Confrontation in the Basil Patch

We are being watched by a thousand eyes....only some get very close.

In Olive's Garden

Why I Married a Chicken

   

   When I introduce visitors   to my wife Olive, most of them pretend not to notice that she's a chicken , and are too polite to ask  why   I married outside my species.  So let me explain.            
                    First of all:  our relationship is not about sex.  Get that out of your mind.   Ours is a marriage of   mutual benefits and general convenience.   Of course it is more convenient for Olive than for me, and unfortunately, eggs are not one of the  benefits.   Hens, like other women,  are born with  a limited number of ovaries to let down in a life tIme -  around three hundred and fifty for a hen  - but Olive stopped laying long before reaching that limit, no doubt as a result of her abuse by the other chickens.

    I don't know if it was the roosters or the hens who ganged up on her,  but   one morning during the first year of the flock,   I   found her lying in a corner of the coop, beaten nearly flat.
  She is a Dominker, which is a breed common in the nineteenth century, before Asian varieties were bred into the European stock, and different enough in feathering     and comb that the other   chickens   discriminate, to say the least.  Her several brother Domikers had already been driven by the other roosters to the periphery of the flock, where they have not survived.
    
    I carried  her up to the house and set her in a box on the floor by the chair where I write.
         I put her food in a bowl on the kitchen floor along side the dog dishes, but each evening at roosting time she  insisted on climbing up over my lap to spend the night on the back of my chair,  The gallon can of Olive Oil  sits on the shelf  behind her.  And so, she became Olive.

     After a week or two,   I tried to  reintroduce her into the chicken coop....but the hens immediately attacked her, so I brought her back to the house.
          And  when I put her out among the ranging hens, she  would immediately fly at them in  like a hopped up rooster in a cock fight.  

        She had less of an aversion to the roosters, and would occasionally offer herself to one of the favorites I sometimes allowed into the house.
  She  also started crowing occasionally......never the complete phrasing, but two thirds of it, which is more than I have ever heard from the other hens.
         My mother used to say, "Whistling girls and crowing hens, always come to some bad end." But there isn't much I could do about it.
      The crowing behavior first began when I would leave the house.... or even the room. 
           She would also crow sometimes when I sang.  This first occurred   a couple of years ago when I began doing my weekly video weather report for the Tiny Town Times.  She was usually sitting on the back of my chair when I recorded the sitting down portion of the video, so I incorporated her in it, as Olive the Weather Hen. 
 
           I guess that was a good move.  Olive became  famous, with more fans than  me  in my role as  Davey Weathercock,  and she  aroused more interest than the  substance of my weather comentery.
         For a while ,  before the economic crash, we made a  weekly salary which kept us  in chicken feed and wine, for which Olive has developed a taste.   We entertained a number of eminent Olive seeking pilgrims. 
    

   They don't love her any better than I do.  Olive is an indiscriminate, serial pooper, but a fussy housekeeper otherwise, and spends hours a day poking around, examining small objects and specks of nothing much, and generally policing  the floor.  She even caught a mouse in here once, and always grumbles when one is heard gnawing in the walls or when one flits across the floor. Or imagines that she does. We share meals and maybe a nip of wine.  When I write, she is at my feet or at my head.  Her influence on my writing is obvious.

       Waking mornings, we talk for a while  her language mostly, between my bed and her roost.  If I don't get up soon enough, she will come off her  roost, waddle across the room and fly up onto my stomach.

Then I have about five minutes to roll out and get her some breakfast (chopped cabbage usually)  and if I don't, she takes her morning dump on me.
     Sure I  have some cause for resentment,and I am quite tied down here by my obligations to her,  but it is all by choice and I would have only my own choices to blame.  I could have eaten her long ago,   She sheds feathers on a regular schedule and I collect them in a bread bag.  I already have enough to make the illusion of a replacement Olive, but of course, a bag of feathers, or even a whistling girl could never replace Olive.  

 
            

First Truths

When I was  five, the world was round on the bottom, and   flat on the top, with a plastic dome to keep people from going off the edge.
       I stayed  close  to home , but  started an exploratory hole to China.  That attempt  didn't get further than the hard pan,  but I also explored gravity and travel very briefly, by tying on a towel for a cape and trying to fly off the roof of the Bray's chicken house.    
  Clara Bray, the chickens, and her parents, whom I don't remember ever seeing,   lived up the road on the edge of the village .
           One day  little Clara   wandered into our yard where I was playing, and told me    her mom and daddy were not home, and that she  knew zactly where her daddy kept  his bullets ....... so we could  take some out back and splode them.

