The Grasshopper Trap (15 page)

Read The Grasshopper Trap Online

Authors: Patrick F. McManus

O
nce again it is time for my question-and-answer column in which I dispense bits of wisdom, helpful hints, and an occasional downright dangerous piece of advice. The topic for today is “Hunting Camp Etiquette.”
 
Dear PFM:
I am just getting started in the sport of hunting. Last fall I happened to ask the camp cook what was in the stew. Everyone seemed shocked by my question. The cook went into his tent and pouted for the rest of the evening. What did I say wrong?
Puzzled in Detroit
 
Dear Puz:
The one question you never ask a camp cook is “What's in the stew?” You can be quite certain the cook does not wish to reveal the contents of any of his dishes, even if he knows what they are.
The other hunters present want even less to hear the concoction described in any detail. Simply eat your stew like a man and don't ask questions. Afterwards, however, you should try to monitor your vital functions for at least two hours.
Another problem with asking the cook about his stew is that it may not be stew. It may be hash or scrambled eggs or pancakes, which could explain why the cook went to his tent to pout. Can you blame him?
 
Dear PFM:
I have trouble getting to sleep the first night in camp. The other fellows in my tent seem to drop right off the minute they hit the sack. Then they start to snore, which makes it even more difficult for me to get to sleep. Is there any polite way of inducing them to stay awake until I fall asleep?
Nodding-off in Birmingham
 
Dear Nod:
Yes, there are two proven methods for doing this. If you have had stew for supper, a mere suggestion planted in the minds of the other hunters can be quite effective in keeping them awake for hours. As soon as everyone is in his sleeping bag, simply shout out, “I can't feel my legs! I can't feel my legs!” This is a wonderful way of gaining the attention of the other hunters. They all leap up and rush off to the nearest poison center. Try to get some sleep before they return.
Another ploy is to wait until the other guys are nearly asleep and then say, “What the devil was that? Did you guys hear that weird sound?” The only thing that remains to do then is to plump up whatever it is you are using for a pillow and get some shuteye. The other guys will lie awake for hours, listening.
 
Dear PFM:
We had a fellow in camp this year who kept asking things like, “Tell me again, which side of the trees does the moss grow on?” Should a person like this be allowed to wander away from camp by himself?
Wondering in Seattle
 
Dear Won:
Only if he is your guide. I once had a guide who constantly argued with his compass. “That can't be north,” he would say. “This stupid compass shows north in the southeast! Stupid instrument! Well, forget that! This way, guys. The road has to be right on the other side of that mountain.” Once he got us so lost I resorted to firing three shots in rapid succession. But the light was bad and I missed him.
 
Dear PFM:
The other fellows in my hunting camp sit around each evening sipping whiskey, chawing on tobacco, and telling coarse jokes. I have never done any of these things. Naturally, I don't want to offend my friends, but what can I do?
Pure in Pasadena
 
Dear Pure:
This is a very delicate matter and you must treat it as such. Sipping whiskey while chawing tobacco and telling jokes can be downright disgusting if not done properly, and I can understand how you might disgust your friends if you're just a beginner. I suggest you practice at home behind the garage until you get the technique down.
 
Dear PFM:
A member of our hunting party volunteered one freezing morning to get up and build the morning campfire. As he stepped out onto the frosted ground barefoot and wearing only his longjohns, he spotted a buck deer crossing a clearing up on the mountain. Snatching up his rifle, he charged off after the buck. Several hours later he returned to camp, dragging the deer. His underwear was torn and filthy. Although his feet were half frozen, he danced around camp laughing and joking and telling us about how he had tracked down the deer. Is this abnormal behavior for a hunter? What is the proper thing for us to do?
Concerned in Cody
 
Dear Con:
This is the most serious case I've heard about in years. Anyone who volunteers to get up and build the morning campfire has to be crazy! Encourage him to seek professional help, particularly if you notice any other odd behavior on his part.
 
