by Ron Foster
When you want a thing done, 'Don't do it yourself' is a good motto for Scoutmasters.
Robert Baden-Powell
Take for example the last time he had stormed off and said I am going looting or whatever you want to call it whether you all like it or not and grabbed nothing but his gun and survival vest and disappeared for two days.
The women worried, the boys cried and everyone started thinking the poor old bastard had died before Farley’s drunk ass had come wandering in about 10 o clock one evening with a bag of can goods he wouldn’t fess up to where he got them from and a deer haunch that came with a harrowing tale true or not of how that was all the meat he could salvage from the situation he regaled them with before passing out with a grin.
That the apocalypse was working on Farley’s mind was evident to everyone. You could catch glimpses of him in the early morning hours practicing hand to hand fighting with open palms and knife when he thought nobody was looking. He had accidentally drawn his small blade on young Fong and he said when Farley did it he looked into the face of the devil himself when he accidentally surprised him trying to figure out what kind of animal was robbing his traps.
Farley said he had seen a black bear in his trap line running but not to worry because the creatures were normally more scared of man than we were of them but thought a bobcat had declared our reservation as his hunting territory and that Farley thought it was necessary to drop everything and go try to kill it because it would reduce our hunting chances.
Charlie and Miss Feng saw the black bear Farley said was in their area one day when he was out on trap line. Farley’s trap line was 5 miles in a circle around them and you never knew if he would be home for breakfast or dinner or not because Farley in their opinion would whine he couldn’t make it back to camp, he was too tired etc after servicing the route. That he found occasional booze in a house close by and had a party to his own self was no longer talked about.
Farley provided, Farley was the strength of the group; Farley carried the weight on his shoulders of this entire clan and left his goods behind when he went out foraging.
The group was tighter than it had ever been before, Fong taught Judo to his new nemesis brother Jeremy. Miss Feng and Becky did dishes, cooked, cleaned and looked out for the boys, fished and guarded. Charlie took on a grandfather’s role as well as master of this former Air Force resort while Farley did what Farley’s do and stamped everyone’s name on the land.
Farley just wasn’t happy unless he was trying to out do himself explaining a security or survival trick in order to prove a point. If nobody seemed to be listening he got depressed and considered himself taken for granted with complaints or arguments for them to try to do or listen better before he quickly got over it and was back to joking around. Because it was known by all that Farley had at one time served as an enlisted man in the military, the thing that got him most in trouble was when he hollered at them about their own safety and security they felt justified in telling him that neither they nor he was in the military and for him to address them differently.
Well in his mind he already had been patient and as far as he was concerned he was treating them with kid gloves at first by not giving them near the hell he remembered receiving or giving instructions while training troops for battle or just learning a job that has serious consequences if one makes mistakes. Farley was getting better though at modulating his tone or way of saying things and they were learning he didn’t really mean anything by being gruff, it was just his way of getting points across and not directed at them personally.
“I never look at the masses as my responsibility. I look at the individual. I can love only one person at a time. I can feed only one person at a time. Just one, one, one.” Mother Teresa
Charlie had a single shot 12 gauge Farley had manage to abscond with somewhere and a handful of ammo, the kids were trained in the better aspects of cheating like hell to catch a fish, small game or how to eat somebody’s cat or dog if you had too which didn’t go over well with their parents and Farley had banished himself to the solitude of the woods once more.
“Starvation, not sin, is the parent of modern crime”
Oscar Wilde
“Give him some time.” Miss Feng said regarding Farley and all of their conjectures of this strange man’s attitudes to having to go out daily for their survival versus hanging around doing chores in camp.
“We don’t speak this way very often but I thought about that and we actually had that discussion once when he conned me into going skinny dipping with him. All he wants is being hugged on like he is a good dog or something and that’s weird to me. He has a lot of ghosts bothering him if you know what I mean. It’s like hug him and pat him and he will go to sleep like a baby, next minute he wants to protect, he is up and around 24-7 and waiting to defend us, very confusing man.” Becky said.