     The box of 30.30 cartridges was on a shelf behind the door at the top of the cellar stairs.
        We  took a few and  went  way out back , where we put the cartridges on a rock and threw stones at them.
               This experiment also failed,  and  we  wandered on a little further toward the horizon.
     We soon came to hedge row where  three kids a little older than us were watching a brother  and sister; she on her back and he sitting on top,   trying to push his  limp dinky into her girl  thingy..... but there was nothing doing with that experiment either.

      Clara went home  and   I headed back too, but our family friend, the widow Manie Lyons, saw me passing through her back yard, and  brought me inside for milk and a cookie, then walked me home.
          Mom had thought  all that time that I was still out in the garden with my grandfather and the dog.

     My grandparents lived next door to our own house, which  had been my Great Grandfather's and the location of his medical practice.  My mother had been born there.
  I  didn't understand houses to be built by people, but more like  living  things which engendered and sheltered humans. 
 The next year we would move  to Ithaca...... a long drive from the center of the world ..... and   I didn't imagine we could move without the house .   I asked my mother how  exactly it would happen,   and  I was sure for years afterward that she told me  a big wind machine would come and blow it the house onto a truck.
  I was bitterly disappointed when the day came and we left  the house behind.

 There had been no preschool or kindergarten in Natural Bridge, so when I entered school for the first time in Ithaca,   I was a slow learner in everything with letters or numbers in it.... but when a teacher with a  grapefruit and oranges represented the solar system and the motions of the planets, it made  better sense to me than the old half-dome model.  And not long after, when another teacher used the same fruits   to show atoms  with orbiting electrons and so on, something in me clicked and  I  realized that  the stuff of the world is  the same    on the inside, as it is on the outside:  a fractal universe,   This made    perfect  sense of gravity and  most  everything  but  sex,  death, and time.   

Boy With Guns

   Out of the Closet

             
        

  Our family guns stood unclothed  in the back of  Mom and Dad's   bedroom closet,  and every once in a while  I went in there to handle  them:    the  Marlin, lever- action, thirty-thirty, with which Dad    shot one deer ever; his bolt- action twenty- gauge shot gun, with a safety release so slow that I would never see him get off a shot during the few years we would eventually hunt  together; and the little Winchester Pump  .22 my grandfather   had  taken in payment of a debt.  It was  the model  Annie Oakley  used to break clay pigeons in exhibition, and  the one they used to have on chains at  carnival shooting galleries.   Granddaddy had given it to Mom, who was all he had begotten for a son.   After my grandfather died, the closet inherited   his own  Marlin deer rifle and   the sixteen- gauge double-barreled Fox shot-gun I would do most of my hunting with.
  Four  or five cavalry and dress swords  and an antique  musket leaned in the back corner of the closet....  brought from the attic of our  house   in Natural Bridge, where  they had been stored when not being used in the annual Veteran's Day parade.  The gun's stock  had four notches which I counted as dead soldiers.
        It was meant to be loaded at the breech  with a paper cartridge.  Then you placed a detonator cap over a nipple at the breach, under the external hammer.
          I snuck it  out of the house a few times to use in   improvisational enactments  around the Civil War memorial  cannons in the East Hill cemetery.
    On the large pediment  behind the two cemetery cannons was the brass statue of a Union soldier, holding a real gun, not unlike our family musket.    A few years later, someone would wrench the gun out of the cold brass hands, and a few years later yet, someone toppled and stole the soldier himself , so   the city replaced it with a stack of bowling balls , meant to represent cannon balls, but two or three times too big for the cannon bore. The two cannons were not plugged flush with the opening of the bore, so you could    put a lit fire- cracker in there, then (very quickly)  a bunch of oak leaves and acorns.......which would scatter, splatter on tombstones, and  drive a whole surge of attackers all the way back to Dewitt place.


  In the heat of   play, I  discovered that if I put a wad of cap gun caps in the hollow of the musket hammer, it  made a terrific explosion, which would blow the hammer back and shoot flames sideways.     One day when I visited the closet,   I imagined that t if I were to drop a  firecracker down the barrel  of the musket and then drop a marble in on top of it, I could probably shoot clear  across the gorge.
        So I took  the gun,  a marble, and a firecracker out behind the house to the edge of the gorge,  where I lit the firecracker....but  the firecracker had a faulty quick fuse,  and it went off when I was just about to drop it down the gun barrel.
  Streaming banners of blood from my thumb and forefinger, I hid the gun in the entryway, and then told my mother about the  defective  firecracker. I never told her about the gun.   I hadn't even gotten the firecracker into the barrel,   so it was a firecracker incident not a gun incident.

