Our End Of The Line

by Ron Foster

  A Hunting We Will Go

  “Walt, you getting self ready to go shoot bobcat?” Yoshi said sleepily from the couch which he had passed out on instead of his bed last night.

  “You don’t have to be up this early, Yoshi, I am fine.” Walt replied feeling kind of puny himself after drinking all that rot gut wine last night.

  “I go hunt in the orchard like you say and come find you when I hear you shoot.” Yoshi replied sitting up and trying to think about getting ready himself as he rubbed sleep out of his eyes.

  “Yoshi, you wait a bit to come check on me after you hear my shot if I catch sight of that booger. I don’t want you running into a wounded bobcat or spoiling an extra follow up shot at him that I might need if I miss that mangy devil the first go around. Don’t worry, I will holler out to you that all is clear if you are around anywhere close enough to hear me. Three quick shots from my rifle in succession though still means ‘emergency come help me’.” Walt said getting ready to leave the house shortly after sunrise.

  “Ok, Walt, you want coffee? I fix for you!” Yoshi asked.

  “No, you go ahead and get yourself some, don’t worry yourself about me none. I wanted to be out sitting on that tree stand early this morning but unfortunately for me, I didn’t get my butt out of bed in time to have my coffee this morning and got to get going. You know where everything’s at, I will see you later.” Walt said and picked up his gear and went hunting.

  “I still not get over how handy that shotgun/rifle carrier thing you got is!” Yoshi said admiring the Brass Stacker leather scabbard Walt was about to put on like a backpack.

  “Yoshi, that fine leather rig is the best thing since sliced bread to me in this grid down world! Having the capability to be able to carry multiple guns or hands free a single one allows me to adapt to my local surroundings much better than I had ever anticipated. Take today for example. Now we baited the traps with the blood and guts of that duck as well as we got some feather whirly gigs and foil attractors hopefully spinning in the wind for attracting that bobcat or enticing a seriously curious raccoon that can’t leave them shiny things alone. So, I am thinking that hopefully we’ve got a good chance of having managed to draw game over to our area last night and they are either in the trap or somewhere nearby sniffing the wind and maybe I can get a shot at something. Now any of those critters I baited for, my .22 can handle quite nicely but walking out the door and into the woods these days and times, I’m always a bit scared or leery that someone more desperate than me is going to try and put the drop on me. It is pretty much just force of habit these days. I don’t think there are any strangers in our woods but it makes me feel better to have Mr. Iver Johnson along. And even though that 20 gauge shotgun is only one shot, that’s one shot of number 3 twenty pellet buckshot dead for anything that wants to surprise me within 25 yards or so that I won’t have to aim so close with.” Walt said explaining some of the advantages of having a short distance defensive shotgun in a situation like that and relying on the more accurate and multiple lighter rounds of his .22 Henry rifle as longer-range backup. Of course, also a big thing to consider was, as he had explained to Yoshi before, he considered the shotgun more suitable and humane for deer than his .22. If he was out specifically hunting deer he would have the fully choked single shot loaded with buckshot most of the time for a snap shot at any possible fleeing deer he might scare up as he was heading towards his deer stand. Of course once he got there he was also known to switch to a rifled slug when watching the approaching trail and his artificially created salt lick that required him to use the shotgun more as a rifle because of the anticipated distance to the target. Shotguns are adaptable things and when it came to hollering “Snake!” and grabbing a firearm to deal with a dangerous pit viper, that trusty single shot shotgun had dispatched more than one rattler or water moccasin at close distances. That was another one of the few times that he was happier to have that little light weight shotgun in his hand more than his normally ever present .22 caliber rabbit/squirrel rifle.

  “Yes. Very handy to carry both guns up the tree with or to carry both guns to go to deer stand! You can shoot deer with big gun or plink squirrel with little one!” Yoshi said admiringly to the old boy’s country ingenuity and very cool carry set up.

