The Grasshopper Trap Page 7

  For hundreds of years, hunters have employed the hunker successfully in negotiating with farmers for permission to hunt their property. I myself am an expert hunkerer and would be willing to teach the technique free of charge to both Russian and American diplomats, just so we can get the present mess straightened out in a hurry. Most of my fishing and hunting buddies are skilled hunkerers too, and would be glad to help out. The diplomats, however, should let me know a week in advance if they want to attend my workshop in hunkering, so I can reserve a barnyard. I already have the sticks.

  An ancient posture, the hunker was first employed by primitive man. He hunkered in the evenings by his campfire, watching simple little dramas played out by the dancing flames, although usually only reruns of previous campfires. During commercials, he picked moss from between his toes, having no bathroom or refrigerator to run off to. Then one night he discovered he could change the channel by poking a stick into the flames. During a particularly inane sitcom, he started doodling in the sand with the stick, and thus was born the classic hunker as we know it today.

  Primitive man referred to the hunker only as “Ooo-ah,” which may either have denoted the hunker or possibly have been only a natural response to the leg cramps associated with it. Even today I have heard men go “OOO-AH!” while attempting to rise from a long hunker. The word “hunker” probably derives from the early Scots word for haunches, which was “hunks.” To sit down on one’s haunches was, therefore, to hunker. Then, of course, it may not have derived from that at all, but who cares?

  The hunker should be practiced at home until it is mastered and certainly before employing it to negotiate with a farmer in a barnyard. It is not uncommon for the unskilled hunkerer to settle down on his haunches, lose his balance, and then topple over on his back—fine and good on a shag carpet, but disastrous in a barnyard. True, farmers do get a good laugh out of seeing a hunter topple over on his back in a barnyard, but afterwards they are not about to trust him with a loaded gun out among the cows. It is the cows, after all, that make toppling over on one’s back in a barnyard such a memorable experience. (The bill from the cleaners may contain a substantial surcharge and even a death threat.) I don’t know why farmers insist on keeping cows, when they have all those pheasants and deer running around. I’ve talked to several of them about getting rid of the cows, but they won’t listen to reason.

  To hunker properly, bend your knees and slowly settle your rear down until it comes to rest just above your ankles. Your feet should be spread about eighteen inches, to prevent you from toppling over sideways, which is even worse than toppling over on your back. Your forearms should rest comfortably on your knees; if your belly is hanging out over your knees, however, you can rest your forearms on your belly, which isn’t quite as good, but you have to rest your arms somewhere. Otherwise your hands drag in the barnyard. A barnyard ranks among the top three worst places in the world to drag your hands.

  Now take your stick and—Oh, I forgot to mention the stick earlier. You always want to find your stick before you begin your hunker. If you don’t find your stick first, you have to waddle around in your hunker looking for one. That makes you look ridiculous and causes the farmer to think maybe he can’t trust you out among the cows. One of the main objects of the hunker is to impress on the farmer that you are a responsible person, and waddling about like a duck in his barnyard can blow your image all to heck.

  Okay, let’s say you are now hunkered and have your stick in hand. You want to use the stick to draw maps in the dirt to show the farmer how responsible and smart you are. While drawing the little maps, you explain to the farmer what you are drawing, because otherwise he will think you are just scratching up his barnyard. Don’t go into too much detail with your drawing. Sketch in a few trees to indicate a woodlot, but don’t try to do pines or oaks, say, because that will take all day and farmers are busy people. You should say something like this, as you point to the various lines: “Now here’s your north pasture, right, and you don’t want me to hunt there because you have a hoard—uh herd—of cows up there. So, your woodlot is here and over here is your stubble field, where all your pheasants are. Those little dots there are the pheasants. I just want to hunt the little dots. What do you say?”

  In hunkering with your farmer, you should be careful to draw him down with you into the hunker. You lose much of your persuasive power if you are hunkered and he is standing over you looking down and you have your neck bent way back in order to look up. This has happened to me on occasion, and I’ve found it to be quite embarrassing. Once, the farmer continued walking about the barnyard doing his chores and I had to waddle alongside of him, trying to draw quick little maps in the dirt every time he stopped to slop a hog or something.

  Modern farming methods have complicated hunkering. Big corporate farmers now work in large steel-and-glass office buildings hundreds of miles from the actual farm. They milk the cows, slop the hogs, and shovel out the barn all by computer, and I can’t say I blame them one darn bit. The farther you can get from either end of a cow or pig, so much the better, at least in my opinion. But getting a big corporate farmer to hunker right there in his office with secretaries running in and out can be a problem. Right away, for example, he wants to know why you’re carrying a stick into his office.

