First Follower

It has recently come to my realization that I now have one follower in my blog. Yeah me!!! I have always wanted to start a blog but in my parents house we did not have the intranet so i was unable to start one as to check and update it I would have had to drive down the road about a mile, just to get to a house that was in some small way civilized. Now, i had not planned on writing about anything else except for my new follower(and i know this person in real life so it really doesn't even count) but i was sitting here and remembered a story from my childhood days in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri and thought it needed telling. This story will be filled with homespun wisdom and backwoods terms like yall, 'coon hide, and other such fine literary devices of the like. This story probably won't be all that funny but i don't care if you think its funny or not, i am still going to write it.


Our story begins one very cold January morning about 5 a.m. Now you are probably wondering what the fuck I was doing up at 5 a.m. over Christmas Break. Well to tell you the truth I was and in some small way still am, an extreme country boy. I hunt, fish, trap, and do all kinds of country type things like raising goats and horses only to watch one brutally murder the other. http://orbpoopsy.blogspot.com/2008/11/my-brothers-little-pony.html Now that you've returned from reading that story or since the only person who reads this blog is the guy who wrote that story himself, you didn't read it we shall continue. So I am up at 5 a.m. eating breakfast from eggs I gathered last night and having eggs and bacon(the bacon of course coming from this years hog that we butchered so we could have fresh jowls so we could eat the traditional good luck for the new year feast of Black Eyed Peas and Ham Jowls) getting ready to check my trap line. I'm not talking about live trap cages here people(person) I am talking about the kind of traps you think about when you think in-bred mountain man and when you think Daniel Boone fucking crossing the plains. Trappers where I am from have a bad reputation. It comes mainly from dumb fucks like this
This guys is a complete dumb fuck. Although i must give him credit for the wondefull selection of music he used to backup his slide show. That is some good ol' downhome fiddling music right thar for ya'll. Anyway leg hold traps are the easiest type to open and it's very obvious how to do it. Also if this mother fucker had asked the landowner permission to be hiking on his land the landowner probably would have mentioned the traps and the poor old man would not have had to deal with this sad emotional time for his family. Also the experiment with the carrot, that is an extremely bad example. If you want to know how bad it hurts I challenge you to set one(you can get some from me here in Tulsa as I do have several dozen here) and put your finger in it. It hurts but only for a little bit. I accidentally got my finger caught in one while setting in one of my lines but that's another story and I have gone way off track so... back to the story.

So we( being my uncles and I) set off before the sun has even come up to drive all over the beautiful Ozark Mountains to check our traps. On the way to the first line it's kind of a tradition in our closed circle of trappers to make predictions for the day as to how many of each kind of animals will be caught that day. My prediction ended up being 6 'coon 2 mink ,both buck, 10 beaver, 2 opossums, 3 muskrats, and one spare. A spare is not an animal by the way, it's just anything extra we might happen to catch like a dog, bird, bob-cat etc. So we make it to our first line and are excited to find that this mile and a half run of traps has produced 3 beavers, 2 coon, a opossum, an a mink. Now that is a very good haul for that size of line. The only sad part is that you have to carry the dead carcasses of all these animals for that full mile and a half. And with only two people that's roughly 60 pounds a piece of extra weight to carry. The one plus side to this is that you get to smell the musky scent glands of the mink the whole way. When mink get angry at something they spray like a skunk. It's always fun before we kill the mink by knocking it out and drowning it(shooting it would cause too much damage to the fur) to torment it to get it to spray at you. Many people don't like this smell but...fuck you I don't care. So we lay our haul in the back of our pickup and continue throughout the day killing small helpless animal by either means of drowning them or shooting them with a .22 caliber pistol. When we had reached our last line we had accumulated 5 'coon, 1 mink, 10 beaver, 1, opossum(Slicktail), and 3 muskrats. This last line was one I had set entirely on my own so it was time to see how well i had and done and see if my line would fill my quota. For the first half of the line it looked pretty bad I had two pullouts and one foot. If an animal gets desperate enough it will chew its own foot off to escape much like this
It's always fun to catch a 'coon with only three feet because you know that he had to be like the gummy bear thinking," I can survive with one missing foot, but two gone fuck that I'll just resign myself to my destiny and be shot in the ear hole in the morning". The last half of the line though was much better. I caught 2 cooon, 1 slicktail, and one bird and and with only one trap left i was hoping for the mink to fulfill my quota. Well I rounded the corner and boom there he was. One of the biggest, meanest buck mink I have ever seen. Ir was so big it was probably in reality a small baby river otter or something. Any way i began my search for the prefect stick to hit this thing in the fucking head with so I could drown it. I finally found my good stick and began repeatedly bludgeoning its head. I finally knocked it out and and held it's head under water long enough to kill a fucking green beret before I was convinced that it was dead. Now keep in mind before you read the next part that at this point I haven't been trapping very long and cannot sing with all the voices of the mountains, and still am unable to paint with all the colors of the wind...so my acts are very stupid. Strengthen your brain's stupid defenses at this time as reading this may unknowingly make you more stupid. After i drowned the mink i had to carry him to the truck. Now one lil' ole' secret I had yet to learn from Grandmother Willow is that when you kill a mink you NEVER and I mean NEVER carry it by the head back to the truck. T Doing so will force air back into its lungs causing it to come back to life. This is a lesson that i learned the hard way. Well being the greenhorn I was, I picked up my haul and mink in hand headed toward the truck. About halfway there I heard a slight rustling and began to look around hoping to see a nice 10 point buck deer standing somewhere close as it was deer season and I did have my license on me and my deer rifle loaded in the truck ready to go at a moments notice. I looked and looked and saw nothing so continued to walk when totally out of chance I look down to realize that the WILD ,remember we are dealing with wild animals here, mink was starting to come back to life in my hand. Naturally I freaked out and threw the thing about 10 yards up the creek we were trapping on. Realizing what I had done(basically taken $30 and thrown it away) I dropped the other fur I was holding and began to pursue this little helpless creature. Chasing a mink while wearing hip-waders,down a gravely creek bank should be made into an Olympic sport because if you ever get to experience this you will most definitely want to make it a sport. Anyway i chase this thing for about five minutes before i get close enough to hit it with the small 22 inch shovel/trowel I am carrying. This immediately kills the small mother fucker and I hold him up to the morning sun and start to do an old Indian chant I know thanking the small creature for his sacrifice and helping his spirit journey to that big creek in the sky. After the proper death chants had been sung we loaded up the truck and went back home. The real work had only just started though as over the next month we had to skin the animals, clean all the fat off their hides, stretch them out to dry, then ship them to Canada where they would be auctioned off to places like India and other small countries. That year though the Prime Minister of Canada had pissed off the Dahlia Lama(true story folks) so fur prices sucked dick. For all that I caught that year which was 4 mink, 15 coon, 1 beaver, 10 slicktails, and 5 muskrats i only received $150. This sucks as in today's un-pissed off Dahlia Lama fur market the same load would have brought around$450-$500 dollars. Well I am done now and I will leave you with this homespun word of wisdom, "Duct tape is like "The Force". It has a "light side" a "dark side" and it holds the universe together