  “Before you ask Yoshi, I got my Henry .22 loaded today with a special bullet that you call Stingers. That’s a hyper velocity .22 round. It’s a very hot round traveling around 1500 fps (feet per second) versus about 1100 fps on a standard velocity .22. It’s the old lightning fast versus big and heavy thing and I kind of been second guessing myself about using them. Like I said, bobcats aren’t that hard to kill if you hit them in the right place, I was thinking they might be a bit better if I have to make a body shot. I don’t have a whole lot of those kind of rounds but that’s what is so great about this carbine, I have the capability of loading it with a huge variety of bullet sizes and powder weights and it will be just as functional and accurate with them all.” Walt said.

  “Better bullet?” Yoshi asked quizzically.

  “Yea, better bullet they say for some things. Hard to say what’s better than others the way stuff is advertised sometimes.” Walt responded trying to decide if he wanted to take the time to explain to Yoshi what the hydrostatic shock effect the hyper velocity rounds had on flesh but without the use of a YouTube video or shooting something in the back yard or something that basically exploded in the back yard after being impacted would appear like, he advised Yoshi that he really had to get going and bid him adieu.

  “Good hunting, Walt! You be careful not get scratched.” Yoshi said as Walt tipped down the brim of his hat ostensibly to shade the morning sun out of his eyes but he was actually just trying to look cool for Yoshi as he set off on his bobcat adventure, hangover and all.

  Yoshi closed the door and then began getting dressed himself and mentally rechecking his knowledge of starting up the SilverFire Scout rocket stove Walt used to heat up the water for his morning coffee with. The idea behind the stove was simplicity itself, but with the great deal of scientific knowledge and engineering built in it Walt had explained to him, Yoshi considered it to be almost magical.

  He was going to try to duplicate Walt’s experienced efforts of lighting and burning only three thumb sized sticks that he just picked up off the ground to boil water and make his morning coffee with and maybe still have some heat leftover. He had looked forward to doing such a small task excitedly all night and was amazed that the simple matter of boiling water or making coffee could be reduced to an old man’s walk around the house to gather fuel for what he called his cooker. The idea of just picking up some twigs for tinder and a couple of sticks from off the ground that nature’s bounty seemed to have been dropped from the hardwood trees in just the right places was great and made it an easy task.

  When he was back at his hotel room, Yoshi was lucky to have that LP gas grill the owners had left. He loved this SilverFire stove because of its fuel economy. When he was trying to save propane by cooking on the hotels big steel open park-like guest grills, it always seemed to take forever for him to gather big sticks of fallen wood and usually end up only finding rotten wood or whatever for making a big campfire only to let the coals burn down before he could start cooking was a task and a half. Walt had told him last night, what he called an old Indian saying about campfires. He says “A white man builds a great big fire and stays warm by looking around the woods all night for sticks to feed it while an Indian builds a small fire and stays warm next to it feeding it small sticks all night.”

  Yoshi was kind of bummed that Walt wasn’t a real cowboy. He had always loved watching the old black and white Westerns and the great color movies that followed after like “The Good, The Bad And The Ugly.” For Walt to tell him that a lot of country folks just wore cowboy hats because they were stylish or useful was a big letdown for him. He had had himself a front row seat watching that crazy not a cowboy cowboy get himself a duck and then turn around and face o
ff with the militia or whatever Walt said they were! To him, Walt looked like he was facing a bunch of wild Indians with his trusty lever action carbine!

  Yoshi had seen Walt walking up on that old side of the road motel and had immediately started hiding from him. But he was fascinated with this man. He remembered a quote from one of the Hollywood westerns he had watched, one man was described as “A long drink of water.” And that was what Yoshi had considered Walt per se. Overalls, cowboy hat, that beautiful looking Western gun and Walt’s general way of sneaking around without quite looking like he was sneaking around. He still wasn’t too sure about Walt, though. He had appeared to be talking to himself or at that duck he was hunting; he might be a bit crazy but he wasn’t so much worried about that because if Walt was crazy, he seemed to be crazy in a good way.

