If You Didn't Bring Jerky, What Did I Just Eat?: Misadventures in Hunting, Fishing, and the Wilds of Suburbia
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If You Didn't Bring Jerky, What Did I Just Eat?: Misadventures in Hunting, Fishing, and the Wilds of Suburbia
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Overview
For nearly a decade, Bill Heavey, an outdoorsman marooned in suburbia, has written the Sportsman’s Life column on the back page of Field & Stream, where he does for hunting and fishing what David Feherty does for golf and Lewis Grizzard did for the South. If You Didn’t Bring Jerky, What Did I Just Eat? is the first collection of Heavey’s sidesplitting observations on life as a hardcore (but often hapless) outdoorsman.
Whether he’s hunting cougars in the desert, scheming to make his five-year-old daughter love fishing, or chronicling his father’s life through a succession of canine companions, Heavey brings his trademark wit to a wide-range of outdoor enthusiasms, running the gamut from elite expeditions to ordinary occupations.
In turns hysterical and poignant, entertaining and educational, this is an irresistible addition to the collection of any avid outdoorsman—or any suburbanite intrigued by the call of the wild.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781555848569 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grove/Atlantic, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Sales rank: | 500,882 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Distance to Trouble
Maybe taking my new laser rangefinder to my nephew's wedding wasn't the best idea I ever had, but bow season was coming up fast. As all bowhunters know, those long summer hours on the practice range mean zip when the moment comes and the deer you sighted at 32 yards turns out to have been standing just 17 yards from your tree. Frankly, judging distances is an area in which Stevie Wonder and I are about equally skilled. Oh, I know the basic "tricks of the trade": If you look through your peep and see individual hairs, the deer is quite close. If you can see the whole deer and a fair amount of the real estate surrounding it, the deer is not close.
Other than that, I'm lost. I figured I needed advanced help, the kind that only $350 buys you. By the time I ordered the laser rangefinder, I had convinced myself that it was as necessary to my continued survival as oxygen, water, or Fletch-Tite.
It did not disappoint. Arriving the morning we were due to fly to Indianapolis for the wedding, the Bushnell Yardage Pro Compact 600 lay seductively wrapped in tissue paper and a black neoprene carrying case. I picked it up and started fiddling. It had simultaneous multiple target acquisition capability like an AWACS plane; reflective, rain, and zip-thru laser modes for all-weather capability; an LCD gauge showing distances up to 600 yards with plus-or-minus 1-yard accuracy; and a 4X perma-focus sighting system with a tiny box in the middle of the crosshairs that looked like something off a smart bomb. I was smitten. I stashed it in my carry-on.
The lady at the X-ray machine was suspicious. "Why you got a camera with three eyes on it?" she asked. I explained that you look through one lens, while the others send out a laser beam, which — But at the words "laser beam," she cut me off as if I'd said "pipe bomb." She immediately waved over a large gentleman wearing an even larger security blazer. "Tony," she called loudly, pointing at me.
Tony ran his wand over me to see if I'd managed to arm myself in the 15 seconds since passing through the metal detector. Then he wiped my new toy with a pad that detects explosives residue. Then he held the rangefinder up to his own eye. "See, you push that button, and it tells you how far away stuff is," I explained nervously. I was afraid that maybe rangefinders fit into some new category of things you couldn't bring into airports. Tony aimed it down the long corridor and hit the button. "Hey," he said. "It's 78 yards to the men's room sign. Cool." He smiled and handed it back to me.
Whoever was driving the bride to the church got lost. We sat in a stifling hot Methodist Quonset hut with zero ventilation, three crying babies, and pews built to remind the sitter that earthly existence is not meant to be fun. Numb with boredom and sweating heavily, I slipped the rangefinder out of my pocket and focused on the organist. I would have bet he was a good 30 yards off, but the LCD read 19. My arrow would have whizzed 2 feet over his head and stuck in the big pipe behind him. Someone tapped me on the shoulder. It was my wife's sister's mother-in-law. "Would you mind taking a picture of little Ashley and me?" she smiled.
"Happy to," I said. I aimed and pushed the button.
"My, that camera's quiet."
"New model," I explained.
The jig was finally up at the reception. I was once again overestimating distances — the buffet table that I guessed at 41 yards was a mere 27 — when one of my younger cousins came up behind me. "That thing isn't a camera," Luke, 14, said triumphantly. I felt if anybody could appreciate my new toy, it would be a kid, so I took him into my confidence and showed him how it worked.
He began sending infrared beams all over the room. Then suddenly he burst out laughing. "Check it out, dude. Aunt Laura's waist is 46 yards away, but her butt's only 45 yards!"
