All my life, I have longed to be a great outdoorsman. The kind of fellow who can whip up a blazing campfire out of two sticks and a handful of grass and twigs. The sort who can sink his face deep in a mountain stream and never think twice about what germs might be floating by.
A man who can live off the land, build his own cabin if he has to, and hike 20 miles across pine needles without making so much as a whisper against the passing shrubbery.
From earliest boyhood, I’ve read everything I can find about Daniel Boone, and the more I read, the better I like him. Forging a path through the wilderness … befriending all the Indians he could, and dodging the rest with remarkable alacrity, agility, and affability … keeping his faith and his wits about him (he always carried his Bible in his knapsack) … and maintaining his sense of humor in the face of danger. (Asked once if he’d ever been lost, he said, “No … but one time I was perplexed for about three days.”)
As a child, I acted out his adventures, and just knew that – given the opportunity – I could have held my own with him and the other great pioneers and frontiersman of those early days: Simon Kenton, Davy Crockett, Kit Carson. I even had a classic model, close at hand: my father could glide through the woods with the best of them, hit anything he aimed at with a rifle, and cook up a good campfire meal in the middle of a pouring rain.
Alas, his scouting genes did not make the leap to my bloodstream.
There were telltale signs, early on. Dust devils left me blinded and helpless; bees and wasps sought me out with a vengeance; virtually everything that grew outside a potted plant made me itch and sneeze and scratch at my throat.
Then – finally, fatefully – came the great squirrel hunt.
I was still just six or seven, but my uncles – intrepid Mississippi hunters all – had heard of my enthusiasm for the wilderness. They always liked having my dad along on safari, and that year, they kindly invited me, too. I trotted along, following the baying hounds, visions of bear and cougar attacks sharpening my vision and heightening my anticipation for taut showdowns to come.
Only, as it turned out, the hounds weren’t baying at a bear. We followed them to the foot of a towering pine, where they danced and howled and nosed upward at one of the highest branches of the tree, on which swayed …
… the cutest squirrel you ever saw.
He looked like something out a Disney movie. I was just trying to decide whether he was more of a Chip or a Dale when a roar behind me yanked me half out of my skin. I looked back at the smoking gun of my Uncle Gabe, and then back in time to see a grey blur plunge through the lower branches and sprawl, stricken, at the base of the tree.
The hounds sprang on it. One turned, excited, the dead squirrel clutched firmly in his salivating jaws.
My uncle, beaming with pride, tapped me on the shoulder. He held out his long, heavy rifle … sunshine sliding up and down the barrel, smoking still drifting up from the muzzle. Would I like the great honor of carrying the gun that brought down the squirrel for our supper?
Oh, I wanted the gun, alright. I snatched it out of his hands, only to find that it weighed nearly as much as I did. No matter. With a surge of strength, I hoisted the muzzle off the ground and swung it around toward the dogs. I shoved it right up against the skull of the murderous beast that was gumming that innocent squirrel, and fumbled fast for the trigger.
My uncle squealed and hastily grabbed back his gun. What he said next was not especially appropriate for boy of my tender heart and years, but then it was his favorite hound whose life I was trying to abbreviate.
All of the other uncles, I saw, were shaking their heads in disappointment. They unanimously banished me to the back of the line for the rest of the long afternoon’s trek. Dad laid a kindly hand on my shoulder, but there wasn’t much he could say. I had broken the outdoorsman’s code.
As years passed, I came to realize I was never going to break into the Wilderness Club. I struck out at pitching tents, couldn’t handle an axe – couldn’t even fish, for sorrow at the sight of whatever I landed flopping helplessly on the pier. To this day, I can’t get too wistful about Daniel Boone without my wife giggling at the thought of her city boy stumbling through the bushes and brush.
I mused on all this, the other day, as we walked our suburban block at sunset. The yards were alive with the fauna ‘m fond of. A dainty family of quail scurried by. Rabbits froze, silent, as we strolled past their evening’s nibble nook … their eyes as big as that ill-fated squirrel’s from so long, long ago.
People – people actually shoot and eat these things.
We walked by an empty riverbed, and my wife pointed out a kildeer, crying and whimpering and faking a broken wing to distract us from some nearby nest of her young. How could anyone destroy so courageous a mother, or harm the young ones she prizes so dearly?
My heart overflowed with love for all of nature and its gentle denizens.
We came home, and I set back to work on the evening’s project, reading and typing and slurping an occasional swallow of tea. The tea was a new recipe, concocted by the manager of a favorite sandwich shop: sweet and unsweet, stirred into some mixed berry lemonade.
Another swig, and something thicker than tea came into my mouth. One of the berries, I presumed, but plucked it out and put it on a napkin, anyway. Then I noticed that the berry was moving. Squirming. And black with wings.
The berry was a fly.
“What are you doing?” my wife asked, as I spit and spit on my way to the bathroom, where I jammed a heaping squeeze of toothpaste onto a brush and into my mouth.
“FWY ‘N MWY MWOUF!” I spat.
She bit so hard on her tongue, but her eyes were shining with delight. She knows how these moments wound my inner outdoorsman.
“You could use the mouthwash,” she said, drolly.
“D’WAT’S NWEXT!” I yelled, feverishly scrubbing my tongue.
I am a friend of nature. But nature is no friend of mine.
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