The Horse in My Garage and Other Stories (14 page)

The Longest March

I

slumped in my office chair, desperately trying to think of an opening for a story about the horrors of March.

“March is longer than a supper of boiled liver.”

Naw, that won't work.

“God made March just in case eternity proved too brief.”

Now that's pretty darn good! Has a Shakespearean quality to it, a bit of class.

“March is the
plop-plop
without the
fizz-fizz
.”

Scratch that.

How does the old saying go—if March comes in like a lion, it will go out like a lamb? Personally, I always thought of March as coming in like a dead toad and going out like a dead toad.

That pretty well captures my feelings about March. On the other hand, the Friends of Toads might get after me for bad-mouthing their amphibian.

“If the year has an embarrassing itch, March would be the place to scratch.”

Did I want to risk another letter from the lady in Ohio complaining about my depravity? No, better not.

My wife entered the room we laughingly call my office. “I wish you wouldn't just sit there staring vacantly out the window. What you need is a good hobby!”

“Staring vacantly out the window
is
my March hobby.”

Bun has only one bad habit—positive thinking. With all the really fun bad habits around, my wife picks positive thinking.

“What I came to tell you,” she said, “is that your youngest daughter wants to know if she can go out on a date with Charlie Harper?”

Ah, young Charlie Harper! Handsome, athletic, polite, a lad of friendly smile and twinkling eyes, he reminded me of myself as a youth. I remembered how I would stand in front of a mirror working on my friendly smile and trying to make my eyes twinkle. “Absolutely not,” I shouted. “He's a total fraud. She's not going out with a wild kid like that! I know his kind. He doesn't fool me for a minute.”

I hate disruptions. Slowly I forced myself back into reminiscence. It was still March but a different March, the longest March I would ever know. I was sixteen, up in my room in our old farmhouse working on my hobby of staring vacantly off into space. March had already stretched to the edge of time and back, with enough left over to knit a couple of ice ages. I was sick of March and knew that the only thing that could cure me was May and the opening of trout season. For temporary relief, however, I thought how my first cast would unfurl over the swirling waters of Sand Creek, how my worm and sinkers would caress the water with a soft
plop
, be sucked beneath the current and drift into the deep hole beneath the big old black cedar stump to the waiting jaws of a . . .

My name cracked in my ears like a rifle shot. Mom was beckoning me downstairs, her voice strained with urgency. Knowing full well the general portent of my mother's urgent tones, I descended the stairs at a pace commonly associated with snails.

“Yeah?”

“Reverend Twill is here,” Mom said. “He needs someone to guide him up to Rancid Crabtree's cabin. Mr. Crabtree may be dying.”

I knew Rancid was supposed to be dying. Nobody needed to tell me that. Rancid had been my friend for a long time. Hunter, trapper, angler, rover, philosopher, Rancid was the sort of man who should live forever! Rancid had said so himself. But now he was dying. I wondered what business a preacher could have with the old woodsman.

“What do you want with Rancid?” I asked.

“It's just the business I'm in,” said the minister. “I heard Mr. Crabtree was very ill, and I thought I might encourage him to repent of his sins.”

I wanted no part of this undertaking. I knew for a fact that Rancid never thought of himself as sinning but rather just having a good time. Not that Rancid didn't, in fact, sin. Indeed, just the previous spring I had heard Rancid sin loudly and at great length when a huge cutthroat snapped his leader. I had never thought it my business, however, to explain sin to a grown man.

“Gosh, I'd like to help you out, Reverend Twill,” I said “but there's some important business I got to take care of today.” My mother gave me one of her looks.

Bouncing along in the car with Twill, I pondered Mom's explanation of why I should guide the preacher to Rancid's cabin. It was her sound reasoning that persuaded me, its essence condensed to the phrase “Or else!”

