Fishing for TreasureAdventures in Junk

Bill and I set out exceed­ingly early one Sat­ur­day to visit a flea mar­ket far out in the coun­try and sell a cou­ple of black pow­der long guns. He used to col­lect them, but got tired of pour­ing pow­der or bit­ing car­tridges or what­ever the obso­lete oper­at­ing sys­tem was.

Now, it’s get­ting more dif­fi­cult to sell firearms at most flea mar­kets. In between the folks who test the prod­uct by fir­ing over the heads of the crowd, and the ones who ped­dle ille­gal stuff out of their trunks to finance their favorite kinds of may­hem, the mar­kets have got­ten pretty skit­tish about weapons.

But the black pow­der guns are still wel­come most places. They’re his­tor­i­cal and col­lectible, and way harder to oper­ate than mod­ern weapons. High­way­men did good busi­ness with them back in the day, but the work ethic has declined in all pro­fes­sions and mod­ern thugs want some­thing more point and click. Except maybe in Cal­i­for­nia. You can’t ship black pow­der weapons there. I guess either their mug­gers are more indus­tri­ous, or their cit­i­zens slower on their feet than in other places.

While Bill talked with the col­lec­tors about what­ever they find to say about guns, I vis­ited the old man who brings honey down from the moun­tain. He keep his hives in big stacks. I don’t know how he gets them apart to clean them, but he has lots of great honey. Then we looked at the live­stock – minia­ture horses, goats, rab­bits, hogs…Hogs stink incred­i­bly. If the only way I could get bacon was to raise it myself, I’d give it up in a heartbeat.

All tired and happy, we started the long drive home. It was a lovely day and pic­turesque as all get-​​out. We drove by pas­tures and cows and horses and more pas­tures and oh no it’s a deer run­ning in front of the car – it’ll never make it – yes it will – BAM! we clipped it!

Bill pulled right over and we got out to look at our smashed turn­ing light and dented hood cov­ered with hair. “Well, there went today’s profit” he said. He was right, too, almost to the dol­lar. But he had more urgent con­sid­er­a­tions. “We have to find the deer, it it’s hurt, and kill it.”

Well that was log­i­cal. We couldn’t leave the poor thing suf­fer­ing in the bushes. We started look­ing in the hedges. He con­tin­ued, “And then we’ll take it home and eat it.”

I was fairly crog­gled. “We’re going to do what? Take it home in WHAT?” He said matter-​​of-​​factly, “In the car.” I had trou­ble get­ting my thoughts together on that one. To start with, nei­ther of us is of an age and health any­more to be stuff­ing a dead deer into the back of a Toy­ota. And though the uphol­stery had endured many things, it had never yet been soaked in deer blood and I feared it would not improve the ambiance of the vehicle.

But scratch Bill and you find an old hunter. He was hark­ing back to the days when he and his friends had slaugh­tered croc­o­diles bare-​​handed and packed them out of the Swiss Alps or what­ever they did. I may have con­fused some of the stories.

Bill was plan­ning aloud as we peered into the brush. “We’ll have to gut it, or it’ll go bad. You have the only knife, we’ll use that.” I won­dered if he’d hit his head in the acci­dent. “It’s a Swiss Army knife – the blade is ONE INCH LONG!” He was a lit­tle impa­tient with my stu­pid­ity. “It’ll take us awhile, then. We can do it.”

(When I related the story later to another hunter, he told me that a Swiss Army knife was his favorite tool for clean­ing a deer. He told me in great detail how he enjoyed cut­ting the joints apart with his teeny, tiny lit­tle blade. So Bill isn’t alone  — other guys have been hit in the head, too.)

We still hadn’t found any sign of the deer – to my con­sid­er­able relief – when a man drove up on a rid­ing mower. He’d come from the house across the pas­ture. “Was it a dog?” he asked. We told him the deer story and all of us looked at the car again and then at the hedge. If the deer was in the pas­ture, it wasn’t on this side.

So we finally resumed the trip home, on the alert for charg­ing wildlife. I looked in the mir­ror. There was the landowner, div­ing into the bushes. Look­ing for that deer.