"Gimme that thing back. And don't you tell anybody about it, or I'll break your fingers. Now beat it." Last I saw him, he was 24 yards out and headed toward Aunt Laura. I made a beeline for the door.
CHAPTER 2The Access Consultant
The lady of the farm — with a chain saw, sun hat, and a look on her face like she hasn't had a good laugh since the Johnstown Flood — makes me 20 yards out as I pull into the farm's rutted drive. She yanks the chain saw into being and walks away. Almost as an afterthought, she sticks her free hand in the air and twirls one finger in a circle. It's a miracle of nonverbal communication, that twirling finger. It says, Don't even think about asking to hunt deer here. Just turn your car around and git. I do.
The next place has a gravel road lined with honey locust trees and woods on either side. Even from my car, I can see deer trails everywhere. Around back is a man sitting in the shade with a glass of beer and the sports section. I introduce myself awkwardly and ask if he has a problem with deer eating his plants. "Eat the hell outta my wife's garden," he says cheerfully.
I move to Stage Two, telling him that maybe we can help each other. He raises a hand just as I'm getting to the part about how responsible I am. "At least you asked. I'll give you that. But last year, some bowhunter took out a horse we've had for 16 years. Broke my wife's heart. You seem like a nice enough feller, but I can't let you hunt here."
At the last try of the day, I trudge unhopefully to knock on the door of what looks like an empty house. Only it isn't empty. In fact, there's a woman standing stone still in the dimness of the screen porch. "Ma'am?" I say. "My name's Bill Hea —"
"I don't care if your name's Pat Sajak. Nobody hunts here."
I smile. I pivot. I leave.
Two weeks later, I'm at it again. Only this time I have a secret weapon — my father. My dad is 80. He doesn't hunt, doesn't fish, doesn't even approve of people who do. But he's as extroverted as they come.
When I pick him up, he's wearing a coat and tie and pants. When I mention that he might be a tad overdressed to talk to farmers, he says, "Always look your best for a sales call."
"This is a sales call?" I ask.
He stops and looks at me funny. "What the heck d'you think it is?"
No one is home at the first place. No one seems to be at home at the second. The two of us stand on the front porch after knocking and listen for signs of life. "I'll check around back," he says. Two minutes later, I hear laughter coming from the other side of the house. On the flagstones out behind the back door, I see my father holding a glass of iced tea and talking to a couple about my age, who are so entranced they barely notice me. My father is already well into the story about how he accidentally burned down the refectory of the Church of the Redeemer on North Charles Street in Baltimore at a high school dance in the late 1930s.
The couple laugh and for the first time turn to have a look at me. "Oh, that's my son," my dad says offhandedly. "He'd like to bowhunt here if it's okay with you. He's a good boy." The two say sure, refill my father's glass, ask if he'd like a chair. And then he tells them the one about how the Rita Hayworth movie on the destroyer got mistaken for a German air attack.
"We'd just pulled into the harbor at Mers-el-Kebir in Algeria after a lot of combat in the North Atlantic," he says. "A supply ship had pulled up alongside and sent over Rita Hayworth in the movie Blood and Sand. The harbor had been recently attacked and was completely blacked out, but the men were dying to see Rita Hayworth, so we rigged an overhead tarp up on deck and showed the movie under cover. Things were going fine until some knucklehead tossed a lit cigarette into the aluminum box where the film was stored. That thing went up like a torch, flames 20 feet in the air. And everybody in the harbor, thinking we were under attack, opened up with everything they had. After half an hour of fireworks, the harbormaster, thinking my ship had been hit, came over to assess the damage. I made the mistake of telling him exactly what happened, and he said, 'Mister, we just shot off five million bucks' worth of munitions so your men could watch Rita Hayworth. You get out of here, and don't come back.'"
As we're driving home, my father smiling at the thought of the new friends he's made, I'm thinking I could rent my father out to bowhunters as an "access consultant." I'd charge $300 an hour. I know guys who'd pay in a heartbeat.
CHAPTER 3Smells of the Season
It is late November. Mom is off at a meeting and Molly, my 12-year-old stepdaughter, is late for her modern dance class. No problem, I tell her. I'll drive.
She plops down in the front seat, gags, and frantically unrolls the window. "Gross! Your car smells like the elephant house at the zoo!"
I'm a new and naive stepdad. I try the reasonable approach. Actually, I tell her, it's doe-in-estrus urine.
"Doe in extras?" she asks. "Like, there's more than one? And you spray their pee in your car?"
It's suddenly very important that this child not think I'm a mental patient in training. I launch into the simplified explanation of the rut. I tell her that when the girl deer are ready to be friends with the boy deer in the fall, their pee smells different than it does the rest of the year. This really excites the boy deer. And if you happen to be a hunter trying to lure the boy deer in, you can sometimes do this by putting a little doe-inestrus on a rag tied to your feet when you walk to your stand.
