Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Stomping a Critter

So often, 'fire threads bring to mind an experience that my friend Jack Hamilton had � and told me about with wide, ultra-serious eyes.

Jack farmed a few acres on the humid coastal plain of south central Alabama (Conecuh County, not far from where Mickey C lives).

Unable to finance a tractor, Jack perforce plowed with a mule. And as anybody knows, you can't wear glasses when you work-up a sweat in that dust and high humidity. So Jack wasn't wearing his glasses on the hot and sweaty day in question.

Two mysterious things kept happening all day. Whether anything other than their mysteriousness connected 'em, I have neither a guess nor a theory nor an answer.

1. � The mule kept twisting its neck around to see past its blinders. so Jack had to struggle constantly to keep his furrows straight.

2. � A long, low, black something-or-other kept dashing across Jack's field, from the woods on one side to the woods on the other side. Without his glasses, Jack couldn't see it clearly. As a hunter and generally pretty good outdoorsman, Jack couldn't think of any critter that was that low and that long � or that long and that low � that'd be common in those parts.

So he struggled and puzzled until late in the day, when the mule was twisting its neck even farther around, as if to look back. Inadvertently, Jack looked back over his shoulder �

� and bearing-down on him fast, straight down the furrow behind him, here came the long, low, black whatever-it-was.

"I just had time to holler and stomp it. And you know what it was? A buzzard shadow!"

He needed to plow faster....

Great story Friend Ken. Here is one that happened a good many moons ago.

Uncle Hart Jackson was in the kitchen waiting for Aunt Lula to fix his breakfast about daylight one foggy morning. Without his glasses Uncle Hart was fairly limited. He stepped to the kitchen door to look at the weather. Suddenly he started to franticly whisper to Aunt Lula.

Bring my shotgun quick. There is a turkey sitting on the yard fence. Hurry hurry Lula he is going to fly.

Never taking his eyes off the yard fence he waited for Lula to hand him his shotgun.

When she finally did after what seemed to him to be and eternity Uncle Hart eased open the screen door and levled down.

Pulled both triggers. Blew the horn off his saddle that he had set up on the yard fence the evening before and had forgotten about.

I once had a serious optical illusion that nearly caused me to shoot a days old calf. Looking into the evening sun the animal was silhouetted on the hilltop crest and looked EXACTLY like a mountain lion. My concern was that my youngest daughter was between me & it. My mind convinced me it was what I thought it was & I told her to hit the ground while raising my rifle. Fortunately I did not fire until I i.d.'d & confirmed my target since it was not advancing.

That was one time I was glad I was wrong.

First thing I put on in the morning is my glasses, don't want to have to wipe up the floor around the commode if nothing else!

Terry, just do like I do and hang it over into the commode.....on second thought you may have to get on your knees.

a friend of mine had been going out with a girl for a while when her parents invited him home for dinner.
the meal went well except for her father giving him the odd sly comment, after eating Dallas thanked the girls mother and asked where the bathroom was. She gave him directions and as he walked out the father said "Remember more than two shakes and you're playing with it" Dallas turned round and with a dead straight face said "Don't worry sir, I kick mine"

The fog was thick that early in the morning as our ornithology class approached the pumping station on Chena Slough.

"A stork!" our professor suddenly exclaimed in a stage whisper. Sure enough, there appeared to be stork on top of a high pole at the pumping station.

We waited while the professor dithered in a dilemma � creep closer, to let the class have a better look at this unexpected bird? Go back to the university and come back with a gun to "collect" it for the ornithology museum? Oh, what to do? What to do?

Then the fog thinned enough for us all to see what species of stork it was �

A floodlight.

"Ah! Illuminator incandescens!" I exclaimed as I pretended to record the sighting in my notebook.

Doctor Kessel didn't see any wit or humor in either the situation or the comment.

Later that semester, we went out to Creamer's pasture to get a look at plovers.

"There's one 'way over there by the far fence corner," Frank Erie said, "but I can't tell whether it's a male or a female."

I had the most powerful binoculars in the class � 10x � so I took a look. Plain ol' pasture puddin' � normal for a dairy pasture.

"Ah, Defecatus bovinus!" I said as I pretended to record it.

Doctor Kessel told me that if I didn't cut-out the one-liners, I was going to flunk the course (in spite of an A average). I got mighty solemn for the rest of the term.

Going to bifocals just before a steelheading trip, I was amazed at all the submerged limbs that were in the water. Near everytime I looked down there was one there for me to step over. Finally realized it was the line in the bifocals. It's invisible to me until I'm wading, then it has the appearance of a blurry stick of wood on the stream bottom.

Once in a while a real one comes along, and I go for a swim when I try to wade right through it.

Boy! That brings back a memory that I haven't thought-of for over seventy years!

When I was wee, I tried-on some adult kin's glasses. Then I tried walking.

Just ahead of me, the floor seemed to be a foot or two higher.

I tried to step up onto it and nearly fell on my face.


A much more recent one �

Walking along the sidewalk one afternoon in Anchorage, I very casually almost stepped-off into the full gush of a deep-flowing storm drain � water over a foot deep and just shy of a yard wide.

I was wearing my good suit and dress oxfords, but I'd just come back from a summer on the Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge, where we'd worn hip boots seven days a week and waded along shallow creeks and rivers as much as we walked on land � if not more often.

Just in time, with one foot poised momentarily over that gushing gutter, I realized what I'd been about to do.