Dear PFM:
A friend of mine recently stunned a large buck with his last shell. As Joe approached the fallen animal intending to finish it off with his knife, the deer staggered to its feet and began wobbling up a hill. Joe grabbed the buck by the tail and tried to pull it back down. The deer, however, began not only to recover its senses but to pick up speed, and soon it was fairly flying up the hill with Joe hanging on to its tail. As they topped the hill, they practically trampled a young hunter by the name of Rich, also from our camp, who had just come up the hill from the far side. At that moment, Joe let go of the deer's tail, did a couple of somersaults, sat up,
shook his head in disgust, and thrust the knife back into its sheath. “Dang,” he said to young Rich, “I'm just getting too old to run deer down with a knife. From now on I'm goin' to use a rifle!” My question is, do you think if we told young Rich the truth, it would help him recover, or should we just let him continue to stare off into space?
Sincere in Cincinnati
 
Dear Sin:
This is an extremely dangerous situation. I have heard that story told at least five hundred times in hunting camps, and the next person who tries to tell it will be sealed in his sleeping bag and freeze-dried as a warning to others
.
 
Dear PFM:
I pulled this practical joke on my hunting companions. After they had gone to sleep and the fire was out, I filled their rubber boots full of water. The next morning they jumped out of bed to go duck hunting and their boots were solid ice. Ha ha! Since mine were the only boots without ice in them, they knew who had pulled the joke on them. Ha ha! I will be out of the hospital soon and want to know if I did anything wrong when I pulled this joke on my former buddies.
Jokester in Jersey
 
Dear Joke:
You most certainly did do something wrong! Anyone who pulls a great practical joke like that should be smart enough to sleep with his boots on.
 
Dear PFM:
Some of the guys want you to settle an argument: Which is proper to use with camp meals, paper or cloth napkins?
Also, should dishes be passed left to right or right to left? And finally, should the salad fork or the cocktail fork be placed next to the dinner fork?
Mannerly in Missoula
 
Dear Man:
Every time somebody sets up a new hunting camp, these same questions arise, and I am sick and tired of answering them! For the last time: cloth, left to right, and salad!
 
Dear PFM:
We recently discovered an abandoned hunting camp, complete with a big old log cabin, which we have fixed up. The hunters who owned the cabin disappeared rather mysteriously, or so we are told by some of the locals. What bothers us, though, is we think the cabin is haunted. In the middle of the night we hear this strange moaning in the room. Then a quavering voice repeats over and over again, “Don't eat the stew! Don't eat the stew!” What do you think it means?
Fearful in Fargo
 
