Crazy incident leads to fishing trip idea
Hack Philips came through the door with a white gauze bandage around his head and a sad look pasted firmly on his face. He waived, faintly.
The Hunting Club members, who were gathered around the large round corner table in Doreen's 24 HR Eat Gas Now Cafe, stopped in mid-argument about our upcoming summer fishing trip.
Doc immediately opened dialogue with the new customer. "Howdy Hack. Won't your hat fit a little tight with that bandage on your head?"
"That'll be the least of my worries," Hack said, settling on a swivel stool at Doreen's counter.
She immediately slid a cup of coffee in front of him. "You don't look good, hon. This first cup is on the house."
"I didn't feel good when I came in a few minutes ago," Wrong Willie told Doreen.
"Take some aspirin," she said, turning her back on the group to make more coffee.
Jerry Wayne, who can't hear it thunder, continued with our previous conversation as if we hadn't stopped to gaze upon Hack's wound. "I can't hike down into any steep Colorado canyons to catch a few little bitty trout. My knees won't let me. I think we should just fish some of them alpine ponds we can drive up to."
"Why not just go to one of those pay-by-the-pound trout ponds they have for kids?" I said. "Then you could sit on a little bench and use spinning gear."
"They have those?" Jerry Wayne asked, brightening at the prospect of easy fishing.
"Never mind," Doc said. "Hack, I know your head probably hurts, but why do you look so down?"
Hack fingered the bandage. "Well, you know that Weatherby I bought last year?"
"Yep," Doc said. He'd been with Hack when he bought the beautiful rifle.
"I lost it."
An audible gasp took most of the oxygen from our corner of the room. None of us have ever truly lost a rifle. We've misplaced them for a year or two, but they were never lost.
Hack sighed. "Well, I guess I'll have to tell this some time, so here goes. I was up in Colorado hunting those big mule deer with my cousin Abe. We were sitting in a little aspen glade, watching for a good buck, when this guy came walking up the trail without a rifle.
"He was looking at the ground pretty hard, so we knew he was most likely tracking something. The poor feller didn't see us until he'd almost stepped on Abe. Then he jumped back and hollered like he'd been snakebit.
"We calmed him down, and when he realized we were up there hunting, he spilled a story that made us want to cry. See, he'd shot a monster buck over in the next valley. It was so good, that he had to take a picture right then. The guy was a professional photographer, so he had some pretty good gear with him.
"Since he was by himself, he positioned a tripod in just the right location, put his camera on it and focused the dead buck just right in the frame. He set the timer, walked over and knelt by the buck and took his own picture.
"Then he got to thinking that he'd like to have his rifle in the picture, also, so he leaned it against the buck's neck, held the head up just right so you could see the rack and waited for the timer to go off. The deer opened its eyes just as the camera flashed."
Hack rubbed his forehead with a shaky hand. "That poor feller said the next thing he knew, the buck jumped up to run, but the rifle's strap caught on its antlers, and before you could do anything, the deer tossed his head and the rifle flipped into the air and landed across its antlers like a gun rack on the wall.
"Then it ran off," Hack finished. "When we saw him, the guy had spent the better part of the day following the deer's tracks hoping to find it dead, or at least to find his rifle."
We felt the poor guy's pain, but I couldn't understand how that story fit into Hack's story of woe. "That doesn't explain your own head and rifle, Hack."
His eyes welled. "All right. Here goes. Abe left with the guy to help him look some more while I sat there hoping another buck would walk past. They were supposed to meet me back at the truck just before it got dark.
"I sat there half an hour later and who'd believe it, but that crazy buck kind of staggered toward me from the direction they'd taken, and boys, it still had that rifle tangled in its antlers. It took about two steps after I saw it and just kind of settled down on the ground with a sigh like someone had let all the air out of it.
"I couldn't believe my luck. I just stood up and walked over to the deer and saw it was a monster. I hollered a couple of times to see if Abe or the other feller could hear me, but they didn't answer. So I tried to decide what to do.
"So help me, I got to grinning and laughing about how ridiculous things looked when an idea hit me. I needed proof to show people what had happened. I got my camera phone out of my pocket and took a picture. Then to make it funnier, I rested my rifle across its antlers like there were two in a gun rack and backed up to take another picture.
"That's when the deer woke up again, saw me and jumped to its feet. It startled me so much that I fell backward and hit my head so hard I remembered where I'd hidden the key to grandma's safe last year. When my head quit spinning, the deer was gone with both rifles, and Abe was shaking me awake."
Stunned, we sat there absorbing the story.
"Oh," was all I could say.
The restaurant was quiet for a long time. Then Jerry Wayne asked a perfectly logical question. "So were there any good streams to fish near where you guys lost those rifles?"
Hack wept. Doreen threw us out -- again -- and we had a destination for our summer fishing trip.
Reavis Wortham's e-mail address is reaviswortham@att.net.
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