                                                                                                                                                                                

         Sheriff of Lewis County

Every summer  the little Winchester went with us and our bee bee guns up to lake Bonaparte  to be ready  in the rack beside the fireplace ,  along with all the rods, and  canteens, and creels,   My   Grandaddy   sometimes took the Winchester along when fishing for Northren Pike, because they    can rake you badly with their baracudda teeth or tangle you up in hooks and wires if you don't dispatch them before bringing them into the boat. We have a picture of Grandaddy standing in front of our camp with three  bass and   a   big Northern Pike, strung  between  Red Pine trunks behind him,  while he holds a spread-eagled  Red-Tail  Hawk he had shot out of the sky on the same expedition.   Hawks were  considered bad guys back then
     Grandaddy  had grown up working, the son of a  Civil War Veteran disabled at the horrific battle of St. Petersburg,  and had  done about every job in county. outside of doctor, lawyer, and undertaker. He was a railroad telegrapher when he met my Grandmother, and he was even Sheriff for a term.  He didn't get to keep his service revolver after his term as Sherrif, but I still have the holster, and one .38 caliber load, and he kept the ethic.
           One day when I was eight or so,  and the rest of the family had gone to town,  Granddaddy and I were sitting out on the screen  porch on the lake side of camp ,  when   we saw two guys  in  a little putt-putt   shoot a sea gull right out in front of the island.   A sea gull was not exactly equal to Loon on the protected list......but  Granddaddy put  his pipe on the copper sombrero, went in and grabbed the Winchester, and.....for some reason...... told  me to come  along down to the boat house.
  The Evenrude and the light aluminum boat were new back then and we caught up with the put put bang gang boys easily.
      Grandaddy cut them off, quoted laws,and cussed them out.   I don't recall that he showed the gun. Mostly I remember our  righteous excitement.   



    
  
   Great Balls of Fire


 My   Dad's father was a Baptist minister who died   when Dad was twelve, and probably wouldn't have introduced him to guns anyway.  Dad  was always more comfortable at the fishing level of blood sport , and he mostly just  loved the society of  camp with all the tradition and stories.  He became a boy scout leader, and he wrote the charter for the Elijah Lake hunting club, of which he, my Grandfather Failing, and my Great Grandfather Dr. Drury, were all charter members.
     Once or twice every summer  we would go up on the flat boathouse roof with the Winchester....Mom often included...to throw cans into the bay and shoot at them.....hear the bullets glancing off the water and stinging through the trees.
     At least we didn't deliberately point the gun at anybody, and  by age fifteen or sixteen, I did have the  actual firearms   safety training required  to get my hunting license.   I  joined the high school gun club, and was a marksman on the high school rifle team, which used government supplied amunition to practice one night a week in the old High School Gymnasium.  I knew makes and models of guns  like other kids knew cars models,
      Since I got my hunting license before my driving license, my mother would sometimes drive me out to the country and drop me off somewhere to hunt grouse with  my Grandfather's double barreled sixteen gauge Fox .   It has a thumb-operated safety which I  can quickly and easily push  to release while raising the gun.       Unless you hunt with a dog, it is always a  surprise, and usually a shock when you flush a grouse in cover.        Their stubby wings and pumped pectorals  can  rocket the birds  just about directly upward ....sometimes right out of a snow bank,...... with such a roar that it might cause you to shoot your foot........  and  as soon as a grouse is up,  it swerves and cuts  back, to put a tree between it and you. 
     When  grouse flew up,  I  often   shot off both barrels at once in the general direction of the sound.
  One afternoon,  in grouse cover where it had no right to be, a crow flushed out of a  small pine very close to me.....and I shot him. Poorly.
     The crow fluttered down and sat there on the ground cussing me .
     I tried to gather it up to take the thing home and save it somehow........ but  the crow wanted nothing to do with me,  so I had to finish  killing him.  Nevermore maybe.
 
    Dad hunted  with his bolt-action twenty gauge.   It  had a clip holding a second and third shot, but he needed to take his hand off the trigger and use thumb  and forefinger to pull the safety off,  which is  just one reason why  I never saw him even get off a first shot.
       He didn't care that much.  "We saw a lot of nice country", he would say.  It was a "Pleasure Exertion".   When we went fishing, he preferred to row while I did the casting. He wanted me to succeed.
               One weekend in October when I was sixteen  we went up North  to close camp for the winter. 
        Saturday afternoon,  while Mom cleaned out the fridge, Dad and I took the  shotguns  to hunt along the  abandoned road from our north shore of Lake Bonaparte  toward  the ghost town at Alpina,        I was walking in the left rut, my Dad in the right,  when   a grouse roared up just beside the road on his right.......and, before the bird could get a tree  or my father between him and me,  I snapped off two  shots right across in front of my Dad's face....about forty five degrees past my legitimate range of fire.      

