storm and grabbed the side of their boat.
Clifford eased out on the throttle and the two boats began to move.
There was a good chop on the water now, and the sky was black. Mort and I clung to the side of the other boat as if it were the brink of an eighty-foot cliff.
Clifford let out on the throttle a bit more, pulling Mort and me over on our sides. We wrapped our legs around the seats and locked our ankles together. Our rib cages began to simulate the action of an accordion in a rock band. Charley horses began to gallop up and down my arms.
Clifford eased out on the throttle a bit more, and Mort began to emit a low, continuous moan, which he politely attempted to disguise as humming.
"Hummghh, hummghh," he went.
Clifford eased out on the throttle still a bit more, and the bows of both boats were out of the water. Our fishing lines snapped into the air and trailed out behind us like silver streamers in the wind.
"Hey, Cliff," I yelled through the plume of spray. "How about slowing it down some?"
He smiled down at me. "Yup," he said. "They was all small."
Alma meanwhile had taken a liking to Mort and was attempting to engage him in conversation. She had moved over next to him and was shouting down into his free ear, the one not scrunched into an oarlock.
"Bet you can't guess how long we've lived in these parts, can you, young man?" she asked.
"Yes ma'm," said Mort, always the gentleman. "Hummmgh, hummmgh!"
"You can? How long then?"
"Yes ma'm," Mort said. "Hummmmgh, hummmmgh!"
"We've lived here seventy-odd years now, and let me tell you, we've seen some powerful hard times," Alma said, apparently not realizing that she was seeing one of them right then.
"Yes ma'm," Mort said. "Hummmgh, In hummmgh."
We smacked into a huge wave. One moment the other boat was above us, Mort and I holding up there, and the next it was down below, dangling from our aching arms, and all of us still going like sixty. Then the two boats began to go their separate ways. Mort and I wrenched them back together, shouting out a rousing chorus from an old sea chanty frequently sung by sailors as they were being keel-hauled.
"Thought we was going to lose you for a minute there," Clifford yelled over at us with a grin.
"Yes ma'm," Mort said. "Hummmmgh, hummmmgh!"
When we were once again standing safely on the dock, which didn't seem like a day over three weeks, Mort turned philosophical about the whole adventure. "Look at it this way," he said. "First of all, we probably never would have survived that storm if we hadn't been rescued.
Second, we're standing here on the dock soaking our hands in the lake, and we don't even have to bother to bend down."
"Hummgh, hummgh," I said.
"I'll Never Forget Old 5789-A"
Let me admit it right off. There was a time not too long ago when I liked my wildlife unadorned. What I mean is, I liked it in the naked.
Stark raving raw. In its birthday suit. Nude. Stripped. Bare. Some fur or hair and maybe a set of horns, but otherwise unadorned with so much as an aluminum fig leaf.
The wildlife situation, as I saw it, was becoming grim--science-wise.
The scientists were running all over the place decorating my wild animals with vinyl tags, collars, streamers, flags, patches and jackets. They were putting radio transmitters on grizzly bears and sage grouse and sea turtles. Deer in Idaho were running around in blinking lights, and some falcons of my acquaintance carried so much electronic equipment they had to taxi for a take off. So help me, I even knew a mountain goat that ran around for a year with a piece of garden hose on his horns!
And that's not all. Plans were under way, the wildlife scientists told me, to start using telemetry, the system used by NASA doctors to keep tabs on the physiology of astronauts orbiting the globe. That way the zoologists and wildlife managers would know not only the location of a particular animal day and night but his temperature, rate of respiration, heart beat, and no doubt his politics.
All this I found depressing. Whoever expected wildlife managers to actually start managing the wildlife? I personally did not like scientists and the like fooling around with the fauna.
Then one day I said to myself, "You're a modern American male, aren't you? Yes. Therefore you are regimented, inoculated, tranquilized, numbered, recorded, transported, transplanted, poked, probed, polled, conditioned, and computerized, aren't you? Yes. Then," I said to myself, "why should a bunch of damn animals be better off than you are?"
After that I decided to get into the spirit of the thing. The time would come, I saw, when people would think that anyone showing a preference for naked animals must be some kind of pervert. Mothers would call their children off the streets whenever "Fruity Fred" walked by. Toughs would beat him up in bars, and he would have to move to a city where the police protected people like him. He would have to get his kicks by watching clandestine showings of old Disney nature films in motel rooms and maybe even by exchanging pictures of naked deer and bear with persons of similar inclinations. Maybe he would be forced to make his living by peddling picture postcards from an alley: "Wanta buy a dirty picture of a moose?"
None of that was for me. I got scared and started thinking of all the advantages this new scientific approach to game management would bring about.
It took a while, but I finally thought of some.
For example, I wouldn't have to slog around in the woods anymore hunting aimlessly for a deer. I would just stop by the local Electronic Game Control Center.
"What do you have in the way of a nice 125-pound whitetail buck at about 4:15 P.m. in the Haversteads' meadow?" I would ask the technologist in charge.
"One moment, please." She would put the last touch to a phony eyelash and then program a card and run it through the computer. Blink.
Buzz.
Hummm. Clink! "You're in luck," she would say, looking at a piece of computer tape. "Buck Deer No. 5789-A will be crossing the Haversteads' meadow at exactly 4:32 P.M. He will be traveling due north at a speed of six miles per hour. His present weight is 135 pounds; pulse rate, 78; and temperature, 98.1. He has had all of his shots."
"Just what I'm looking for," I say, and rush out the door, heading for the Haversteads' meadow.
At precisely 4:32 P.m. Buck Deer NO. 5789-A steps into the clearing, heading due north at a speed of six miles per hour. He is wearing a bright red vinyl jacket set off by blue ear streamers and a collar of blinking lights. I bust him with a .30-30 slug, which enters just slightly above his portable power pack and emerges to the left of his transistorized radio unit.
As I rush up to the fallen NO. 5789-A, a feminine voice squawks from his radio pack, "Nice shot!" The voice belongs to the lady technologist at the Electronic Game Con
trol Center.
"Thanks," I say.
"I will now put on a recording of the proper method for dressing a big-game animal," she says. Another female voice comes on: "You have just shot what is known as your big-game animal. Here are the directions for dressing your big-game animal. First carefully remove from the big-game animal all electronic devices, its vinyl jacket and ribbons, and the collar of blinking lights. If this is not done immediately, the meat may have a strong flavor. Step Number Two ..."
You can see the advantages.
The drawbacks, of course, would be minor. For one thing, we would have to add some new terminology. Hunting conversations then might go something like this: "Heard you gotcher deer."
"Yeah, I busted old 5789-A."
"No kidding! How many transistors did the old boy have?"
A Fine & Pleasant Misery Page 14
