[meteorite-list] Antlers (Was: Jeff Kuyken Finds his First Meteorite) - Humor Alert + Off Topic

[Bernd V. Pauli]

Aussie Jeff wrote:

"I actually found the antler in the first couple of days. Then Mike
  mentioned that he had found the same one the year before."

Absolutely off-topic but, nevertheless, I'm sure you'll like it ;-))

Cheers from Germany
Today's temps: 93F

Bernd


John Steinbeck: Travels with Charley

There are customs, attitudes, myths and directions and changes that seem to be part of the structure of America. And I propose to discuss them as they were first thrust on my attention. While these discussions go on you are to imagine me bowling along on some little road or pulled up behind a bridge, or cooking a big pot of lima beans and salt pork. And the first of these has to do with hunting.

I could not have escaped hunting if I had wanted, for open seasons spangle the autumn. We have inherited many attitudes from our recent ancestors, who wrestled this continent as Jacob wrestled the angel, and the pioneers won. From them we take a belief that every American is a natural born hunter. And every fall a great number of men set out to prove that without talent, training, knowledge, or practice they are dead shots with rifle or shotgun. The results are horrid. [. . .]

It isnt hunger that drives millions of armed American males to forests and hills every autumn, as the high incidence of heart failure among the hunters will prove. Somehow the hunting process has to do with masculinity, but I don't quite know how. I know there are any number of good and efficient hunters who know what they are doing; but many more are overweight gentlemen, primed with whisky and armed with high-powered rifles.

They shoot at anything that moves or looks as though it might, and their success in killing one another may well prevent a population explosion. If the casualties were limited to their own kind there would be no problem, but the slaughter of cows, pigs, farmers, dogs, and highway signs makes autumn a dangerous seasons in which to travel.

A farmer in upper New York State painted the word cow in big black letters on both sides of his white bossy but the hunters shot it anyway. In Wisconsin, as I was driving through, a hunter shot his own guide between the shoulder blades. [. . .]

With the rolling barrage going on in Maine, of course I was afraid for myself. Four automobiles were hit on opening day, but mainly I was afraid for Charley. I know that a poodle looks very like a buck deer to one of these hunters, and I had to find some way of protecting him. In Rocinante there was a box of red Kleenex that someone had given me as a present. I wrapped Charley's tail in red Kleenex and fastened it with rubber bands.

Every morning I renewed his flag, and he wore it all the way west while bullets whined and whistled around us. This was not intended to be funny. The radios warned against carrying a white handkerchief. Too many hunters seeing a flash of white have taken it for the tail of a running deer and cured a head cold with a single shot.

But this legacy of the frontiersman is not a new thing. When I was a child on the ranch near Salinas, California, we had a Chinese cook who regularly made a modest good thing of it. On a ridge not far away, a sycamore log lay on its side supported by two of its broken branches. Lees attention was drawn to this speckled fawn-colored chunk of wood by the bullet holes in it. He nailed a pair of horns to it and then retired to his cabin until deer season was over. Then he harvested the lead from the old tree trunk. Some seasons he got fifty or sixty pounds of it. It wasnt a fortune but it was wages. 

After a couple of years, when the tree was completely shot away, Lee replaced it with four gunny sacks of sand and the same antlers. Then it was even easier to harvest his crop.

If he had put out fifty of them it would have been a fortune, but Lee was a humble man who didnt care for mass production.