That's a good one.
This summer, Ihad my boat tied to the stump on the river in front of my cabin. Next moring the boat was about two feet from the shore and high and dry on the sandbar. I stepped into the river with hip boots on so I would not get my feet wet. Went in over my head as the river had cut a channel against the bank during the night. Feet got wet anyway.

On Kodiak Island, Thumb River brings snow melt down to Karluk Lake.

Upper Thumb River flows down to Thumb Lake, and Lower Thumb River runs from Thumb Lake down to Karluk Lake. Where Upper Thumb River flows into Thumb Lake, it quickly dumps its load of silt into the calmer water of Thumb Lake, forming a shelf of silt just a few inches below the surface for just a few feet before it drops-off abruptly into the deeper water of Thumb Lake.

And that water, my friend, is cold, cold, cold � just a few teeny degrees "warmer" than ice.

Will, Earl, and I pulled a fiberglass ocean-going skiff up Lower Thumb and crossed Thumb Lake, to haul it by painter up Upper Thumb. The skiff's high freeboard (the height of the gunwales above the water, for the understanding of dry-footed sofa-sailors) was like an expanse of sail in the stiff down-the-river wind, and the great weight of the giant culvert trap and thick steel guillotine gates greatly deepened its draft, so the puny little outboard had just about all that it could do to putt-putt us across Thumb Lake to the mouth of Upper Thumb River.

Earl and I sat in the bow. Behind our heavy load of steel, Will ran the motor. As was our custom in the shallow beach waters of Karluk Lake, Will cut the motor a few yards before we'd run aground and tilted it up, to let our momentum grind the bow into the silt at the mouth of Upper Thumb.

But the current of Upper Thumb and the down-river wind began to push us back into the lake. I jumped over the port side, into ankle-deep water, to counter that push. The push continued, but I could feel that I was slowing it and would in a few more seconds be able to stop it and pull the bow back onto that underwater "beach."

But Earl couldn't tell that I was having any effect on the push back into the lake, so he bailed-out over the starboard side, expecting � obviously � to jump into shallow water just as I had, to help me pull the bow forward.

But there was only deeper water � water much, much deeper � on that side. So the sight that nearly split my gut was Earl's face, just above the starboard gunwale � eyes and mouth three great big Os of sudden surprise and shocking cold as Thumb Lake filled his hip boots with ice water.

I almost lost my grip on the port gunwale. Almost.

great stories gents,


wonderful thread Dr. Howell


just walked one of the loops at Creamers field the other day with my youngest. Just too pretty out not to, imagine my surprise when he told me it was the first time he'd done so. Heck the boy's 13, he's snowmachined all over the back side of Creamers, but had never walked the nature paths.

It was a good walk and talk, time well spent.


saw a few laggard sandhill cranes and geese, but sadly no defecatus bovinus

My wife's dad, pastor of a local church for many years, often had church members over for lunch after Sunday morning services. One particularly bone chilling cold and windy Sunday, a wonderful elderly woman everyone called Miss Lila was among the lunch guest's. Miss Lila was the oldest active church member, a very intelligent lady, and still got around better than many that were years younger than she, but her vision was failing badly, even with the strong glasses she always wore.

As she entered the parlor in the parsonage Miss Lila spied across on the far wall what must have appeared to her as a nice warm, glowing blaze in the fireplace. She headed straight for the fire, backed up to it, hiked up the hem of her Sunday dress a decent amount and proceeded to warm her backside.

What poor Miss Lila didn't know (and nobody had the heart to tell her) is what she saw as a nice warm inviting fire was actually nothing more than a fake mantel with a cheap set of fake logs with an even cheaper color wheel flickering red, yellow and orange light's.

To anyone else with even slightly better vising than her's it sorta, kinda, almost, maybe if you shut one eye and squinted the other, looked like it might could be real fire. Like I said, not wanting to embarrass that sweet old lady, no one said anything and I really do think she was content in the belief the fire actually was warming her backside.

A wild spring storm brought a Russian species of crane over to Creamer's field, and every biologist for hundreds of miles wanted to "collect" it. I wanted, so badly that "I could taste it," to trap it and tether it there with a busted compass pendant from its neck.

Also yearned to have one of my Alabama kin send me a "water turkey" (AKA "snake bird," Anhinga anhinga, IIRC) and have a guy from Nenana bring it in as something that he'd caught in his water wheel.

Years later, I heard that Australian scientists visiting the Arctic Research Laboratory had taught some Point Barrow Inuits to make boomerangs out of ivory, with the promise that they wouldn't spill the beans to the oh, so many anthropologists who'd most certainly soon flock there in droves.

Wish I'd've thought of that!

Sheer genius!

I'm still green to the bone.

A lady whom I used to know liked to travel a lot � but not alone. So she had her friend LaVerne come along.

Rusty was a fresh-air fiend. Complained that she couldn't sleep with the windows closed. One winter night in northern Montana, she bitched so long and loud that LaVerne got out of bed and opened the motel-room window. Rusty, contented, went right to sleep and slept soundly all night.

In the morning light, LaVerne found that the storm window outside the open window was as tightly shut as ever.

One of Dad's old-lady members could not hear the thunder from lightning only yards away, but she never missed a Sunday service and sang the hymns more or less right along with everybody else.

She also had a constant oversupply of intestinal gas that she eased-out slowly, with whistles and squeals that of course she couldn't hear.

Only those behind her dared to giggle, and no one � but no one � dared to embarrass her, hurt her feelings, or keep her from enjoying Sunday fellowship by telling her that she wasn't getting away with a thing.