As a youngster, my plan was to grow up and become a mountain man. The idea seemed like a good one. I could hunt and fish all the time, and trap for furs to get my walking around money. I had seen some movies too, so I knew it would be simple as anything to put a pan in the river and get some gold to supplement any major purchases that might be necessary. Log cabins and lean to shelters seemed easy enough to construct. They built them in the span of one, short, uplifting song in the movies. All the survival books I read from the library made lean to structures look simple to build. I decided to practice my skills at living like a mountain man as a kid by erecting a structure that I could utilize while camping—why pack a tent, when you have a semi-permanent dwelling. I was so proud that I showed it to my father.
“Hey,” he said, “Nice brush pile! But we need you to build them in the beagle club. There is plenty of cover for rabbits here.”
“That’s not a brush pile,” I said.
“It’s not?”
“No,” I said as a squirrel ran out of it.
“Then what the heck is it?” Only he didn’t say heck. He utilized a geographical term of theological origins.
“That’s where I can sleep while camping!” I pointed at my shelter.
“I thought that I bought you a tent?”
“This is for survival situations,” I said.
Needless to say, the mountain man lifestyle would take more effort than I had realized. Then I discovered girls. It is tough to get a girl to commit to living in the wilderness. Living on wild game and fish doesn’t appeal to most gals. Let alone sleeping in a brush pile. Sure, a nice romantic stroll in the woods is one thing, but sleeping on the ground is another. Whenever my wife, Renee, and I go camping, I take supplies to make sure she is comfortable in the woods. The last time we packed to go for a wilderness getaway the neighbor stopped by with bad news. “It was nice knowing you, Preacher,” he said.
“You okay?” I asked him.
“I’ll be alright.”
“Oh good,” I said, “The way you talked I thought we were never going to see each other again.”
“Well, we probably won’t.”
“Man, I am sorry to hear that,” I said, “How much time did the doctor give you?”
“What are you talking about?”
“What are you talking about?” I said, “Why else would we never see each other again?”
“Well,” he said, “It is obvious that you are moving! You could have told me.”
“Oh,” I looked at the truck, packed to the gills, “I ain’t moving. I am taking Renee camping.”
I don’t think I could get Renee to live a mountain woman lifestyle. So, I put my mountain man dreams on the back burner. Until I got this sweet little muzzleloader. It is a side by side 16 gauge, percussion cap shotgun. Black powder, just like the mountain men. It is perfect for pretending to be in the past. I mean, I would love to hunt and fish for a living. Naturally, it would be great to be inaccessible by cell phone 24 hours per day. Then again, antibiotics are nice. Death by diarrhea is no longer a common event in the developed world, but could happen if I walked off into the frontier. I can’t begin to tell you how much I miss hot showers when I have been in the field for a week. Solar showers are cute, but they only warm up the water sufficiently to stave off hypothermia long enough for you to build a fire. I like pretending to be in the past. Black powder is the way to pretend!
Black powder? That’s old school. And fun. You get to carry a powder horn. A possible bag (mountain man purse) is pretty cool too—it can hold your ammo and premeasured powder loads for your gun. I even have traditional wadding for this shotgun—beehive. My traditional wadding comes from a hive that encased my modern electric meter. I accidentally disturbed the pesky wasps by mowing the grass. I got stung—a lot. I vanquished them with bee spray and gathered the remnants of their home to use in my shotgun.
Each barrel takes 70 grains of powder. Then some beehive. Then the same measure of shot—I mix #7 ½ and #6 together, something that doesn’t happen in factory loads. Then you have to add more wadding to keep the shot from running out of your barrel. I grabbed that old smoke pole for one of the last hunts of the Pennsylvania rabbit season. It had been a good season, and I had killed a lot of rabbits. I decided to make the day a little more challenging. I headed afield with traditional gear and traditional clothes. I added a blaze orange vest and hat to be compliant with the law. The first chase was long, and 4 circles later I got a shot.
Smoke belched out of the muzzle and hung in the air. It cleared as the dog was approaching. I didn’t see the rabbit, and figured I had missed. It did not go far, and Duke brought it back on a retrieve. I reloaded as Duke found another bunny. I became transfixed in hound song. His rolling bawl took me back to the brush pile campsite of my childhood. I thought about dreams of living off the land. A pristine wilderness, with game abounding. I remembered the romantic notion of having a hunting dog in the pioneer days, and always having food ready at hand, brought to the gun by the dog.
I snapped back to the present, and the sun was sinking low. Duke was in full cry. I was not in a wilderness, but on land that had been surface mined for coal just a few decades ago. The rabbit came zooming past me and I held a sustained lead and squeezed. When the smoke cleared, the rabbit was just a foot or two from where it was when I squeezed the trigger.
I decided to set up my modern phone (or is it postmodern) and take some old pictures. Well, pictures of me in old time garb. Me and the dog and the bunnies and the old gun. I was wearing a wool pullover, leather brush pants, and leather boots. I took off the orange vest and the orange hat. I took the GPS handheld, suspended from a lanyard, off my neck, and took the GPS collar off the dog. I intentionally brought a leather leash—not a plastic one in some neon color. I put the cell phone in a tiny tripod and synched it to a Bluetooth remote control button. Sure, it was theater. I killed two bunnies that way. That’s all. But it was an homage to our hunting heritage, an acknowledgment of how we used to hunt.
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