Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Mule Deer-Message for Elmer Keith

Forget where I read this, and don't know if it's true. But the story is that a new editor, frustrated with Keith, sent him a memo that he needed to use more commas when he wrote. Keith's next manuscript had, and the very end, about three lines of commas, with the note that here they are, put them where you want them.

I hope that's true. For me, that's something I would expect him to write, but did he?

That's funny, don't care who you are.

I doubt very much that either Elmer or Jack were ever paid to stand in a booth and glad-hand anybody. Partly I doubt this because SCI was started in 1973, toward the end of their careers, when both were pretty tired of traveling just for the sake of traveling.

In fact I don't know of anybody who's been paid to stand in an SCI booth and meet people. Some do have booths of their own, where they selling stuff so are understandably nice to most people, or are in somebody else's booth because that other somebody is selling something--like, say, Craig Boddington being in the Safari Press booth because they're selling his latest book. But being paid to stand in one booth at any convention? Nah.

"Years ago," said Chin. "My buddy Lao Tse died. A few of us over at the monastery decided to go over and pay our respects. So I get to the funeral home and there are all these monks, disciples of Lao Tse, acting like a bunch of women. They're crying, they're wailing, they're pulling their clothes, they're falling on the floor and rolling around, and the noise? It sounded like they were slaughtering sheep!

"So I went in and I let out three big wails, and then I turned to my buddies and told them 'Let's blow this place. I know a bar around the corner that has cheap buckets of Miller until Five.' One of the monks gets off the floor and runs over to us.

"'Where are you going?' asked this monk. 'Is that all you can summon for your friend? Three lousy little wails?'

"That's when I got steamed. I went around the parlor, kicking butt. I knocked those monks upside the head with my staff. I kicked their sorry backsides. I put a hurt on them like they had never seen. 'I'll give you something to wail about!' I said.

"'But Master!, said the monks. 'This was your best friend.'

"'No!' I said. 'I can see Lao Tse was a fool. And you are all fools too. I had believed him to be the man of all men, but now I know that he was not. When I went in to mourn, I found old persons weeping as if for their children, young ones wailing as if for their mothers. And for him to have gained the attachment of those people in this way, he too must have uttered words which should not have been spoken, and dropped tears which should not have been shed, thus violating eternal principles, increasing the sum of human emotion, and forgetting the source from which his own life was received. The ancients called such emotions the trammels of mortality. The Master came, because it was his time to be born; he went, because it was his time to die. For those who accept the phenomenon of birth and death in this sense, lamentation and sorrow have no place.'

"I kicked all their sorry butts, and as I left, I told them this: ' There was a fire. It burned brightly once, and now it is gone. It may burn elsewhere in this world, I know not where, but these sticks have burned out and grown cold. '"

With this, the Chinaman got up from the mound of dirt and walked over to the little campfire that someone had left. With his boot, he kicked the embers. A few were still hot, and once they hit the snow, they sizzled and went out.

"Just like this." said Chin. "And then I walked out of there and got drunk with my friends."

DF,
Spot on!

Romantic notions usually do not stand up to real life experiences.