  He had for a fact been a good hearted man who had taken Yoshi in and Yoshi himself didn’t know if he would have done the same for Walt under such circumstances. He regretted looking so cowardly when Walt had run into his hiding place full-tilt looking like the Chinese Army was after him and instead of welcoming the man, threatening him with his pistol sticking around the dumpster but Walt had just taken it in stride just like a lot of his old Western Hollywood hero actors would have done and somehow managed to make it all work out. Yoshi wondered when he and Walt eventually went down to his old restaurant to see what was left, what he would say about his small cowboy hat collection that he had in his office if they were still there! Yoshi loved all those hats but thought they were kind of silly for an old Japanese man of his prominence to have such attachment for.

  See, what happened a long time back was, a lot of his uncles would go to visit the other side of the family that lived in Texas for vacations. Yoshi was always offended when he was older that they acted like such foreign tourists and had to go visit the Stetson hat factory as well as various bootmakers to get souvenirs and do the Japanese photography tourist thing. Now when he was a boy, they gave him hats. He had Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy, the Lone Ranger, you name it cowboy hats and well as small Stetson hats of his own until he found out in his opinion, Orientals don’t look too cool in those hats! Maybe it’s like when the big hulking Westerners wanted to come over to his country and wear kimonos or eat with chopsticks or something! It just seems odd when you are older to put on the accoutrements of another culture and somehow appear comical. Still, in all, he had always wanted to meet a real cowboy and with his limited English and time spent in this particular part of the South, he didn’t have a word for what Walt actually was.

  He knew what a redneck or a hillbilly was and he had seen many variations of that but Walt said he didn’t generally like being called redneck so much and Yoshi didn’t understand homesteader too much but he understood it better than the prepper thing Walt said he used to be. In Japan, you had country people; you have various kinds of country people in the U.S. also. Some dumb, some poor, some stupid, some brilliant. But most of them had one thing in common, these were people that knew how to live off the land.

  Thomas, Walt’s neighbor, seemed o.k. with him being Asian, not like some rednecks he had met that don’t like anybody not of their own race. Yoshi felt sad momentarily that no one from his culture or generation was around to talk to but Walt had a way of making it just the two of them facing this calamity together and that’s all that mattered and removed any so-called prejudices or differences they had.

  However, Walt had said last night that he might want to go to Panama City with Yoshi someday to try join up with his clan of Japanese relatives on the coast. That’s going to be a funny when cowboy hat wearing old man Walt meets great grandmother Jasmine that doesn’t like GI Joes from before big war but she be o.k. maybe… She liked John Wayne, just say ‘his shoes too big’! What she mean by that anyway? Asian people always talking about round eyes and big feet like bad but raised dogs that are good for nothing as they are too small, wrinkly with big eyes like goldfish with smashed in faces and feet too big for bodies. Crazy world, huh? Yoshi said to himself as he went to collect twigs to get the tiny rocket stove started.

  Yoshi spotted a squirrel chattering at him on the way to Walt’s cooking area and cursed himself for not carrying along the Gamo Swarm pellet rifle Walt had entrusted him with for orchard guard duty and stew pot filling food procurement. What did Walt say about any animals within ten feet of his house, he say you leave it alone in peace? No shoot it? Yoshi questioned himself. Evidently, Walt was a Buddhist or something when it came to what he referred to as critters around his house. He say you leave them alone if they come to visit, some kind of different spiritual thing of they come to be friends and not come to be dinner.

  Another strange thing about Walt Yoshi couldn’t figure out: he was what Hollywood say not cowboy but what was word, oh yes, frontiersman! Like some of those men that had big fight in Alamo with Mexicans. Yoshi loved everything about crazy American ‘big noses’ that came from forests wearing buckskins, raccoon and skunk hats shooting Kentucky long rifles but he liked cowboys with six shooters and lever action guns better!

