by Rod Miller
“Any luck with camels?”
“Not any you could classify as good. Ibrahim and I found only jaded and unsound animals among the traders we encountered. Tunis may be a bust and we shall have to sail to Algiers for suitable specimens.”
“Oh, I think not,” Rawhide Robinson said. But before he could offer an explanation, they were interrupted by cacophonous caterwauling coming down the quay.
“What the #$*&!@?” Major Wayne said.
“Why, I do believe that’s Ensign Ian and Harry,” Rawhide Robinson said.
Major Wayne: “Yes, and unless I miss my guess they’re both drunk as sailors.”
Rawhide Robinson: “Yep. They do look to be a bit wobbly on their pins.”
Captain Clemmons joined the choir: “The both of them appear to be three sheets in the wind.”
“They look like they couldn’t lie down without holding on.”
“I’d say they’re sloshed, sozzled, soused, and snockered all at the same time.”
“Indeed. They appear to be tacking, but unable to navigate.”
“Tanked up, for certain.”
“I don’t believe they could hit the ground with their hats in three tries.”
“They do seem to have more sail than ballast.”
“They definitely have a snoot full.”
Accompanied by song and laughter and stagger, Ensign Scott and Harry made their way across the gangplank—threatening to topple with every stumble—and tottered onto the deck. As Captain Clemmons came into focus through the fog, the young officer attempted a salute but his hand missed his forehead altogether. The second try resulted in a thumb in the eye, prompting a giggle fit from Harry.
“Ensign Scott!” the captain said. “Have you been drinking on duty?”
“No, sir. Not a bit. Nary a drop. None. Nada. Sir.”
Again, Scott’s reply launched laughter on Harry’s part, and the ensign joined in. He thought better of the hilarity and again saluted. “Only the sweet mint tea of Tunis. Sir.”
That, too, spawned more mirth from Harry.
Now, Ibrahim entered the fray with a tirade both long and loud. No one, of course, save Hurry—and Harry—could fathom a word of it. Throughout the harangue, Harry attempted, unsuccessfully, to keep from laughing, which further inflamed Ibrahim.
“Hurry, what’s he carryin’ on about?” Rawhide Robinson said.
“He is saying Hayri is an infidel, an unbeliever. That he is no better than the giaour, the kafir—that Hayri is as bad as you American heathens.”
“But why?”
“Followers of Muhammed consider alcohol an abomination of Satan. Intoxicants are forbidden by the holy book, the Kuran.”
And still, Harry snickered and sniggered until Ibrahim wound down and stomped off to secrete himself in Tulu’s stall, whose company he preferred above all others. This, too, amused Harry, who laughed so hard he collapsed on his backside into a tall coil of rope. Unable to extricate himself, he chuckled and chortled and tittered and giggled at his situation until slipping into somnolence with a smile on his face.
Ever after, the amused Turk was known as Happy Harry.
Meanwhile, Ensign Ian Scott was coaxed to coherency by cup after cup of coffee and he related the tale behind their unintended intoxication. It seems the two had succumbed to the hospitality of a disreputable camel trader who invited them to share tea as they discussed business.
“He must have spiked our tea with spirits of some sort,” the ensign said. “Although I did not detect it. The tea was so sweet with sugar and mint it effectively disguised the intoxicant. I assure you, Captain Clemmons, sir, we had no intention of imbibing. Not myself, and certainly not Harry, who would never willingly partake of liquor under any circumstance.”
The young officer, with his faculties nearly fully restored, rose smartly to attention and snapped off a salute so sharp you could shave with it. “My apologies, sir. Whatever punishment you see fit to administer I shall willingly accept. I beg, however, that you spare Harry from suffering any consequences from this unfortunate circumstance.”
Clemmons assured the ensign there would be no penalty for what he perceived an unfortunate accident. Major Wayne concurred, and offered the hypothesis that the camel merchant might have assumed the men carried cash with which to purchase camels, and intended to incapacitate and rob them.
With the shipboard merriment moderated, Major Wayne accompanied Rawhide Robinson and Hurry to the out-of-the-way camel corral to complete the purchase of four dromedaries the girl and the cowboy had chosen. The camels were soon secured aboard the USS Cordwood, bringing to thirty-two the ship’s store of camels, and they set sail, at long last, for the United States of America.