Dear Fearful:
Don't eat the stew, dummy.
E
arly one summer morning, Crazy Eddie Muldoon stopped by my house and told me he was running away from home. “Want to come along?” he asked.
I was out feeding the chickens at the time. When you're eight years old, feeding chickens can be complicated. On this particular morning it had been necessary for me to scratch a huge smiling face in the dirt with a stick and then carefully pour wheat along the lines before letting the chickens out of their house. Crazy Eddie seemed unaware that he was standing right next to a living, scratching, pecking work of art, a smiling face composed entirely of live chickens.
“How come you're running away?” I asked.
“My folks work me too hard,” he said. “I'm fed up.” Offhand, I could not remember ever seeing Eddie do any work for his folks, but maybe they worked him nights, when I wasn't around.
“Mine too,” I said. “You see these chickens? It must have taken me an hour to feed them this morning.”
Eddie tossed the hair back out of his eyes, still ignoring the chicken face. “Well, you want to run away?”
Lacking any other plans for the day, I said, “Okay, when do we leave?”
“Right now,” Eddie said.
“I can't go right now,” I said. “I've got to eat breakfast and clean my room first.”
“Well, hurry,” Eddie said.
“I'll get my mom to make us a lunch while I'm cleaning my room,” I said.
“Don't do that,” Eddie said, his freckles merging into an expression of disgust. “You can't have your mom make a lunch. You have to sneak the food. Don't you know anything about running away?”
“This is my first time,” I said. “I'll try to sneak some food.”
“Good,” Eddie said. “I brought along a gunnysack to carry our food and stuff in. Now hurry. And don't get caught.”
Don't get caught! What a wonderful expression! If there was one thing Eddie knew how to do, it was to charge me up for a new adventure.
My mother was in the kitchen clearing away the breakfast dishes when I rushed in. I snatched a couple of pieces of cold toast and a strip of bacon off a moving plate.
“You made it just in time, buster,” she said. “Land sakes, I never knew anybody to take so long to feed chickens! Now go clean up your room. Smells like something died in there!”
Actually, it had died on the highway, squashed flat by a big truck, but this was no time to argue fine points. I waited until Mom left the kitchen, then sneaked as much food as I could cram into a paper sack and took off.
Crazy Eddie was waiting out behind the woodshed. “That was fast,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I didn't clean my room. I figured what's the use cleaning my room if I'm running away.”
“I wondered about that,” Eddie said. “You're starting to catch on.”
I put my paper bag of sneaked food into our pack. Eddie swung the gunnysack over his shoulder, staggered back a few steps, caught his balance, and then started off in the direction of the creek.
“Where we running away to?” I asked.
“Well, the first thing, we got to wade up the crick to the railroad bridge.”
“How come we got to wade up the crick?”
“'Cause that's the way it's done, don't you know that? It's so the sheriff and the posse can't follow your trail.”
“Hold up a sec, Eddie,” I said, my tennis shoes squeaking on the grass as I slid to a stop. “Tell me that again about the sheriff and the posse.”
“They always send the sheriff and the posse after runaways,” he said. “But don't worry. By the time they find out we're gone, we'll be so far away they'll never catch us.”
“How are we going to get so far away?”
“We'll hop a freight.”
Amazing! After all the wild and ridiculous ideas Crazy Eddie had come up with that summer, he had finally hit on something sensible. He went on to explain how we would become hoboes and ride freights all over the country and camp out under the stars. After our food ran out, he said, we would live off the land, picking wild berries and catching fish and stuff.
“Which reminds me,” he said. “What kind of food did you sneak?”
“Let's see, I got half a box of cornflakes, a jar of milk and some sugar to eat on the cornflakes, a can of pork ‘n'
beans, four pieces of fried chicken, half a loaf of bread, a jar of jam, a bunch of carrots, about a dozen sugar cookies, some raisins, three apples, and a package of graham crackers.” I could tell from the expression on Eddie's face that he disapproved of my selection.
“What'd you bring carrots for?” he said. “They're one of the reasons I'm running away.”
We waded up the creek toward the railroad bridge, the water reaching only slightly above our ankles but still deep enough to throw the sheriff and the posse off our trail. Some of the families who lived along the creek used it for a dump. This was back in the days before we had either ecology or environment, and creeks were often regarded as good garbage collectors. Eddie and I sorted through several dumps and found an old kettle and a few other odds and ends to use on our adventure. We added the new finds to the gunnysack, under the weight of which we took turns staggering along toward the railroad bridge. Running away had turned out to be much harder work than I expected.
We reached the railroad bridge about noon and were surprised to see two men sitting in the shade beneath it. They had built a fire and were roasting a chunk of baloney on the end of a sharpened stick. Both of them were gazing at the sizzling meat as if it were the most fascinating thing they had ever seen. Then they noticed us.
I whispered to Eddie, “What'll we do?”
“They're hoboes,” he said out of the corner of his mouth. “Real hoboes. Maybe they'll want to talk to us.”
“Maybe they'll want to murder us,” I said, lacking Crazy Eddie's natural optimism. I lowered the gunnysack to a sandbar, looked around for an escape route, and began silently to rev my internal-combustion engine.