  Yoshi found him some oak twigs and tested them with pressure from his thumb to see how easy they broke like Walt had advised him to and started to use some matches to light his fire but then remembered the treasure in his pocket that Walt had given him called a ferrocerium rod to start the fire today with. He remembered that Walt had admonished him not to use up his cotton balls needlessly for tinder just because it was easier. He stopped the task of lighting the fire for a minute and as Walt had told him first smelled the woods this fine morning, testing the air.

  Walt had told him he could smell rattlesnakes and the importance of getting awareness from smells on the air but he was not sure if Walt was just kidding him or not. He had experimented with a simple child’s pencil sharpener last night that Walt had gifted him, one made out of brass with a stainless-steel blade and not a cheap plastic one like he had in his pencil box as a child. Walt had told him of its importance and usefulness in this grid down world.

  He must remember to say something to Walt about always addressing him as ‘boy’ like he had done when he gifted him with that treasure. Yoshi was a man, not to be addressed as a boy even though white southern men commonly addressed each other this way. Walt had given it to him and said “Boy, let me give you something to help you out lighting a fire forever! If you ever got to light a fire in that woodstove or build a campfire and you’re trying to do it by making a spark on something in the middle of nowhere and using cotton balls or an odd thing Walt tried to explain to him called Charcloth, that sharpener was a great backup. You just take one of those twigs you got off the ground and start sharpening it up. Those shavings are great easy fire starter Walt said but he added some kind of weird Southern euphemism to it, something about he was “slicker than owl shit” when it came to sharpening up the same stick on each end to make something called a “gorge” that he would need to catch a fish on if necessary if he ever lost his fishhooks. Yoshi didn’t understand that concept very well. Walt had called it a ‘gorge’. Now when he went to English school, a gorge was either a big looking ditch or fat people eat too much by his Webster dictionary definition. Walt had explained, think about it like those long wooden button sticks that go through loops on a jacket instead of buttons and you have to figure out what size fish you want to catch then they laughed about being kids and sharpening those sticks on the sidewalk and he had explained to him if you sharpen a stick on each end of it and tie you a line in the middle of it and stuff that thing down a grasshopper or cricket or worm or something and instead of jerking your line at first nibble, allow the fish to swallow it and then jerk it!

  That double pointy stick would lodge in the fish’s throat if you sized it right. He had told Yoshi that many natural museums had countless scores of these fishhooks that you didn’t have to carve to make a fishhook and Yoshi wanted to try it and see if the old man was right. Walt had surprised Yoshi last night asking him many questions about his relat
ives in Florida that weren’t too far from here if they could find the gas to get there.

  Walt, although he was not necessarily a solitary man, seemed either very interested or overly concerned about the possibility of moving away from here, Yoshi thought before using his pencil sharpener to make some tinder and getting a delighted grin on his face as it quickly worked starting a fire in the rocket stove to heat his coffee water.

  Walt looked to his right and left then glanced around in back of him several times at what he called his little Prepper Shack. Yoshi should be leaving soon to go orchard hunting possibly and Walt evaluated what else was going to be happening today. That dang bobcat that was robbing his traps was a problem but something seemed strange or odd about that particular animal. He wondered if it was wounded or just old and tooth worn because according to the little bit of signs he could see it was exhibiting erratic behavior. The main thing he was concerned with was that it appeared to be hunting squirrels close to his creek but it had apparently backed off quickly from the creek bank edges whenever it got close. Now everybody laughs about cats’ aversion to water and what not, but the big looming question in his mind was had this cat started exhibiting symptoms of hydrophobia, rabies that is… Did this cat have an unwarranted fear or aversion of water? A bobcat with seemingly no fear of man to be trap stealing and a great deal of mental instability scared the hell out of him! Those things were all teeth, claws and muscles and being eviscerated by a wildcat jumping out of a tree or overtaking him unawares as he was walking around and raking his stomach with them claws was even more than he could imagine in these turbulent times.

  There is nothing worse than a cornered bobcat spiting and snarling to tell you you don’t want to mess with it. A well-known remark sometimes heard in redneck bars to tell somebody that you want to be left alone is “You would rather sandpaper a wildcats’ ass in a phone booth than mess with me!”