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 keeps 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.

Now, Bill has never been afraid of snakes. Family lore has it that as a boy he went on missions to clean water moccasins out of the swimming hole. He would lay out fishhooks and lines on the bank to capture them, and then string the trophies together to impress the other kids.

I only heard of him bringing a snake into the house once. It was a copperhead in a jar. He’d decided to keep it in his room. Luckily, his Dad found it before his Mom did. If it had been the other way around he’d have likely finished his childhood in military school.

You see, Bill’s Mom doesn’t like snakes. His Dad does. As a matter of fact, he goes on missions to rescue all the cornsnakes and ratsnakes from unenlightened persons and gives them asylum in his barn so they can eat the rats. But as she points out, how do the snakes know they’re supposed to stay in the barn? Which is a good question.

Once the family was driving out of state when they spotted a great big snake on the road. Bill’s Dad hopped out the car and determined it was alive and nonpoisonous. “We can put it in the car and carry it back to the barn!” he said in great delight. He just about lost more than he would have gained there. His wife told him tightly, “You had better hope that snake can cook and clean, because if it gets in this car I’m getting out.”

Bill is extremely dutiful when he finds a snake. “We need to take this to Daddy to put in the barn!” I don’t know how they can walk in there, the floor must be seething. When he was younger he used to catch rattlesnakes to sell to the snake handling church up on the mountain. But either the rattlers got faster or he got slower, because he doesn’t seem to encounter them anymore.

Our dog, Gus, is interested in snakes too, but a bit more cautious about it. We’re always alerted to their presence by a deep, deliberate “Wuff! WUFF!” coming from the yard. He follows them around, barking the snake bark, until we come out and see what kind it is. Then the snake takes advantage of his distraction to escape.

So one day Gus sounded the alarm and Bill went out to check on it. There was Gus looming over something on the ground. Bill – very injudiciously, I think – said cheerfully, “What have you got there, boy?” Gus showed him.

He seized the snake by the tail and gave it a practiced flip high into the air. Time obligingly slowed down so Bill could watch the snake flying up, up, up, hitting apogee, and coming down, down, down, right at his head. As he said later, “I don’t move very fast these days, but I got out of the way!”  The snake hit the ground and departed posthaste in search of a herpetological shrink.

As I said, Bill has never been afraid of snakes. But for a couple of days there he would sometimes fall uncharacteristically silent. When I’d ask what was wrong, he would answer, ”Nothing. I’m just thinking about that snake.”