Drive - A Memoir 95th Installment
Russ
said, “Could we share your fire?”
“Be
our guest” the beefy, bearded man said.
“Can
we put this wood on the fire?” I pointed at some small logs. “We’ll
get more after we get warm.”
“No
worries” said the other hunter. This guy seemed a little less
dangerous.
As
we were standing there the big guy growled “You hungry?” and as
we looked up at him, we must have looked hungry enough, so he tossed
a can of lima beans on the fire. “What are you boys doing up here?”
“We’re
bird dogging for our Old Man, but I think we took the wrong
ridgeline” Russ said. “Have you guys seen an angry looking farmer
with a gruff looking companion in a blue truck come thru here?”
“Yeah
we did, they drove right past going down that way,” the kinder
looking man said.
“Down!”
I cried. “They left us.” As we hunched closer to the warming hot
fire, the can of lima beans suddenly blew up. Kabooom, it almost blew
the fire out, a cloud of steam rolled up like an atomic bomb cloud.
Lima beans are big beans, and when blasted at substantial force, they
sting like crazy. They hit our jeans, snapped where they hit our
coats, and inflicted painful hot
stings to our faces and bare hands. We danced around raking at our
faces to get the hot beans off our skin.
The
beefy hunter, who forgot to poke a vent hole in the can said, “Sorry
boys.” The other guy said nothing.
“I
think we’d better go,” I said looking away in case there were
tears that would show. We started down the road feeling a little
better in the icy air, and as we walked we picked beans off our
clothes and ate them for lunch. A short while later, after traveling
about a mile we came upon the Old Man and Chick coming up the road.
They’d gone down looking for us and were coming back up. We were a
sight for sore eyes, they said, but we were the ones who had sore
eyes, sore faces and sore hands. We told them all about our trials
and the
great lima bean explosion.
As we drove out of the mountains, the Old Man or Chick would look at
the white spots all over our jeans and the red spots on our faces and
burst out laughing in spite of themselves.
After
I had related this story to Victor, he was duly impressed. “Wow, I
don’t blame them for laughing at you,” he said, “Funny story. I
guess I was lucky. When I went bird dogging, they sent me places but
always kept me in sight.”
“What
I think is our folks always treated us as equals and not as kids,”
Russ said somewhat morosely.
“Russ,
you shouldn’t say ‘always’ and ‘never.’
500 more words tomorrow
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