But not before Rawhide Robinson and Hurry hurried back to the bazaar for another heaping helping of harissa, shoveled up with a savory serving of brik.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
* * *
The USS Cordwood had barely squirted through the Strait of Gibraltar when Hurry hustled and bustled about the ship in search of Rawhide Robinson and Ensign Scott. “Come!” she said, tugging on the cowboy’s sleeve and beckoning to the ensign. “Come quickly! It is time!”
“Time? Time for what?”
“Come! You will see!”
They followed the girl—clomping along quick time to keep up—down the hatch to the lower deck. They caught up to Hurry as she veered off into one of the camel stalls. The cowboy instantly saw what so excited the girl.
“Well sakes alive on a half shell!” he said. “We’re having us a baby!”
“A baby?” Ensign Scott said. “A baby!”
The camel in the stall lay on her side, the calf’s forelegs, head, and neck well on the way. Happy Harry, squatting at the camel’s rear, smiled. “It is so.”
Hurry sat at the new mother’s head, scratching and stroking her neck as she grunted and groaned. Happy Harry grabbed the calf’s forelegs and pulled, helping mother and baby along. Once the calf’s shoulders emerged, the rest came slipping and sliding out like a gush of water from a well pump.
“It will grow up to be a bull,” Harry said. The mother was soon upright and kneeling as Harry dragged the calf toward her head so she could nose it about.
“How soon before the little critter gets up?” Rawhide Robinson said.
Hurry said, “Like the foal of horses or a calf from cattle, it will stand within the half hour.”
“I suppose he will be wobbly on those long and skinny legs,” the ensign said.
“It is true. But he will soon be walking well and even running—if he finds room here.”
Harry said, “The mother will be on her feet in minutes. I am surprised she is not up already. Then, the little one will find his first nourishment.”
“How come that little feller ain’t got a hump?” the cowboy said.
“In a few months, when he starts eating more than milk, it will form,” Harry said.
“But are not the tufts of hair already there where the hump will be already handsome?” Hurry said. “He is a beautiful calf. I shall call him ‘Okyanus’!”
“Okyanus?” Rawhide Robinson said. “What’s that mean?”
“In your language you would say ‘Ocean.’ I name him that because he is born here, in this ship on the ocean.”
“A fitting moniker, if you ask me,” Ensign Ian said. “We had best give Major Wayne the news.”
The news surprised the major. “A calf? Where on earth did a calf come from?”
“Oh, the usual place, Major—I’d have thought a man of your years would have an understanding of such things!” Rawhide Robinson said.
“Hmmmph.”
“The mother is one of the camels we picked up in Alexandria, sir,” Ensign Scott said. “No telling, of course, who the father is—it would be a bull she met up with a year or more ago down in Africa somewhere.”
“Did we expect this?”
“Oh, sure,” the cowboy said. “I ain’t never been a nurse nor
a midwife to no camel before, but I’ve seen enough cows and mares at their work that I recognized the signs.”
“I confess it was a surprise to me, sir,” the ensign said. “Hurry may have dropped hints, but I did not pick up on them. I am somewhat embarrassed by it.”
The calf soon became the pet of every man aboard. Within days it wandered the ship at will, getting up to no end of mischief. It chewed up shoes and clothing. It gnawed the finish off the ship’s woodwork. It tangled and scattered ropes and lines across the decks. It left unpleasant surprises in the most surprising places.
Still, the sailors fawned over Okyanus. They fed him from their meals at mess and spoiled him with pilfered sugar. They played endless games of tug-of-war with any piece of fabric, rope, sailcloth, belaying pin, or any other piece of anything the calf could get its lips around that came to hand. They chased at tag and ran races. They even napped together, the camel using sailors to pillow his head and sailors using Okyanus as a pillow.
One day Rawhide Robinson cautioned the crew. “You boys best be careful messin’ with that camel calf. You know, sometimes baby critters get confused if they spend too much time with something that ain’t its own kind—they get to think-in’ it’s one of them, instead of one of what it is.”