   The  grouse fell   like a frozen turkey

         "Great Balls of Fire!" was all my Dad said.  Or maybe it was "Great Scott!"  or even "Great Day in the Morning"   He could use  any of the three great expressions   for a wide range occasions.  
    Maybe he said all three things that day...... but we hunted on toward Alpina, and nothing more was ever said about the incident. 





Shooting the Bear or Not
  
      If you have met me, I have probably told you some version of this story, and if you have had me over for dinner, you have heard it twice.
      My Dad had sent several  law school graduates to Alaska to take  jobs in the new state's government, and one of those students, Buzz Miller, suggested that I would see some beautiful country and trout like I had never dreamed of, if I cared to come up to Alaska for a summer.    I could stay with his family while I looked for a job. 
     So,  after my freshman year of college,  I  borrowed the plane fare from my dad, and flew to  Alaska to look for work.        Maybe a job  standing on an outrigger with a huge fly rod, casting a fly the size of a  rooster   to catch  overweight Salmon   ....  but in Anchorage, I discovered that one had to buy onto commercial fishing ventures, and that the only job openings were on railroad Extra Gang  living in side track set ups in remote areas....... or  camping  with a rifle   at the mouth of a salmon stream,  to keep fisherman from poaching within set limits. 
      R.O.T.C. and Rifle Club didn't hardly qualify me for the salmon guard job, and the idea scared the romance right out of me, but anyway, I wanted to be the one doing the fishing, and railroad tracks generally run beside rivers, don't they?   
   I filled out the railroad application, signed away my right to strike or organize, and went for my  physical exam with Dr. Merrit Star, a friend of Buzz Miller     Dr. Star invited me to  warn him some weekend when I could make it in from the extra gang, and we would fly to a fishing camp he had built back in the bush across the inlet. 
    That was good, because there was no fishing where I was going.
  Two days after making my application, I  took a running jump off  the moving train,  way out on the line between Seward and Anchorage, beside  a river  so white with rock powder from the glaciers looming over us, that no fish could survive in it.  And most of the time off work for the next weeks, I would be too beat and back broke to walk down to the river anyway.

    No fish, but there were plenty of bears.  Three to six of them appeared every evening soon after our cook dumped the dinner leftovers on the other side of the tracks. We came out to watch  and may have fed them a cookie or two by hand.... but the  Foreman were told there might be a dangerous, wounded bear among them.    
     The track patrolman , called Boomer on account of  of his unmuffled gas car engine which  echoed   half an hour ahead of him,  always brought along a .22 to  sting critters off the track, in case his booming hadn't already done the job.      
        Our  foreman said that if  he himself wasn't around, and one of us saw a bear with as mean limp   among the regular scavengers   then we should just go get his gun and shoot the bear.  

      Alcohol was not allowed out on the line, but guns were.  In Anchorage, on my first weekend in from the Moose Pass section,  I  went to a pawn shop between bars on Fourth Ave  and bought a .22 revolver   for twenty-seven dollars and fifty cents.    It was not for stinging bears,   and only accurate enough to shoot yourself in the head, but, because the chamber wouldn't take anything more than .22 short cartridges, not  powerful enough to kill yourself that way.
       One night as the train rolled by our side track, I fired the revolver out the open other side window of my compartment   and  I couldn't even hear the report .....  but could see  flames leaping out the sides.   That gun was useless for anything , except maybe for display during hold-ups and hostage situations.  
 On another weekend I flew in a Cessna Flat plane with Dr. Star , and his fishing buddy Ed, to the camp Star had built back  in the bush across Cook Inlet....all using materials he had flown in. 
     Ignorant, uneducated bears will be curious, and that Spring  a curious bear  had broken into the cabin when the Doctor was not there. Dr. Star shot the bear when it returned.
     He had nailed  It's hide to the outside of the cabin  to warn away other bears.  

     The bear hide was still there when we arrived, but the porch door  and the main door  behind itwere hanging open.  
          A bear had  come in the window , opened the cupboards, bitten and sucked  the life out of every can in the place, including the bug spray;  then  sprayed and shat over the floor, and  gone out by way of the doors.

     We cleaned up, went fishing,  caught fish, cleaned and ate them, then   threw  the  dinner remains  out on the garbage pile down toward the lake, so that no bear would need to come in after them.

   We played cards and drank whiskey until near midnight when it was still hardly dark yet .  
       
