The Horse in My Garage and Other Stories (15 page)

“Might work. That and a shower.”

I slopped on some of my stepfather's aftershave lotion, but it had no effect on the girl, although it did bring a nice mule deer buck within easy range. The way it kept flaring its nostrils made me nervous, though, and I missed the shot.

Once I even tried camouflage. I borrowed one of my stepfather's dark suits and a tie, and even if I do say so myself, I looked pretty darn debonair. Unfortunately, my stepfather's legs were several inches shorter than mine. Maybe I should have worn some black socks or even painted my ankles with shoe polish.

As with hunting, though, persistence paid off. It took several years, but I eventually married the girl. Her previous boyfriend reportedly said he wouldn't have minded so much if I hadn't been so funny-looking. Ha! Talk about somebody who needed glasses!

The Horse in My Garage

O

ver the years, my wife and I have successfully managed to indenture ourselves to the usual number and variety of pets that the average child needs to sustain life. As any parent knows, these creatures range in size from a few ounces to half a ton (and if one steps on your foot, you may be sure it won't be the one weighing a few ounces).

The portion of suburban sprawl we called home was still zoned for agriculture, an oversight on the part of the county planning committee that allowed us to keep a pet horse on our one-acre spread, which stretches off as far as the eye can see, depending on the air pollution on any particular day. Sooner or later, the planning commission would zone us into urbanity, and we would have to get rid of the horse—the sooner the better, in my opinion.

Since we had no barn, the horse, whose name was Huckleberry, resided in my garage. My automobile resided in the driveway, in a spot apparently under the holding pattern of a large flock of pigeons—a species of bird apparently not all that good at holding. Not only was I embarrassed to be seen driving a vehicle that looked as if it had been used in a scientific study in pigeon irregularity, but I was tired of having a horse in my garage. It might be inferred from this diatribe that I was a person who isn't fond of horses. That is wrong. I detest horses.

Why, you ask, would a person who detests horses buy one? You apparently are not the permissive parent of four young children who absolutely love horses. Also, I was probably suffering from temporary impairment of judgment at the time I made the purchase. The cowboy who sold us the horse made a great show of petting and stroking the beast, apparently to show me how gentle it was. Later, I concluded that he was simply wiping off his fingerprints.

I learned a great deal about horses over the many years we owned Huckleberry. For example, the basic diet of horses is hay, which you may think of as simply long grass that sensible folks keep mowed close to the ground. Upon going to the feed store for a few bales, however, you discover from the price that it is a rare plant hand-picked on the other side of the world and flown first-class to the feed store. Horses also eat large quantities of oats, a substance smuggled into the country under the dashboards of luxury automobiles. Occasionally, the horse will take for dessert a bucketful of small green pellets compressed from shredded $5 bills. The horse will also seek out a poisonous weed and eat it, for no other reason than his enjoyment in a trip to the vet's. Although our vet has never told me, I suspect he was formerly a brain surgeon who gave up that profession in favor of one where there was real money to be made.

Oh, I almost forgot. Horses also need shoes. I had never expected Huckleberry to provide me with entertainment, but at the time of his purchase I didn't know anyone who made an occupation of putting metal shoes on horses. Because the process took place behind my garage, I never observed it firsthand. The sound effects, however, were wonderful, including such classics as, “Git off my foot, you bleeping bleep of a bleep!”

This would be screamed at a pitch so high it was almost impossible to comprehend. The amusement provided by the old horseshoer was almost worth the cost. If you figure in how much he improved my vocabulary, his service was almost priceless. I think the horse enjoyed the process almost as much as I did.

I have to admit that Huck turned out to be a wonderful horse for children, very seldom taking a bite out of one of them and usually in a place where it wouldn't show. If the youngest child was put on his back, he would plod along like a creature suffering cardiac arrest. Somehow, Huck managed to judge how much riding experience each rider possessed and adjusted his pace to fit. As he grew older, his docility seemed to increase. Observing this, one day I decided to go for a ride myself.

“Guess what,” I said to my wife, Bun, in the kitchen one day. “I think I'll go out and ride Old Huck.”