“Oh, pshaw!” some sailor said. “Ain’t no way that could happen.”
Ensign Ian, standing nearby, cleared his throat and injected himself into the conversation. “I’m afraid Mister Robinson is right, sailor. It is a phenomenon called ‘imprinting.’ As far back as ancient Rome, a farmer named Lucius Moderatus Columella taught other agrarians that if they wanted to add tame ducks to their flocks they should gather duck eggs in the wild and place them under domesticated setting hens. The ducklings would hatch, believing the hen was their mother, and grow up with many of the habits and behaviors of Gallus domesticus along with their naturally acquired Anas Platyrhynchos behaviors—or, in common language, the imprinted ducks behaved, in many ways, as chickens.”
“Well I’ll be,” said one sailor.
“I don’t believe it,” said another.
“I’d have to see it to believe it,” said yet another.
“I’ve seen it,” Rawhide Robinson said. “That’s how I knowed to bring it up.”
The sailors voiced their doubts:
“Poppycock!”
“Hogwash!”
“Bull!”
“I seen it all right,” the cowboy contended. “It wasn’t a cock and it wasn’t a hog and it wasn’t no bull—but it was a cow.”
“A cow!?”
“A cow. Well, a heifer, to be exact.”
“How, now, the cow?” a sailor asked, inviting Rawhide Robinson the raconteur to tell yet another of his tales. The cowboy required no further encouragement.
“I was workin’ a line camp for a ranch in the Rocky Mountains this one time. It was spring and I was watching over a herd of longhorn cows up in the high country—a herd, as it happened I had driven up from Texas the summer before.
“But it was spring then, and most all them cows had calves by their sides. One morning one of them cows dropped a late calf then wandered off and left it with nary a care. After a day or three I noticed that cow was overflowin’ with milk and knowed its calf must be missing. I searched high and low and here and there and hither and yon and from Dan to Beersheba for her baby but couldn’t find it nowhere, nohow, noway.
“Then one day I was a-sittin’ on a ridge above this pretty little meadow when an old sow bear wandered out of the timber. Not far behind her come a cub. Not far behind that, lo and behold, came that heifer calf.”
“Balderdash!” said a disbelieving sailor.
Another concurred, with “Claptrap!”
“Bunkum!” said another.
“I swear as sure as I’m sittin’ here it’s the truth,” Rawhide Robinson said. “Here’s what I figure must have happened. See, them bears generally has two cubs and that sow must have lost one. Feelin’ all motherly and such and missing one of her little ones, when she stumbled onto that lost baby calf she must have figured it was better than nothin’. And, of course, that calf not knowing any better went along.
“I saw them bears now and then through the summer, and darned if that longhorn calf didn’t get to thinkin’ it was a bear! Why, it’d nose around in the duff rustlin’ up acorns to eat, and paw logs apart and lap up the bugs and grubs and worms there. I tell you boys, one of the strangest things I’ve seen in all my born days was watchin’ that heifer calf up to her ears in a honey tree suckin’ up that sweet nectar.”
“Twaddle!”
“Ludicrous!”
“Drivel!”
Despite the onslaught of disbelief, Rawhide Robinson pressed on.
“Them’s the facts, fellers, like it or not. When fall came, things got stranger still. Bears, you know, they hibernate all winter long—crawl into a hole and sleep the winter away. Before they do, of course, they’ve got to lay on enough fat to last. So them bears—and that heifer—was eatin’ everything in sight like there was no tomorrow. I swear, that heifer got two years’ worth of growth in only a few weeks!
“I don’t know what happened next, on account of we took the cows down off the mountain. But I reckon that heifer found a cave somewhere and hibernated like the bear she thought she was.”
“You never saw it again?” an intrigued sailor asked.
“You don’t know what happened?” another wondered.
“Is that the end of the story?” someone said.
“Well, come spring we—me and a ranahan from the northern plains who went by the name of DW—took the cows back up to that high country. Me and DW was out in the timber layin’ in firewood for the cookstove when we heard some kind of ruction off in the trees.
