For a man better acquainted with sidewalks than saddles, nature has been a source of endless comedy—and bruises.
As I read the latest Garden & Gun magazine, I am again reminded how out of touch I am with nature. I have never been around a farm, milked a cow, fed chickens, slept in a tent, spent much time in the woods, or, as often reported here, have rarely and always unsuccessfully engaged in fishing. I don’t remember how I happen to receive each edition of Garden & Gun because I have never put out a garden or owned a gun. Somehow the great outdoors has largely escaped my participation. I’m far too citified for my own good.
My few encounters with nature have not gone well. At summer camp as a boy, they taught me how to saddle a horse, but when I tried to ride away like my hero, Roy Rogers, the saddle rotated to the belly of Trigger and drug me along a very rocky Cumberland County wagon trail. I think I still have scars on my back from that fiasco. If God had intended me to ride horses, he would have given me a cowboy for a father.
Years later, when my children were small and impressionable, we attended a picnic where some fool had arranged for small horses to be ridden by the children. I was informed that one of the horses was acting up and was refusing to take riders. Because of my vast experience with horses at summer camp, I was the obvious choice to break the pony and bring it in line. Well, I got on and it bucked once and took off, full gallop, out of my control. It raced through the picnic grounds, the tables of food, the wiffle ball game, and directly into a patch of trees in an obvious attempt to throw me off. However, I knew from the cowboy movies that when the horse passed under an overhead limb I could grab it and lift myself out of the saddle and drop safely to the ground.
Unfortunately, the limb hit me in the head and knocked me off onto a boulder causing a suspected broken hip. Of course, my children embarrassingly witnessed their father’s last ride. At the hospital (one I had sued several times), in an effort to conceal my identity, I informed the doctor I was with the rodeo and just passing through town on the way to Oklahoma City. I inquired if he thought I would ever be able to ride again. Luckily, I was only bruised from my buttocks to my calf and made the conscious decision to never ride again.
Once, on vacation in the Bahamas, Norma and I strayed from our touring party into the jungle to investigate a narrow pathway. On the way back, the path was blocked by a giant man-eating lizard resulting in the tour director sending out a rescue party when we were reported missing. How would I know that iguanas look more threatening than they really are?
Twice in my life I have been invited to go into the woods to hunt. My Uncle Fred, Cousin Jack, and my grandfather, Papa Pryor, traveled way out west to what is now Farragut near Dixie Lee to hunt rabbit. Understand, the Pryors are not natural hunters. We, as a breed, are not even unnatural hunters. Uncle Fred declared all the way out that the rabbit was his “natural enemy.”
I was young at the time and was given a shotgun for protection as we stalked the wild hare. We hunted a small area in the snow on someone’s farm. Papa Pryor sat in a folding aluminum chair to watch when suddenly I was the first to be confronted by a rabbit that jumped up in front of me, and I shot but missed because he wouldn’t stand still and jumped from side to side in a zig-zag fashion. Obviously, I needed to hunt game that would stand still.
Years later, my opportunity came when Larry Seals and David Bartow asked me to join them to hunt fox squirrels on House Mountain in east Knox County. Apparently, they had heard of my prowess in hunting rabbit and that qualified me to join them in their outdoor adventures. Larry and David had played football at Fulton High School and were genuine outdoor guys. Larry was my neighbor and childhood friend and, at the time, we were freshmen at U.T. He was all excited about hunting fox squirrels because he said they were larger and more violent than gray squirrels. “Very rare,” he insisted.
I assumed they were a cross between a fox and a squirrel and were capable of tearing a man’s arm off. I didn’t want to go. Not so much because I was afraid of squirrels, but because Larry said we had to be in the woods on the side of the mountain at daybreak on a chilly October morning. I knew from my weeks as a paperboy for the Knoxville Journal that I didn’t typically do “chilly daybreak” well. Squirrels wake up in their tree nests when the sun first breaks through, they explained.
So there I was, sitting on a tree root to avoid the wet leaves at the base of a large oak in the cold dark of the forest, again holding a borrowed shotgun in my hands. My hunting companions had spread out to stake out their own trees after instructions to me to be quiet and listen for the squirrels leaving their nests. It was hard for me to stay warm bundled in two heavy coats, and I finally was forced to stand because my leg had gone to sleep.
I took one step on my impaired leg when I heard a loud chatter directly above me. Frightened, I reacted by shooting up without aiming or even lifting the gun above my hip. Actually, you could say I shot in self-defense. The chatter stopped and a large red squirrel fell at my feet. Now what? In the silence of the woods, I felt like giving CPR to try to correct my error. Killing was new to me.
Shortly after the mountain absorbed the blast from my gun, my companions appeared and found me standing in shock over my prey. “Damn, that’s the largest fox squirrel I’ve ever seen,” Bartow said. He should know because he was experienced and had even camped out in the woods. They insisted that I have my prize stuffed and cherished for eternity, and we left immediately to go to the taxidermist. As for me, all I had wanted to do was bury the animal and try to put the whole thing behind me once and for all.
I don’t know if you know it, but taxidermy is expensive, and to make matters worse, my mother would not allow me to bring a stuffed rodent holding a hazelnut into her house. Later, after Norma and I tied the knot, she, as well, banned “Big Red” from our marriage home. I wanted to donate it to a squirrel museum or something like that, but I couldn’t find one.
As you can see, I’m not cut out to be an outdoorsman, but I do visit many outdoor stores looking for large size men’s clothing. There must be an abundance of XXL and XXXL size hunters and fishermen. A saleslady at Bass Pro Shops the other day asked me if I was looking for big and tall, and I said, “No, I’m looking for short and fat.” Going forward, I guess shopping for big clothes is about as close as I’m ever going to get to nature.