She takes this all in and thinks it over for a few moments. Then she says, "That is so disgusting I can't even tell you." Her nose twitches again. "Are you carrying dirt in here?"
Uh-oh. She sniffs some more, then looks down at her feet and fishes up a little black disk from among the wrappers that once held Ring Dings, peanut-butter crackers, and toe warmers. I explain that it's the earth-scent wafer I put in the big Ziploc bag with my hunting clothes.
"How do they make a piece of plastic smell like dirt?" I tell her I have no idea.
"So let me get this straight," she says finally. "You want where you've walked to smell like deer pee, but you want your clothes to smell like dirt."
"Yeah," I say at last. "That's basically it."
For a while, Molly is content to ride in silence. But my stepdaughter is blessed with a persistent curiosity. She turns and scans the backseat, plucking an unopened blister pack of red fox urine from the jumble.
"And this?" she demands.
"It's a cover scent. You spray a little of that on your shoes before you go in the woods."
"So dirt and doe pee aren't enough?" she probes. "You also want to smell like a fox has whizzed on your shoes?"
"Well, sorta," I mumble.
Molly has had enough. "Does Mommy know you do all this stuff?" she asks.
Mommy knows, I tell her. I'm praying she doesn't turn around again. There are scrape drippers back there. And Wrap-A-Rubs, scent neutralizers, and a busted bag of white buck-wallow powder on the floor.
Just as we are pulling up to the parking lot, she does turn around again. Guided by some invisible laser ray of curiosity, she heads right for pay dirt, the deer hunter's neutron bomb. Molly holds up two little tufts of nearly black deer hair encased within three layers of Ziploc bags. For a moment it looks as if she's about to open them and take a good whiff.
"Good gosh, child! Don't!" I blurt out. Inside the bags are two fresh tarsal glands from a 9-pointer a friend killed recently. One hit off those babies would knock Molly into the middle of next week.
"Jeez," she says. "I wasn't gonna hurt 'em."
"Those are tarsal glands," I tell her.
"So?" she asks.
"You better go, kiddo. We'll talk about those next time."
Molly sighs. "They're just another kind of pee, aren't they?" she says. It's not really a question. She already knows the answer. "At least I know what to get you for Christmas," she says.
"What?"
"Soap. A lot of it."
CHAPTER 4Death by Multitool
If you've been on an airplane recently, you've noticed the following phenomenon: The moment the announcement starts that it's okay to use portable electronic devices, nearly every person over the age of 8 simultaneously opens a laptop computer and disappears into it. Me, I reach for my new portable amusement park, my multitool.
Mine is a 21-function Schrade Tough Tool, designed for a lifetime of faithful service. The warranty says you're not supposed to throw it, use the blade as a screwdriver, or try to hammer things with it. Other than that, you're pretty much on your own. I open and close it about 50 times, watching it do multitool jumping jacks and transform itself from a small hunk of stainless steel into an instrument of awesome capability. This alone is pretty entertaining. My only regret is that at the moment I have no cans to open, wires to strip, or anything in immediate need of sawing, scraping, filing, measuring, scribing, or disgorging. A multitool fairly radiates purpose, and it seems a shame not to be able to help it realize its full potential. I do use the Phillips head to tighten a loose screw in the Airfone in the seat back in front of me, prompting the guy ahead to turn around and glare.
With nothing mechanical in need of fixing, I turn to my personal appearance. Very discreetly, I shield my face with the airline magazine and go after a stray nose hair with the needle-nose pliers. At the exact moment I'm about to pull, the flight attendant's quizzical face appears about a foot above me. This startles me so much that I yank much harder than I meant to on the tool, which by this time is attached to much more real estate than I had planned. I basically clearcut an entire forest of nasal hairs at once, which causes tears to well up in my eyes in great abundance. Flight attendants witness so many strange things that it's hard to know where the sight of a man with an 8-inch multitool halfway up his nose ranks on the Weird-O-Meter.
"Something to drink?" she asks, recovering nicely.
Half an hour later, having learned nothing from the experience, I'm at it again. A manicure this time. I use the fine flathead for a first pass under my nails and the leather bore to get to those hard-to-reach places. So far, so good. The large locking flathead is just the thing for an initial assault on the cuticles, followed by the scraping blade to clean up the rough parts left behind. This is actually going quite well. But we hit an air pocket or something just as I am applying pressure, and the scraping blade bites into my thumb. Like everything else on a multitool, it's sharper than it seems at first. I stick my thumb in my mouth to stop the bleeding, then figure that my rum and Coke is a better alternative. The alcohol will kill germs, and the ice will shrink the busted capillaries.