Her “or else” covered such a wide range of my privileges that I didn't think I should run the risk of refusing to guide Twill on his mission. Rancid was the happiest person I knew, possibly because he had managed to avoid any serious kind of work his entire life. God wouldn't hold happiness against a person. Rancid even made me happy, which was quite an accomplishment, considering that I lived as the sole male in a house full of prissy women, my mother, my grandmother, and my sister, the Troll.

The preacher's car bucked and twisted in the March mud until it turned off on a track that led through the woods to Rancid's cabin.

“Good heavens! Are you sure, Patrick, this is the way to Crabtree's place?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It gets like this most every March. We're coming to the bad part, though.”

“The bad part!”

“Henry Porter lost his horse in there last year. Just up and vanished.”

Reverend Twill hit the brakes. “Vanished? The horse completely vanished?”

“Yeah. The bad part: Henry was riding it at the time.”

“They both vanished?”

I was just beginning to get the story wound up, when the reverend swung the car around in a sharp arc and headed back toward our place.

“That's the worse road I've ever seen!” he shouted.

Actually, it was only a game trail, or had been, since the game had given up using it in favor of the road.

The Reverend Twill dropped me off at my place and headed back to town, where the sinners were more plentiful and easier to save.

A couple days later, I walked through the woods to Rancid's cabin. The sun was out, it was now April, and the old woodsman was sitting on his porch sipping from a jug of whiskey. He was obvious not only still alive but the picture of health.

After I reported the news to him, he shouted, “The preacher was comin' out to see me?” he asked. “What in tarnation he want to do thet fer?”

“Beats me,” I said. “Actually, I was kind of disappointed when he turned back because I wanted to hear your sins myself. You could tell them to me now, if you wanted to. I'd forgive you.”

Rancid stared at me. “I bet you would.”

The Stalk

M

y friend Retch Sweeney sent me an email last fall detailing a stalk he had just made on a large, gray log bedded down in a grove of young firs. Retch was bow hunting, so it was necessary that he move in relatively close in order to get a shot. At the moment he sighted the log, he was still upwind of it, but the log hadn't detected him yet. He crouched down and swung far out to one side of the log, maneuvering so he could approach from downwind. He soon was within range without the log having detected his approach.

It was at this point that Retch noticed the log was a log and not the resting deer he had first thought. Still, he was proud of the skill with which he had stalked the log and was pretty sure that if it had been a deer, it would have ended up in his freezer.

Retch's stalk reminded me of the time I was leading three friends on an early morning hunt. We were all teenagers, although I can't remember exactly how old. My friends were lined up behind me, all of us tramping silently along in the snow. Usually, I wasn't allowed to lead on our hunts, or on other adventures either, but for some reason that responsibility fell to me on this occasion. Perhaps it was because the morning was beastly cold and it still wasn't light enough to shoot. Maybe no one expected any activity in the immediate future—who knows?

As we moved uphill, I glanced around some bushes and saw a herd of snags moving over the ridge and coming downhill directly at us. I gave a hand signal for everybody to squat down behind the bushes. Time passed slowly. The cold became more intense. Occasionally, I would hear an anguished groan from behind me as the chill of the morning sank into young bones cramped in a tense crouch. My hope was that by the time the herd reached us, there would be enough light for us to shoot. Then it occurred to me the snags might be approaching around the other end of the row of brush. I had the whole group follow me in a duck walk to the other end of the brush. Had the snags possessed hearing, they might easily have detected our heavy breathing, groans, and chattering teeth.

A half-hour oozed by as my frozen ears strained to hear the approach of the snags. The guys had their gloves off, blowing on their frozen trigger fingers. I raised my hand for silence. Then I slowly got up so I could peer over the bushes enough to locate the quarry. That's when I made out that the herd of snags was the same line of snags that had been there for the last hundred years or so. In the early morning light, enhanced by a hunter's expectation, the snags had looked exactly like a herd of mule deer approaching us in single-file. I mean it!

“Dang!” I said, standing up. “They must have cut back over the ridge.” This quick thinking probably saved me from a severe beating from my frozen friends. I'm not sure if they suspected anything. On the other hand, I never got to lead again.

