By Gary Topping–
I grew up on the southern Oregon coast where, so it seems, it rains about three hundred days a year. A high school friend once ventured the proposition that because people are cooped up indoors most of the time, the Oregon coast creates two classes of people: scholars and alcoholics. Whatever the truth of that, I can testify that that environment also breeds another type: the oddball eccentric. My brother was a member of that class, and maybe I’ll have another occasion to write about him. On this April Fools week, though, when light-hearted whimsy rules on TheBoyMonk, I want to write about an Oregon friend whose anonymity I will protect by just calling him Ron, and about a practical joke of his that ran off the rails.
Ron was a deer hunter. Over the years he had found an excellent hunting ground on the private property of a rancher he knew. Each year he would ask permission to hunt there, and it was always immediately granted. One year he invited another friend along, whom I will call Eddie. As they drove up to the ranch house, Ron told Eddie that he was going to go in and ask permission to hunt, and that as he would be only a few minutes, Eddie should just remain in the truck.
He went in and greeted his rancher friend, who, as expected, cheerfully welcomed Ron and Eddie to hunt on his property. “I have a favor to ask, though,” the rancher said. “In the first pasture you’ll encounter along the road, there is an old horse which is suffering and just about to die. My daughter is very close to that old horse. I wonder if you would be so good as to stop and just put the horse out of its misery? I would do it myself, but I’m afraid my daughter would hate me for it. If you would do it, she and I will go up there in a day or so and find the horse which has evidently been shot by some careless hunter, and we’ll be able to treat it as an unfortunate accident.”
Ron readily agreed to do that. But on his way back out to the truck, he hatched, in his eccentric way, an oddball practical joke to play on Eddie. He got into the truck, slammed the door, and began swearing. “That (blankety-blank) guy! All these years he’s let me hunt up here, and now, with no good reason, he says we can’t. Well, you know what? I don’t care what he says; we’re going to go hunt up there anyway.” He gunned the engine, dumped the clutch, and headed off to his longtime hunting site.
In a little while, they arrived at the pasture the rancher had told him about, and there was the old horse. Ron slammed on the brakes. “You know what? I’m going to teach that so-and-so a lesson: I’m going to shoot his horse.” He grabbed his rifle, stepped outside the truck, and BOOM! he shot the horse. An instant later, he heard another BOOM! He turned around, and Eddie had shot a cow!
“I guess we showed him,” Eddie said.
*Gary Topping is a writer and historian living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is the retired archivist for the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City and has written many books and articles.