“Are you crazy!” she exclaimed. “You don't know anything about horses.”

“You may be surprised to learn this,” I said, “but for many years I nursed an ambition to be a cowboy. Now go hunt down that steel thing you put in his mouth, and the leather straps you use to steer him with. Then I'll show you how much I know about horses.”

Together we herded Huck up against a board fence and gave him a bucket of oats to munch in preparation for my climbing aboard, as we cowboys say. I had thought about putting the saddle on his back but that seemed a bit of a nuisance, since I planned to ride him no further than the other end of the pasture and back, an area about the size of a football field. Huck appeared to be half-asleep. Finishing off the contents of the bucket, he lifted his head and looked around. He then clamped his jaws tentatively around my wrist, apparently in an effort to prevent me from putting the steel thing in his mouth. Putting the steel thing into a horse's mouth, by the way, frequently brings on sustained fits of gagging, so for several hours before undertaking the task, it is best not to eat anything. I grabbed the steering lines, climbed the corral fence, and leaped on Huck's bare back.

“Wait!” Bun cried anxiously, “Aren't you going to put on the blanket and saddle?”

“Naw,” I replied. “I'll just ride him naked.”

For those who may be unacquainted with the nuances of horsemanship, I should explain that riding a naked horse is much more difficult than riding one equipped with a saddle and blanket. I intended a brief ride, however, and in that case, a blanket and saddle are more of a hindrance than a help, or so I thought at the time.

What prompted Huckleberry's sudden and unprovoked display of athleticism, I will never know. As I was settling myself on his barren back, my legs splayed out over his barrel belly, the beast took off like Man o' War out of the starting gate. We roared across the front yard, around the back of the house, jumped a plastic wading pool, and pounded full throttle down the pasture, myself now crouched like a monkey on his back, and still roaring, “Whoa! Whoa! You . . . !” Here I inserted some of the colorful words I had picked up from the old man who put the metal shoes on the creature. The words had no effect, as I should have judged from having listened to the old man.

Suddenly, I remembered the steering lines. I let go of Huck's mane, grabbed the lines, and hauled back on them. My effort had no effect. There was too much slack in them. The galloping had vibrated me forward! I was now bouncing up and down on the large bony bump that connects a horse's neck to the rest of him. There was only one thing to do. I threw myself forward and grabbed the horse around the neck. Perhaps I thought I could choke him into stopping, I don't know.

We were now at the far end of the pasture, the fence between us and a busy road that we were approaching at incredible speed. For a moment, I thought Huck was planning to jump the fence, but at the last moment he made a right-angle turn at full throttle, something I later learned that quarter horses are trained to do. Actually, I don't know if they are trained to cut sharp corners at high speed, or just make it up on their own, as a method of displacing cowboys. Whatever. In any case, the movement swept me around under the horse's neck, his pounding front hooves now but inches away. He had not slowed his pace in the slightest. I somehow managed to get my legs clasped above his neck next to my clasped hands. Huck made another right-hand turn, perhaps thinking he could finish dislodging me in that manner, and headed back down the pasture. He slid to a stop right in front of Bun. I peered at her upside-down. She stood there as if frozen to the spot, mouth agape, eyes stricken.

I unclasped my legs and swung to the ground. “What would you like to see now?” I said, turning to her. One thing about us cowboys, we know how to be cool in front of the ladies.

The Tent

S

ome people are born brave. I am not one of them. During the summers I was twelve and thirteen, I started camping out a mile or so up a little creek that tumbled down out of a narrow canyon a couple hours hike from my house. I didn't camp out alone, of course. I wasn't crazy. Usually there were four of us, Reggie, Ernie, Herbie, and me. Reggie was our leader because he was tall, athletic, and had good hair. And he was brave.

We all had a great deal of experience sleeping out from the time we were very young. But there is a big difference between sleeping out and camping out. Sleeping out is done in your backyard. Camping out is done off in the woods or mountains, well beyond the range of suddenly running into your house, as often happened with sleeping out. The difference between sleeping out and camping out was primarily one of distance.