Another such stalking experience occurred when I was ten or so. This time, I was the one being stalked. It was the middle of January, and we had been released from school because it was too dangerous for the town kids to walk through the blizzard or for us country kids to wait for the school bus. We greatly appreciated this thoughtfulness on the part of the principal because blizzards could be dangerous in our part of the country. On this particular blizzard day, as we referred to such days, I was returning to my house from several hours of skiing with my friend Vern Schulze. I lived about a quarter of a mile from Vern and was crossing a large field in front of our house when I noticed a large pack of animals prowling back and forth between me and my house.

I hunkered down in the snow so they couldn't see me. The animals continued to pace. Even though I couldn't see them clearly, I was fairly certain they were wolves, probably waiting for me to return home. Somehow they had picked up my scent, probably not that difficult to do, and knew I was in the vicinity. The wolves moved back and forth in a determined fashion, the blowing snow all but concealing the rascals. I made a snowball and threw it at them, but the snow was dry and fluffy and had no effect. In any case, the wolves didn't seem to notice.

I soon began to feel frostbite setting in, and it finally occurred to me that I might as well be eaten by wolves as freeze to death. I got up and started walking toward them. It was then that I began to make out a pile of logs protruding from a drift of snow, the same logs that had been there for a year or more. The wolves had vanished. They hadn't even left tracks, but, of course, the tracks would have been covered by the blowing snow. This goes to show once again how my keen woodsman skills saved me from possible disaster.

All my experience with stalking as a youngster helped shape my approach to other aspects of life as I grew older. It has been my observation over the years, for example, that the most successful hunters are those persons who focus upon their quarry with intense concentration. It was with this particular kind of concentration that I began to stalk a girl during my senior year in high school. Since a variety of creepos have given “stalking” a bad name, I will, in this instance, use the word “pursuing.”

As with wild game, the pursuit of a girl requires that you first become aware of your particular quarry. In hunting, you can't wander about in pursuit of whatever comes along—an elk, a rabbit, a grouse, or whatever. If you hope for any success, you have to keep totally focused on the particular game. The same applies to the pursuit of a girl. You must have the particular quarry singled out.

One day, my friend Retch Sweeney showed me a photograph of his cousin. I said instantly, “Wow! I'm going to marry this girl!”

Recovering from a painful fit of mirth, Retch said, “Ha! She's beautiful, smart, and rich. She's only seventeen and already in college, whereas you are—well, you!”

It was true. I was still only a high school senior, poor, with bad hair, bad eyesight, and mediocre grades. I never wore my glasses at school. Anything occurring up near the blackboard was a mystery to me. The only time I wore my glasses was when I was out hunting, and then largely at the insistence of my hunting companions.

My only attribute in those days was my enormous self-confidence. Nothing in my life provided any reason for this peculiar characteristic, and for some unknown reason I felt certain I could achieve whatever I set my mind to—in this instance, a particular girl.

She was a Montana girl, by the way, and I highly recommend Montana girls as prospective wives of outdoorsmen. They are hard on the outside and soft on the inside. But my mother-in-law was also a Montana girl, and she was hard on the outside and hard on the inside, so you do have to be careful of Montana girls.

I possessed the same intensity in pursuing this girl that I did in the pursuit of wild game. Often I'd place myself on stand near someplace I thought she might be passing by. “Oh, hi,” I would say. “Fancy meeting you here.”

“We live in that house.”

“Ah, that explains it. Would you like to go for a Coke?”

“No.”

As with hunting, you can't be discouraged when the quarry eludes you. The successful hunter needs to learn as much as possible about his quarry. I used my friend Retch as a research resource.

“Does she like pleasing aromas?” I asked.

“I suppose.”

“Maybe she would respond to a particular scent.”

“I wouldn't describe your scent as a pleasing aroma.”

“I was thinking of something along the lines of aftershave lotion.”