* * *
Anybody with an ounce of sense would have stopped there, but it was a long flight. Unfortunately, multitools have no specific implement for hangnails. So I choose to use the serrated portion of the knife blade at a 90-degree angle to the hangnails — for safety — and sort of abrade them off. This appears to work pretty well, and I'm on my third one when the guy playing Slave Zero next to me attempts a particularly fast evasive move and bumps my elbow. I now have wounds in nose, thumb, and ring finger.
At this point, some slight change in cabin pressure sets all three of my cuts bleeding. I go back to the bathroom and wrap my injured digits in toilet paper and pack my nostril with more toilet paper to stanch the flow. After the plane lands, I work my way down the aisle, multitool in its holster, me swathed in toilet tissue, looking like a mummy that's been in a fight. At the door is the attendant who was working the beverage cart.
"Bye-bye, now, sir," she says. Then she takes my arm and whispers, "The gate agent outside can direct you to the nearest medical station."
CHAPTER 5Don't Even Ask About My Turkey Season
This has not been my best spring gobbler season. With a week left, I have been out 11 times and fired my gun exactly not at all. In fact, the same three No. 4s have been in and out of my autoloader so often it looks like some demented midget has taken a ball-peen hammer to the brass. My six-pocket pants in this year's must-have camo, Realtree Hardwoods 20200, have a newly installed rip next to the fly. I'm proud to say I can now work a friction call and pee at the same time. There are weepy poison-ivy blisters on both of my arms and the right rear quadrant of my head. Everywhere else is territory being fought over by DEET-resistant factions of the chigger and mosquito kingdoms.
It didn't start out this way, of course. I began the season comparing taxidermists' rates for a flying gobbler mount and wondering which corner of my office might afford the best light to show off its imposing length of beard and spur. Failure? Unthinkable. I had too much stuff to fail. There was the vest with padded back and more pockets than a pool table. There were the eight diaphragm calls that fit into nifty slanted boxes. Friction calls in slate, glass, and aluminum. Strikers of hickory, acrylic, and carbon. I had box calls, a gobbler tube, calls imitating the owl, hawk, woodpecker, and crow. I had two face masks and three sets of gobbler gloves. Jake and hen decoys that looked like brown Fruit Roll-ups when stowed. I had turkey socks. I even had one of those padded gun rests you buckle to your knee so that when you finally stand up to retrieve your bird you fall right down again and injure your hip. Failure? Not bloody likely.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "If You Didn't Bring Jerky, What Did I Just Eat?"
by .
Copyright © 2007 Bill Heavey.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Foreword by David E. Petzal,
Introduction,
Part I Stalking in Slippers: The Novice Years,
The Distance to Trouble,
The Access Consultant,
Smells of the Season,
Death by Multitool,
Don't Even Ask About My Turkey Season,
GPS,
Gear You Really, Really Need,
The Only Way to Hunt 'Em,
Confessions of a Bass Fisherman,
The Middle Ground,
Lilyfish,
The Bass Boat Blues,
The Late, Late Show,
Part II Lying, Hallucinating, And Coveting Gear You Don't Need: Becoming a Real Outdoorsman,
Too Long at the Funhouse,
Rut Strategies for the Married Hunter,
Death (Nearly) by Bass Fishing,
Stir Crazy,
Code Orange Fishing,
Summer Survival,
I Want My Bass TV,
Party Animal,
The Art of Lying,
Water Torture,
Stalking Walt Disney,
2004: A Huntin' Odyssey,
The Book of John,
Part III The Junket Jackpot: Hunting and Fishing as "Work",
The Lion Dogs,
Fresh Mongolian Prairie Dog Bait,
The Toughest Son of a Gun in the Elk Woods,
The Promised Land,
Ice Crazy,
Caribou Heaven, Caribou Hell,
A Hunter's Heart,
The Cuban Classic,
Part IV Hunting Without Pants: And Other Necessary Skills,
The Deer Next Door,
Why Men Love Knives,
Pity the Fool,
The Psycho Season,
The Blind-Hog Jackpot,
Out of My League,
En Garde!,
Girl Meets Bluegill,
Aging Ungracefully,
What Strange Creatures,
One Moment, Please ...,
Undressed to Kill,
Path to Enlightenment,
Part V Making Incompetence Pay: The Well-Seasoned Sportsman,
The Fat Man,
A Missed Connection,
Poor Richard,
Why Knot?,
The Enforcer,
Death and Fishing,
Invent This,
The Bonehead,
Dog Years,
Hunting Hurts,
Morons Among Us,
Take That, Deer,
Mr. November,
Part VI It Takes a Freebie: Freshly Recycled Bonus Section for the Paperback Edition,
Stalk Therapy,
Like Father,
Acknowledgments,
Related Subjects
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