One of the men had dirty white hair reaching nearly to
his shoulders. He beckoned to us with a long, bony finger.
“It's okay,” Eddie said. “Look. They're smiling.”
Well, that was a relief! I hoisted the sack back onto my shoulder and we slogged up the creek to the bridge.
“Howdy,” Eddie said.
“Howdy,” the white-haired man said. “What you boys doin' out here?”
“We're running away,” said Eddie. “Gonna be hoboes and ride freight trains around the country.”
The man nodded, still smiling broadly. “Runnin' away,” he said. “Gonna be hoboes. Hmmmmm. Maybe Wild Bill and me can show you a few of the ropes. This here's Wild Bill. I'm Whitey. Me and Bill been hoboin'a long time, ain't that right, Bill?”
“Yep,” Wild Bill said. He was tall and gangly, with black hair and a big mustache that curled up on the ends. He didn't seem nearly so friendly as Whitey. “Whatcha got in the gunnysack, kid?” he said to me.
“Nothing much,” I said. “Just some food.”
Wild Bill and Whitey both stared at the sack as though it were an unexpected birthday present.
“What kind of food?” Whitey said, leaning forward.
Pleased by their obvious interest, I reached in the sack and pulled out the first thing I could find.
Wild Bill and Whitey seemed to sag. “Carrots,” Bill said. “Cripes, that's why I run away from home myself.”
I tossed the carrots in the creek and began to haul out, one by one, each item of our food supply. With the appearance of each new course, Bill and Whitey
oohe
d and
aahe
d as if they were watching a Fourth of July fireworks display. In addition to my sneaked food, Eddie had sneaked a chunk of roast beef, a slice of fried ham, three wieners,
some cheese, an onion, several quart jars of fruit, a jar of dill pickles, and a jar of canned rabbit. As I arranged the food in neat rows along the bank, Wild Bill and Whitey looked as if they were about to cry.
“I told you there was a God,” Whitey said to Bill.
Why Wild Bill might have had any doubt, I couldn't imagine. Of course there was a God. Everybody knew that. Where did Bill think babies came from?
“Boys,” Whitey said, “we was just fixin' a bite to eat.” He pointed at the blackened chunk of baloney on the end of the stick. “Care to join us?”
“Naw,” Eddie said. “You don't have enough. Pat and me will just eat some of our own food.”
One entire side of Wild Bill's face twitched. “You don't seem to get the pitcher, kid,” he said, with possibly a hint of menace.
“Ha ha,” Whitey laughed. “You see, the first thing you got to learn about hoboin' is that when a bunch of us hoboes gets together, we always share whatever food anybody's brought. It's only polite, and that way the hoboes what don't have much food, they don't try to kil … uh, don't get peeved at you for not mindin' your manners.”
“Oh,” Eddie said. “In that case, we'll share our food. We've only been hoboin' for a few hours and didn't know.”
“That's all right,” Whitey said, as he and Bill each grabbed chicken drumsticks and sucked them to the bare bone in a single slurp. Then they snatched up the rest of the chicken and repeated the performance. Whitey wiped his mouth on his sleeve and rolled his eyes, pretending those old cold pieces of chicken were about the best thing he had ever tasted in his life. Eddie and I laughed appreciatively at their clowning.
Wild Bill now seemed to be in a better humor. “Say, Whitey, maybe we should make the boys some soup. We can heat up this canned rabbit for ourselves and they can eat the soup.”
“Good idea,” Whitey said. “You boys like soup?”
“What kind of soup?”
“Hobo soup. It's made with a soup stone.”
“I never heard of a soup stone,” I said. “What does it taste like?”
“Any flavor you like. All us hoboes carry a soup stone. When a hobo ain't got nothin' else to eat, he gets out his soup stone and boils it in a pot of water, with a little salt and pepper.”
“Hey, yeah,” Eddie said. “We'd like to try that. Where do you get these soup stones, anyway?”
“Mexico,” Bill said. “They're kind of expensive, but you boys get to hoboin'down that way, you want to pick up one. You got the soup stone, Whitey?”
“I left it down here by the crick,” Whitey said. “Ah, here it is.” He bent over and picked up a gray, rounded stone. You had to look at it pretty carefully to see that it wasn't just an ordinary old gray rock, but the way Whitey handled it, you could tell the stone was precious. He placed it gently in the bottom of a tin can, scooped the can full of water from the creek, and set it over the fire.
While our soup and their rabbit were warming over the fire, Whitey and Wild Bill entertained us by eating our food in a comical manner. Bill slurped down a whole jar of peaches without even taking a breath, while Whitey hacked off two thick slabs of bread and made himself a sandwich that must have weighed nine pounds. The rabbit had only heated to about lukewarm before they devoured it. Then they lay back
burping and groaning happily to watch Eddie and me eat our soup.
“How's the soup?” Whitey asked.
I smiled and smacked my lips politely. “Real good.”
“I think it needs a little salt,” Eddie said.
“Believe me, it tastes a whole lot better after you been hoboin' awhile,” Whitey said.
“You bet,” Wild Bill said, massaging his belly.
“Say, you were going to teach us the ropes about hoboin',” Eddie said.
“Oh, yeah, that's right,” said Whitey. “Well, it's pretty exciting, particularly at night in the boxcars. That's when the big hairy spiders come out. They're about this big.” He put his hairy hand down clawlike on the ground and made a scrabbling motion with it toward Eddie and me. We jumped back, almost spilling our soup. Wild Bill and Whitey chuckled.

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