     Dr. Star said he had already shot his bear that year, and   Ed, who taught at a remote native school, had shot his bear too, so I should be the one slept on the porch with the bear rifle that night...... just in case the bear came back.   The assignment was  something between a ribbing and token honor   I suppose, but I lay awake for quite a while, zipped up in my grandfather's mummy bag against the cold lake breeze, listening.
            Before I knew I was asleep, I was  startled awake   by a bear , testingly dragging his claws across the porch door screen.
     I rolled over and reached for the rifle, but zipped in the bag as I was, just rolled off the cot, thumped to the floor , and knocked the gun over with a clatter.
     By the time I was out of the bag and at the door with the gun, he was running straight away on all fours over the garbage pile.
I had the gun trained on his butt  but Ed had come up behind me and  pushed the gun down.    I don't know if I would have shot the bear ,    but   that couldn't have turned out well.

  A Gun is a Gun, is not a Gun


 Guy Ackerman   had  thick trumpet player lips and a sparse beard he had grown while offering trumpet lessons,  and half starving  through the winter in Anchorage. Out on the extra gang, he would stand out across the track blowing his trumpet, which  would get  a wild thing  bouncing back and forth off  the mountain and ice walls. Trumpet players should go to Alaska and get dropped off between Moose Pass and Portage, just to do that.      Guy was not planning to starve through another winter in Anchorage, but he had bet  his father that before he came home to Cedar rapids, he was going to shoot a bear. 
           One day  when the foreman was away  and we were watching the evening bears feed across the tracks, one of the   bears appeared to Guy to be limping.... and so maybe it was one made dangerous by having been fired at by the track patrolman.   So Guy got the rifle and shot the bear. 
  The assistant foreman who was  a zoologiy graduate student in Arkansas,  helped us skin the bear, and   butchered it for the cooks, then built a fire to boil the head so he could collect the  skull.  We all stood around and watched it bounce through half the night, telling stories and jokes.....including of course the perennial one about the dumb  green horn who is told that to become a real Alaska Sourdough, you have to shoot a bear, sleep with a squaw, and piss in the Yukon.....So he goes off into the bush, and comes back  a month later, all tattered and bleeding and clawed up, asking , where was that squaw he had to shoot.
  The next evening, Guy and I spent some hours scraping the fat of the hide, then he wrapped it for mailing to Iowa.

    Through the Anchorage classifieds,  Guy and I got a ride with an oil worker driving down the Alaska Highway to Seatle.    He said he needed to know if we were carrying any guns, and I  told him I had the revolver in the suitcase.  That was fine;  I should just keep it there, and not mention it to anybody.
 On down the highway, Guy and I  pissed in the Yukon.  
    We crossed back into the U.S. without incident or gun talk.
  We hitch-hiked across the country, driving the last half of the way in a car which we bought for forty-five  dollars from the guy who picked us up.  It came with an M.P, helmet which he kept visible in the back window to prevent speeding tickets.    He didn't have the registration with him, but said he would send it along.  We left him off in North Dakota and of course no registration would ever appear, but, with some incidents along the way, but we were not stopped for possessing a gun while impersonating a military officer and evading the police in a stolen vehicle.

    The next year I went to Europe for a junior year,   and  I took along  some fishing tackle, but  left the guns at home.  I never got around to applying for a  hand gun permit. 
                                    After my father died, I discovered the main frame of the gun in his desk up on the third floor,  and later,  found  the  cartricge holding cylinder down on the second floor in his dresser drawer;  so you might say that there was no gun there.
 


My Last Hunt.

   During my second of year of  graduate school,  I took a part time job which mostly had me standing at the bow of   a Cornell fisheries research boat that was rigged with   a  couple of electrodes dangling twenty ten or twelve feet apart out in front of it.   We cranked up the generator and  cruised around little Dryden lake while I scooped up the stunned fish  we had managed to get between the electrodes..    The  pickerel , which are speedier or more sensitive than the bass and bullheads, would  shoot right out of the water trying to stay ahead of the charge, and I could sometimes net one in the air.  One I netted would have been a state rod and reel record.  It was materially,  my best fishing year ever.
              Kristal, baby Mnetha, and I lived out Slaterville Road with the watershed forest in back of the house.  I hunted for rabbits, pheasants, and grouse back there.    One afternoon an owl flew up  from  the ground where I didn't  expect to see an owl,  and I  jerk shot him .
        Didn't kill it.   The owl sat on a rock judging me  .
   I went back to the house, got a raw hamburger patty and put it in front of the owl....who   stared at me,  unblinking.

  A day later,  I hunted by the same spot but the owl and the hamburger patty were gone.
      I hunted on ..... and  was in a maple glen,  coming down to the edge of  the little creek bed gully, which was maybe four feet deep and eight feet wide, when  I  noticed a   spike horn buck,  head down, picking his way up the gully,  only fifty feet away, and never looking up. Deer don't expect anything to swoop down on them from above.  That is why people hunt from tree stands.  Not even thinking about what I was intending,   I lay down my gun,  and waited until  the deer was right under me.    Then I jumped down and grabbed him up....his hoofs flailing so wildly  that he slashed himself ,  and blood was splattering on the rocks.  Then  there was nothing do do but set him down.... which I did, and he clattered and splattered off.  I wouldn't need to try that again. I guess that would be the apex of my hunting life.

    On a Saturday two weeks later, my Uncle Curtis was in town  to see a  Cornell football game with my Dad.
  I myself, went hunting out back that day.
            I  shot a rabbit  and was gutting  it in the   yard when Kristal stepped out and told me my Mom had called to tell me Uncle Curtis had died at the foot ball game.
                       It was of a heart attack during a kickoff return. 
                        A week or two  after that, I got a paper from one of my freshmen English section students, telling about how a man died in the stands in front of her while she was at the foot ball game.  I remembered again the smell of the rabbits insides.  Still do.
                    I didn't make any conscious decision, but I haven't been hunting since.        And after that my father would turn off the T.V. when a football game got too exciting and he before started yelling "Great Balls of Fire ! Great Scott!   and Great Day in the Morning."  And  we didn't take any long canoe trips, because he didn't want me to have to carry him  out of the woods, dead.

     Sheriff of Dog's Plot
       
   I haven't hunted in many years...... but I'm keeping the guns.  And not just to defend against people who would invade my house to get the guns. 
     For instance, I needed a gun this winter when a car hit a deer in front of my place, and then another one just yesterday.   I carry an ax in the truck for when I myself hit another deer .  A gun would be better for killing, but I don't want a gun in my vehicle, so  if I ever kill someone in a fit of road-rage,  it will have to  be with an Estwing, Hudson Bay cruising ax.
    And then   I have   occasionally had to kill   poorly-bred  roosters of mine that  insisted on attacking  me, friends, or little people.
 Ever  since,  if I am carrying Granny's cane, or anything that looks like a shot gun, or even just cradling an invisible gun when I approach, the roosters growl,  chatter,  and move off side-ways.
     Though I do generally keep my guns locked in the root cellar.....  Granddaddy's shot gun and a box of #6 shells have lately been standing close  by the kitchen door, ready to deal with the critter that's been raiding here recently,
        In the last few weeks, something has  killed two of my three outdoor hens right after they come out of the trees about  dawn, and  also killedmy most beloved  guard rooster Moby Dot, and   his partner Whitey.     I would kill for Dot and Whitey, maybe even after it wouldn't do any damn good.
       The  chicken killer doesn't carry the corpses away, but half consumes them nearby.....and  returns to feed on them I think... in rotation  with the possum and the cats.   Maybe he never leaves the plot.      I am  guessing that the critter is a raccoon....maybe the one I  rapped with the cane one morning this winter as it ran by me, chasing one of my hens which it had shaken  out of the sumac . 
            So every morning lately I have been rolling out before sunrise to put the a kettle on, load  the gun at  the door, and go out  to stalk around the driveway until  Yellow Foot  the last of her little flock  comes down out of the sumac... and the shadows slink off   so I can safely let the rest of the hens out. 
    But  it still wouldn't be safe for you to show up here unexpectedly, no matter what time of day.
 



Key to the Root Cellar
     

       My intense fascination with guns had long  passed   by the time my son Tarka came along, and I never tried to encourage his own interest.... but boys will be shooters, and  go bang bang with whatever comes to hand.
  Tarka's mother decided that if he wanted toy guns, he would have to make them himself.
       Tarka made lots of guns with the tools and parts in my basement.  And I only helped him a little.  
            Then his mother said he could have only one gun
         So  Takra took  his guns all apart,  and reassembled a new one from the parts whenever he wanted  a different one,  guns cycling in and out of existence.

      Tarka and I   made  greenwood bows, sling-shots,  and cattail stalk arrows..... but I don't think I ever showed him  how we used to  stand catails on their heads  to soak in kerosene for a day,   and then shoot them off the bluff in front of camp at night, flaming out over the lake.

  
   When he got  a little older and insisted, I  brought the  Savage .22 off the  rack;  told him about how it wasn't a killing gun, and we fired it at regular targets....not over the water and into the trees, but  in a gravel pit.
   And later we went out to the gravel pit with  the shot gun, and the thirty thirty so he could make the big booms.
        I  took him to a friend's place  in the woods where he got to help shoot up an old refrigerator with a mail-order military gun.
      Then his own fascination with guns was bumped aside by bikes, which is all for the good I think, except that down hill mountain biking may be statistically more dangerous than general gunning around.

    One day when he was a Cornell student,  Tarka  rode onto the scene of  a fresh car/deer collision:.
     Patrol car lights flashing, car at the side of the road with driver and radiator steaming.  A female officer facing a   deer, broken and flailing  in the middle of the road.  She had her   revolver out, but coiuldn't bring herself to use it. 
     So, although I had never trained him in the use of hand guns,  Tarka did the service.      
      When he graduated, I gave him the Savage .22. and a key to the root cellar here.  It is moist down there, so when I am no longer around, he should go down there and oil the guns occasionally, whether they get used or not.

By the Side of the Road

            Aunt Hazel made this needlepoint for my mother, who always had it hanging by the telephone in Ithaca, and it now hangs on my own wall.   I don't claim to be man's best friend, and I prefer to be
alone most of the time, but this house  on Pumpkin Hill is close to the road, so sometimes I get involved with the human traffic. 
          
    When you  drive over Pumpkin Hill,  the trees fall back and the horizon  drops   away;  when you round the top of the hill at speed, you experience  a  quarter mile  of virtual  weightlessness, during which empty  Doritos bags  and   Poland Water bottles float  out the windows;  folks slip into cruising gear, insert a  new CD, light up, make a call, or maybe  resume an old argument.  Sometimes they just want to bail out:

      Stitches in Time

         I was out with the  chickens  one Fall afternoon,  when  I heard  car door and voice commotion  down towards the neighbors place;     "you hit me."  in a shrill voice that made me imagine a kid   being bumped by a riding mower.  I went out the driveway to see.    
     A  car stood half on and half off the road, the driver side open into road.      An elderly  man and a  younger   woman were trying to get  a kicking and mumbling older woman   into the back of the car.     I could see  how maybe these two they  hadn't noticed her walking  along the road, had accidentally hit her, and were now attempting  to bundle away  the evidence.        Cars were coming from both directions now,  so I  closed the driver-side door.

        The two asked me to help get the old woman into the car.
       I could see  cuts on her legs.   They said she had fallen at home and would need stitches, so  they were trying to take her to the Aurora  "Urgent care center"     They said there was a dementia problem 
      I am sure they were father and daughter and it was all as they said, but  I knew the medical center in Aurora was not open on Sundays, so I called 991 while they packed Mother in.     They were driving away by the time I got the local dispatcher, whom I told they ought to dispatch some one to catch up with these poor folks headed for the the closed, non-emergency center.    I don't know how it turned out for the unlucky lady, or that I was any help at all,  so I  expect to keep thinking about it.

      I can think of at least one   old woman in a restless dementia who  did come walking this way along route ninety this way.  She  did a good twenty miles along route ninety without beging struck or picked up,  but she must have been navigating by the lake rather than by the road, because when ninety bends up  Pumpkin Hill out of Aurora, she took the old road straight along the lake where cottages are in close neighborhoods  and people walk,.....so   was   noticed by someone, and the Sheriff got finally got involved.   Had she come over my way,  I  wouldn't have noticed  her passing.

 
    Innocence Preserved

      I  wouldn't want to be aware of everything that happens on my little stretch of highway, and I'm sure I do miss a lot.
     Peter my feed man  is an emergency vehicle driver.  One afternoon as I picked up some cracked corn  he asked me how I had liked the  spectacular crash right near my place that  same morning.  I had been totally unaware of it   But Peter  said the car had flipped end for end  several times, hitting the ground   five times before it came to a stop right side up.   It had happend at nine thirrty when I was siting right here, and I would have expected to hear it.
   The car must have toe-danced so deftly that it didn't make much noise with each touch....and  since it landed right side up and not once on the top, the  d the jaws of life were not required to extract  her from her Toyota..  She walked away uninjured , but she complained of a  brake problem,
   It might just have been the fault of the place itself.  Maybe  Black Ice was responsible.


   Black Ice
         One frozen morning after a misty rain,  I thought I heard a  rumble of thunder north up the road....but I knew it could hardly be that, so  I went out to look.

         From my driveway,  I could see a car half on the road   up  past the next telephone pole.  The car seemed to be sitting a bit low.
        I went down there.   The tires were all blown and the  roof was a bit mashed, and the two women inside were  buckled up, unbloodied, and talking,  but the older woman, who had been driving said she, couldn't move her head.     I made the 911 call. 
      The two women were mother and daughter and  had just gone out to get a pack of cigarettes. They hadn't been thinking about black ice, or black lung I guess.  Now they wanted to call home right away and tell husband/ son-in-law that they wouldn't be back with the car,  but they couldn't find the shoulder bag with Mom's  cell phone in it. 
     I found the bag   with the cell phone ,  and some of the other stuff that had been in it scattered along the ditch.   Also a whole lot of  none of the pieces  larger than a maple leaf.  Maybe some of the ditch glass was  from previous incidents.     Mom  complained of the cold.  I put my coat over her until they had  cut the car open with the " jaws of life " tool, and  moved her  to the ambulance.
  