“He is just acting like an old soldier, he tries, and he really is the only outsider here because we have our own thoughts or family to depend on and he spends long periods alone. He asked us to take him in, we try, he tries but there is a wall I think he builds around himself so he doesn’t hurt.” Charlie said sagely.
“I think he is dinky dou” Miss Feng said referring to the Vietnamese word for crazy.
“I think he is gotten very tired and just don’t know what to do anymore.” Charlie said.
“If you can’t feed a hundred people, then feed just one.” Mother Teresa
“I think I came home too soon, we got more problems than me!” Farley said exiting the woods on their late night campfire,
“Holy shit Farley I told you don’t do that!” Jeremy said to his sudden appearance sneaking up on the group.
“You no good sneaky man, glad you home but you bad!” Miss Feng said before rushing to his side noticing blood on his brow and vest.
“Ah you old Momma San I am fine. Quit petting and patting me.” Farley groused as everyone started worrying about the blood he had all over him.
“I was going to jump in the lake before coming home to you all and clean up some but this brandy I found is not so dandy when you’re too drunk to skewer a deer properly!” Farley said setting his weary bones down on a log next to their camp fire.
“Are you ok? What happened? Where you been?” Miss Feng asked began a host of other questions before Farley got the point across what was on him was not his blood and look at the cool spear he had made!
“I tell you what I could have lived for a century and never had such a scare as I just had. I was bird-dogging a game trail to see where it went when low and behold a house in the woods presented itself.”Farley exclaimed.
“Why Farley you got to be no good leave steal all the time?” Miss Feng said evidently irked at him once more for his ghosting ways when they argued.
“Just listen to me for a minute and it will be all right folks, I told you I had to venture out farther each time as other people are out there hunting also.” Farley said happy to be home but disgusted that his tribe didn’t understand the difference in him only having an eight shot 22 rifle and a 380 pistol most of the time against every deer rifle, battle rifle or high capacity pistol carrier these days. He felt under gunned in someway but more outnumbered than anything else.
“I was out picking up traps, that’s not setting them, I spent a lot of time and energy setting them out the first go round in what I guessed were bad places and was moving them to another location trying to be more successful when I run up on this house in the woods that looked like a Taj Mahal to me. After sitting in the woods for an hour or so watching it I crept up on it to find out was it occupied or not and found guess what? People! About 6 that I know of, that thing is a hunting lodge of sorts I am guessing and the damn thing is occupied. I got spotted and ran.” Farley managed to deliver before the hell raising began.
“Shut up! Shut the hell up.” What’s done is done, I could have maybe hollered at them and parlayed but they run out like they were going to chase me down and shoot
me.” Farley said before elaborating on a big a frame house he had found that just invited his bump key to try get into and he had got caught sneaking towards it.
“Yea I was going to play thief in the daylight but I had no idea anyone was at home.” Farley said explaining that he was approaching it sneakily and he was damn sure a thief, albeit a thief with a conscience.
“Anyway even if I had walked up on it hollering hello I don’t think it would of turned out good because those people didn’t look like they belonged there either. They had on a mixture of camo and regular clothes, and he figured whoever owned that property had plenty of money to well, look different and be dressed different in his thinking.
That this latest worrisome problem was brought to them by Farley because he wouldn’t leave places alone was diminished by the facts that the man could produce regardless of his somewhat obstinate temperament and declarations that he didn’t need them to survive on his own but they could see through this bluster. But Farley was changing; dancing with death was tiring. Doing the apocalypse shuffle was all he knew. How can we know the dancer from the dance?
“There is a monster in all of us.” Farley said.
“There is a monster in all of us.” The woods murmured back.
Dance till the stars come down from the rafters
Dance, Dance, Dance till you drop.
~W.H. Auden
THE END BOOK TWO OLD PREPPERS DIE HARD
Be Prepared... the meaning of the motto is that a scout must prepare himself by previous thinking out and practicing how to act on any accident or emergency so that he is never taken by surprise.
Robert Baden-Powell
“Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.”
― Stephen King
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Photography by Pat Lambert