“You may not believe it, boys, but it was that selfsame heifer! It had woke up from its long winter nap and, like a bear comin’ out of hibernation, it was as hungry and grouchy as it was ravenous and ornery. And I’ll tell you this—over the winter that heifer’s horns had grown a good two feet on either end. All that fat it had packed on in the fall had turned that yearling calf into a full-grown bovine!
“Me and DW watched it paw around in the dirt and horn apart logs looking for bear grub and DW got curious. ‘What do you suppose that cow’s doin’, Rawhide?’ he asks me. I says, ‘That ain’t no cow, DW. I know it looks like one, but it thinks it’s a bear.’ ‘A bear?’ he says, and I says, ‘A bear.’ ‘Well,’ says DW, ‘it sure is actin’ like a bear. A right surly one, at that.’
“All that conversation attracted the attention of that heifer-bear and it reared up on its hind legs and took to lookin’ around and sniffin’ us out. Then it lets out a beller—sounded for all the world like the roar of a bear—and starts in to pawin’ the ground. ‘I think it’s gonna come after us,’ DW says. ‘I do believe you’re right, DW,’ I says, and drops my ax. I says, ‘I’m for gettin’ out of here!’ ‘Why that’s plumb foolish,’ DW says. ‘You can’t outrun a bear.’ So I says, ‘I don’t have to outrun the bear, DW—I only have to outrun you!’ And with that, I lit out of there.”
Rawhide Robinson took a moment to catch his breath. But the sailors, breathless though they were in their excitement, were also impatient, and encouraged the cowboy to continue.
“What happened?!” one asked.
“What did that bear do?!” asked another.
“You ran off and left DW?!” someone said.
“Did it get DW?!” someone wondered.
“Well!?” a chorus inquired.
After a suitable interval, Rawhide Robinson continued. “Not to fear, boys. Me and DW both got out of there unscathed. Here’s what happened.
“That heifer-bear was comin’ after us with blood in her eyes, crashin’ through the timber a whole lot faster than me and DW could ambulate. Before long, we could feel hot breath scorching our backsides and we both figured we were goners.
“Then, with a crash and a bang and a boom and a clatter, th
at heifer-bear came to a screeching halt, its horns embedded in a pair of trees too narrow apart to allow passage. Plumb stuck, it was. And none too happy about it, I’m here to tell you. It pawed and stomped and ranted and raved until it wore itself out.
“Me and DW, we went about collectin’ our firewood and got it stacked nice and neat back at the line shack. Then we cut a handful of docile steers out of the herd and drove them into the woods where that heifer was held captive by its own fractiousness. They milled around and nosed around and nuzzled around that heifer-bear and otherwise got acquainted.
“The presence of them steers somehow awakened that heifer to the fact that she was bovine rather than bear. Once she was thoroughly convinced of her species—and considerably calmer—we chopped down the imprisoning trees and released her into the herd.
“Last I heard, that cow was still alive on that ranch and dropping good calves every spring. And, so far as I know, there ain’t a one of them ever been born thinkin’ it was a bear.”
The sailors sat quiet, contemplating Rawhide Robinson’s tale.
But the silence was soon shattered with a shout from Ensign Scott: “All hands on deck!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
* * *
So entranced had the sailors been with Rawhide Robinson’s narrative that they failed to notice a squall line coming on a collision course with the USS Cordwood. The officers and sailors on duty, of course, were already at their work to prepare the ship for the storm and the erstwhile audience joined the arrangements like cogs in a clock that kept perfect time.
Rawhide Robinson, Happy Harry, and Hurry hustled about the decks readying the camels for the storm. They checked and made firm their halters, secured the tie ropes, and used whistles and words and taps and tugs to get the camels to their knees. With a lower center of gravity, the animals would more easily ride out the rocking and rolling and plunging and lunging and dipping and dropping of the ship that the winds and waves would soon cause.
His work done, the cowboy watched with mouth agape as the sailors scrambled up and down and across the masts and yards manipulating lines and sails. Others quick-timed it up and down the hatches, through the holds and over the decks, accomplishing their assigned tasks. Orders and instructions flew on the wind like seafoam as the storm intensified—much of it in a language Rawhide Robinson did not recognize:
