Uncle Wally was considered by my family to be the quintessential hunter. Not that anyone in my family knew what the word quintessential meant, but they sure did know hunting, and Uncle Wally knew hunting probably better than most. It was rumored that he could track a snake across a rock, and one time I watched as he almost did this. Turns out garden hoses make pretty much the same kind of track that a snake leaves, only wetter.

Going over to his house was an adventure in itself. After you got past the assorted old cars decorating the lawn like proud trophies of years gone by, you got to go into the house and see actual trophies of years gone by. Only these had eyes. Uncle Wally once explained to me that the eyes were actually marbles, but I never did see how marbles could follow your every move. Yep his house was a hunters dream, and the doc I am seeing now says that those dreams should go away in a few years if I concentrate on happy thoughts.

So you can imagine my great surprise and excitement when Uncle Wally came over to the house where Gramps and I lived one day and announced that he was going to teach me to hunt. Gramps had been trying to teach me to hunt for years, but his lessons always came with a thump on the head, which to my way of thinking completely knocked everything I was just taught right out of my brain and onto the floor where it got stomped on and ground into dust.

The reason I lived with Gramps is that my momma had run off with a biker about the time she turned 16, or as her note said right after “that squealing little runt had thrashed her insides out”. Gramps being the kind hearted soul that he is took me in. I never understood why he hated me calling him Gramps and insisted I call him dad, but I guess it had something to do with him not wanting to feel old.

Well the much anticipated morning finally came when Uncle Wally came to pick me up. As we lived fairly far back in the woods we didn’t have any fancy things like “electricity” or “alarm clocks,” we just woke up with the sun and went to bed when it got dark. Uncle Wally was legendary in his ability to get himself out of bed at any time that he needed to get up. He said it was a trick he learned in the army where you drank a buttload of water before going to bed. Depending on what time you wanted to get up was the deciding factor on how much water you drank. I never did figure out how to do that right as it seemed no matter how little an amount of water I drank I always woke at the same time with a warm, wet feeling. Good thing I did most of the laundry for Gramps and myself.

The sun hadn’t quite gotten up when Uncle Wally’s own version of an alarm clock woke me up. Turns out that a boot makes a fine alarm clock, especially when it whistles past your nose at 50 miles per hour and slams into the wall next to your head. I quickly set about grabbing all my gear I had set out the night before, only to have Uncle Wally give me an exasperated look and knock it all out of my hands. I guess he did that so he could place one of his famous self-made bows in my hands.

“Here, this is all you need today,” Uncle Wally said in his gruff voice.

“What is it?” I asked as if I didn’t know that the stick in my hand with the several ninety degree turns and branches coming off it was. I knew how much Uncle Wally liked to be ribbed about his work. And his friendly scowl as he cuffed me on the back of the head was just his way of saying he appreciated the humor. Sometimes though he gets carried away because it took all morning for the ringing in my ears to stop.

“It’s YOUR new bow, you inbred stupid little piece of …” Uncle Wally liked to trail off his sentences to leave a little bit to the imagination.

I was so proud of my new bow, I could hardly wait to show it off to my friends. This was an Uncle Wally special, and all they had were those fancy ones with gadgets all over them that you bought in a store. You couldn’t buy a priceless piece of work like this in any store. No, really Uncle Wally had even tried to put some in a store once, but the store owner just tossed them out the back door on his big slash pile by accident just before he lit it on fire. Good thing Uncle Wally has a good sense of humor and is a forgiving type of person, cause he figured it was just a mistake on the store owners part and offered to bring in more. Funny thing was how the almost empty bow racks were suddenly filled with a bunch of those new-fangled contraptions when Uncle Wally brought in his newly-made bows the next week. Too bad though cause they would have sold like hot cakes too.

It was about this time that I noticed that Uncle Wally was walking with a stick stuck under his arm.

“Is that your new bow Uncle Wally?” I asked being quite impressed that he would be able to hunt with something that looked like it came right off a tree.

“Nope, squirt, this is what I call a crutch. I kinda hurt my ankle last night coming off the roof. The windstorm that blew threw must have made that ladder wobble a little more than usual.” That was a scary thought seeing as how his ladder had a tendency to wobble even when there wasn’t any kind of wind going on. I could see how even a small breeze would make it a dangerous thing to be on that ladder.

“So, hows you going to teach me to shoot game then?” I asked.

He just smacked me on the back of the head again causing the ringing to continue only a little louder. “The shooting is the easy part boy, the hard part is finding the game, and I know right where they are, so there isn’t any hard part to this.”

I wasn’t about to argue with Uncle Wally, he knew all about hunting, and besides I was afraid one more cuff to the head my give me a concussion so bad I wouldn’t be able to go hunting.

Outfitted with my new bow and a few homemade arrows that were guaranteed by Uncle Wally to never get lost on account of they doubled as boomerangs, we set out for the woods in his old pickup. He was very proud of that pickup and never failed to mention that it had a 240 air conditioner in it. Not that I had ever once seen him turn on the air conditioner since the windows were in a perpetual state of being in the down position. I once tried to roll the window up and he almost threw a fit, yelling something about ruining the space time continuum or something like that.

About the time that the sun broke the horizon with an audible “crack,” Uncle Wally and I arrived at his favorite, and secret, hunting spot. To me it didn’t look any different than the 200 other clearings that we had passed, but he swore that this was the best place in all of central Idaho to hunt. Not to mention that since it was right off the road we didn’t have far to go to get to it.

Boy was I wrong!

“Since I hurt my darn ankle you get to go climb that ridge over there,” he pointed at what seemed to me to be a sheer cliff face that went straight up about 300 feet, “once you get there you work that ridgeline all the way down around the other side. When you get to the old creek bed, just stay in it and it will bring you right back here.” Uncle Wally looked kinda proud that he had put all those words together in once sentence.

“Where will you be Uncle Wally?”

“Why … I will be right here waiting for you to bring back a nice big muley. Don’t worry though, I’ll help you load it in the back of old Bessie here.” He was always a considerate person like that.

I am not sure if Uncle Wally intended for me to learn mountaineering or not, but I guess he must have, because scaling that rock face with nothing more than my hands while carrying a bow and a couple of arrows sure did teach me a few things. Like, how I never wanted to learn to be a mountaineer.

A couple of hours later when I finally reached the ridgeline, I was a little warm from the blazing sun and my mouth was a little dry, kind of like I had stuck about 50 cotton balls in my cheeks. I had done this once on a dare so I knew that the feeling was exactly the same. About this time I was wishing Uncle Wally had let me bring some of my gear, because one of things I had packed was a canteen. But I didn’t worry about it too much since he had told me I would be coming to a creek on my way back.

The hike back down the ridgeline was almost as tough as the climb up had been, but it went a whole lot quicker since all I had to do was keep moving in a downward direction and keep myself from falling. I am sure if I fell I would have made it down even quicker. The tough part was trying to be quiet. Seems like I couldn’t take a step without breaking some kind of dry branch which would then make a popping sound about the equivalent of a .22 caliber pistol fired inside a closed in room. Don’t ask me how I know what that would sound like, and don’t tell Gramps that the hole in my bedroom ceiling wasn’t from a small piece of meteor.

I finally made it down to what looked like a slight depression in the land, or what may have been a creek at one time before it dried up. I had a sickening feeling in my stomach that this may have been the “old creek bed” that Uncle Wally was talking about. The sick feeling may also have been a beginning symptom of dehydration, but it’s hard to tell when your mind is all fuzzy-like.

The fuzzy-like mind may have accounted for what happened next, or at least my view of it.

I was coming out of the dry creek bed onto the road just about the time I heard Uncle Wally yelp in what I would have termed a girlish scream, of course I may have been hearing things in my dehydrated delirium since Uncle Wally was about as manly as they come. I looked up just in time to see Uncle Wally draw back his draw back his old bow and take quick but steady aim at what looked like the biggest deer I had ever seen. Turns out it wasn’t a deer at all but a really old elk, but I didn’t know that till later after I had downed about three gallons of tepid water from an old gas can in the back of the truck. From my angle it looked as though the arrow must have missed that elk by a whole foot, or even maybe three feet, but all the sudden that elk rears up on its hind legs and its eyes went really wide and it dropped down on its side dead as a doornail.

I knew that Uncle Wally was probably the greatest hunter that ever lived, but I had just seen him kill an elk with, what I thought, was a missed shot. In fact the arrow was still stuck in the tree behind where the elk had been standing. As Uncle Wally went over to retrieve his precious arrow I realized that Uncle Wally must have known that elk was pretty darn old and the slightest scare would kill it, kinda like Great Aunt Marge when she croaked during the annual horseshoe tournament, so instead of wasting an arrow he just scared that old elk to death.

What a great hunter.

It sure was nice of him to give me instructions on how to load that big old elk into the back of the truck too. There were several times I don’t think I would have been able to do it without his reassurances.

“What are you some kind of girly-boy?” He would ask with a straight face, even though I knew it was only his way of joking around.

Can’t say that I cared much for the meat after we got it home though, it was all tough and stringy and kinda tasted like boiled bacon. But my dog Baron sure ate good that winter.