While sleeping out, a sudden retreat into the house was usually ignited by the amount of darkness in the world. You would be lying there in your sleeping bag looking up at the sky, the whole world filled with darkness, and suddenly the sheer vastness of the dark overpowered you. Many people who haven't slept out don't know that, but it's true. Dark becomes an irresistible force, and your senses go on red alert. An ant tramping by or a mosquito's cough could ignite a sudden retreat, but usually the alarm wasn't so major.

I should point out that no one actually slept while sleeping out. No matter how slight the sound, it would trigger some mechanism in your legs, and the next moment you would be hurtling through the back door of your house, your sleeping bag or blankets still fluttering to the ground.

Camping out, on the other hand, left you imprisoned out in the wild, with great blocks of dark between you and your back door. Sometimes you would actually fall asleep while camping out, but usually not until the second or third night. I can still recall the wonderful relief of waking up the next morning still alive and in one piece. There is no more glorious sight to young campers than the first sliver of sun rising over a distant mountain.

One summer, Ernie's parents came up with a brilliant solution to the dark. They bought him a little, white canvas tent. If the four of us slept side-by-side in it, no farther apart than bread slices in a packaged loaf, we fit nicely. I don't remember if the tent was waterproof or if it kept the rain out, but it did keep most of the dark out. Being a small tent, it limited the dark to a few cubic feet, a couple dozen at most, but it established a limit. You no longer had the sense that the whole world was filled with dark. True, I did realize a grizzly could chomp down the whole tent and us as if we were nothing more than a bear-size taco, but grizzlies were nothing compared with limitless dark.

Right here, I should mention that Reggie had a serious fault as a camping companion—he was fearless. One of us regular guys would hiss something like, “I just heard something!”

Reggie would say, “It ain't nothin'! Shut up and go to sleep!”

I wanted so much to be like Reggie, to be brave and calm while camping out, and to actually sleep.

This brings me to the night Reggie got up and left the tent to answer a call of nature. I know this sounds crazy to any former kid campers, but it's true. That's how fearless Reggie was. He thought nothing of getting up in the middle of the night and going outside the tent. Nature could have been shrieking in one of my ears and often was, and I would not have budged toward the limitless dark. I was so comfortable in the embrace of that little tent that I never even noticed Reggie's foolhardy act and may even have drifted off to sleep.

The next morning, Reggie insisted on relating his adventure to the rest of us. He told us how he had been standing alongside the tent during the night answering the call, and the moon was out, and he was listening to all the little night sounds and enjoying the moment when suddenly a huge bear ambled by on the other side of the creek. At that point, the creek was so narrow that the bear could have hopped across it without wetting a paw. I was so overwhelmed by Reggie's report of his own nonchalance in regard to the bear as if it were something he experienced almost every day, his standing out there in the moonlight, calmly watching this huge, carnivorous beast lumber by. I was so envious I could hardly speak. Suddenly Ernie let out a yelp. “Hey! Who peed all over the side of my tent!”

After that, I found myself much more comfortable, camping out with Reggie. He suddenly seemed a lot more like one of us regular guys.

To Smoke a Steelhead

A

fter having been a steelhead fisherman for more than forty years, I recently confessed this aberration to my doctor. He said as deplorable and incurable as this condition might be, he didn't think it would make me dangerous to myself or others and certainly not to steelhead. He himself is a chukar hunter, mostly on the steep breaks of the Snake River. So he should talk.

The point of this essay is simply to provide instructions on how to smoke a steelhead. It is a step-by-step procedure based on my own recent experience of smoking a couple of large steelhead.

The steelhead is a sea-run trout, as you probably know, an actual fish, although many anglers believe it to be a mythical creature, a cruel joke played on them by their friends and enemies to get them out on an icy river at the crack of dawn. There are fiends who will actually do this, and the rotten, no-good . . . but I don't want to get carried away. Dedicated fishermen might go through a lifetime without hooking a single steelhead. It is, however, quite easy to pretend that you have caught numerous large steelhead, but that is a topic for another how-to piece.