         The next day, the-son-in-law/ husband   appeared, searching along the road for his mother-in- law's  wallet.    It  had been in the shoulder bag and had her driver's license in it.   He didn't find the wallet, but he didn't seem to disturbed about it all,d  I asked about Mom and he said she had NOT  broken her neck.  That's a miracle,  because  the car had rolled over three times and gone six feet up the telephone pole, before eventually   landing right side up beside the road .
    I haven't heard if there is a whip lash issue, or if they were ever able   to find the wallet with the driver's license ;  but the next time they have to run out for cigarettes, the daughter can drive.   
 
       Have Mercy
 
    You better watch out if you drive over Pumpkin Hill at twilight.
  One evening  this fall as I sat right here with the doors shut, I heard a muffled clatter from outside, and imagined something was after my hens under the deck.  But then from out on my deck I could see a big SUV pulled off to the side of the road only fifty feet or so up here.  I went out and across the yard. 
      The Stealth black, high wheel-base  plastic- grilled SUV had hit a deer about a hundred feet down the road,  and driven it half past my place. A lesser vehicle might have taken it through the windshield..
   The car radio was on loud.   The deer was in the ditch behind the car,  all four legs shattered, struggling silently to get up. .  A man and woman  stood at the other end of the SUV   looking at the radiator.  The plastic grill was just about all gone, but the radiator didn't seem to be leaking.  We supposed they could drive away.


            The fellow guessed the deer had a broken back.   I offered to shoot it, so they drove away and I went for the shot gun.
         
    I left the deer in the ditch as a kind of road sign for a couple of days.   Be warned: deer like to go up and over a hill instead of around it, so all ways over the hill tend to cross at the top.
        After a few days it snowed some, so I  sledded  the corpse  back into the brush for the coyotes and  crows.
            I  hope it's never YOU I have to shoot.
                 

Update on My Imaginary Brother William, Who Started this Blog

                                                        ( William in Ithaca, January 2001)

                       
  After thinking for months that  my so called brother William   was off down in the Carolinas   with Missy Hoolihan (or Hooligan) and the Tall Animal Review,  I got an email, saying    he   was in Hollywood, California, living on the Universal Studios lot,  in a trailer which used to belong to Gweneth Paltrow's cousin or brother.   
  Willy  is....or  was, so he says,  working as a chicken wrangler  for those old-time  farm-yard scenes you've got to  have in every pre-twentieth century movie.   He had use of a laptop with  free Univeral  internet;     the cousin had left him a fridge full of diet Pepsi  (which Willy complained about)   and  there would always be a nineteenth century drama filming on the lot....  and  paying way more money than he has any use for.
 That was a few weeks ago.  I doubt  he is there now.   He's essentially too rural a stray for that life....and given his freedom with the truth....he might not have been there at any point, might have actually  emailed me  from the doublewide  home of a waitress in Chisom,  West Carolina.
     Nope....   I don't know where he was or where he's gone.  And as a matter of fact, I don't know where he came  from either....not before the day back in Natural Bridge when I was about six years old, and  he appeared in the family garden with our dog Binker.
      Binker was part Spitz and part Border Collie, a former stray herself.  She must have brought him home with her.   I   remember the scene very well, because I have remembered it so often:  William standing there in the garden with his hand on   Binker,  seeming, because of his preternaturally short legs,  to be a normal, though raggedy boy, standing in a hole up to his knees.
  Right away I disliked this   feral intruder, even if the dog had brought him home.  Especially because My dog brought him home.  Nobody wants to be displaced in his own home or his dog's affections.
     When my mom and dad tried to bring the dirty boy in,  I  tried, and failed, to hold the door shut from inside,   so   I ran upstairs and hid in a closet while Mom and Dad took the nameless William to the bathroom and tried to wash the stink off him.  They didn't quite manage to get all the stink off him,  but  he eventually got a name, and  I would  have to share my dog and my and bedrooms with him.   It helped that he preferred to spend most nights either in the bathtub,  or outdoors somewhere.

  When I got to be ten or twelve he would  disappear for days or even weeks at a time.....and then after we let him go off  to stay with Aunt Sammy in Florida.... it was very easy to  forget he ever existed.
     So  it was always a little uncomfortable for me and the family  when he reappeared.