  If he offers you a chair by his desk, you’re stuck and you might as well get right to the point: “May I get permission to hunt on your nine-million-acre farm out by Turnipville? I’ll close the gate behind me.” Under such circumstances, you’ve got about a ten-percent chance of getting permission. Draw him into a hunker, though, and you’re already halfway through his gate.

  You’re in luck if the corporate farmer has a couch and easy chair off in one corner of his office. Plop down on one of those, which will force him to sit on the other, unless he wants the conversation to be carried on by shouting back and forth across the office. Next, reach the stick way out in front of you and draw a little imaginary circle on the carpet. (If you draw a real circle, that means you forgot to wash the stick after hunkering in a barnyard, and right then you can wave good-bye to getting permission to hunt.) Now, around the circle, sketch out the rest of the farm. As you do so, slowly slide off the couch or chair, whichever you’ve selected, and into your hunker. You need to do this with a smooth gliding motion, so as not to be obvious about it. Once you are securely hunkered, the farmer, if he has an ounce of true farm blood in him, should slide off his chair into his hunker. Right then you’re as good as hunting the farm.

  I once drew a corporate farmer into a hunker in the middle of his office by pointing out a tiny, intricate design on one of his Oriental rugs. He dropped into a hunker to examine it close up. Once we were hunkered, I switched the conversation to hunting and soon got permission to hunt. The man was an old-style farmer, though, and loved to hunker. He took my stick and began drawing on the rug himself, talking about shoats and goats and oats and other strange things. He had coffee and cookies served to us while we hunkered, and then we had cigars and brandy until at last I could bear it no longer and rose quaking and quivering to my feet. “OOO-AH!” I said.

  “Pardon?” he said.

  “Just another name for the hunker,” I said, hobbling toward the door. “Thanks for letting me hunt the farm. I’ll close the gate. OOO-AH! OOO-AH!”

  The hunker is often mistaken for a squat, which is something entirely different. The squat has its uses, but it is an ugly posture, lacking in both grace and dignity. If you happen to catch a person in a squat, he is usually embarrassed and shows no inclination to engage in even small talk, let alone serious conversation. Seldom, in fact, do you ever find two people squatting together. If you inquired of a person’s whereabouts and were told, “Oh, he’s squatting out behind the barn,” I doubt that you would have any inclination to go seek him out. I certainly wouldn’t. On the other hand, if you’re told, “Oh, he’s hunkered out behind the barn,” why, then you know the man is receptive to visitors and probably would
enjoy a good chat about his lower forty, which is practically being eaten bare by the population of pheasants. The hunker is conducive to genial conversation. The squat, at best, may be conducive to some low-grade contemplation, but that’s about it.

  My first experience with the hunker as the ultimate posture for communication and persuasion occurred when I was about sixteen. Retch Sweeney and I enjoyed fishing the creek that ran through a farm belonging to Homer Poe, but we had avoided a particular stretch because it was too difficult to fish. The difficulty arose from the fact that Poe’s house looked right down on this section of creek, and Poe had told us several times he would skin us alive if he ever caught us trying to catch his fish. We knew, of course, that he was exaggerating. The cantankerous old farmer would never even consider actually skinning us alive. He would undoubtedly kill us first.

  The high risk of fishing the Poe farm added considerably to our enjoyment, and we should have been satisfied with that. Still, the unfished stretch of creek below the Poe house proved irresistible. At the first easing of darkness one morning, we sneaked onto the Poe farm and, concealed in brush, began casting out into the creek, all the while keeping an eye on the Poe house for any signs of life. Hauling out one huge brookie after another, we soon forgot all about the farmer and his dire threats.

  Suddenly, Retch glanced up. “Poe!” he whispered.

  Sure enough, there was the farmer striding down the trail from his house right toward us. Since he wasn’t screaming and shaking his fist and in general behaving like an enraged lunatic, we guessed that he hadn’t yet seen us. Walking behind him were the two gaunt timber wolves he kept as watchdogs. The dogs would run us down in no time if we attempted to flee.

  “Quick,” I whispered to Retch. “Let’s hide in the old pumphouse.”

  Neither of us wanted to hide in the pumphouse, but it was our only chance to escape with our hides intact. Many years before we were born, or so legend had it, a man had hanged himself in the pumphouse. The possibility that his ghost might still be, uh, hanging about contributed nothing to the desirability of the pumphouse as a hiding place. Constructed of stone on the bank of the creek, it had grown over with some kind of creepy vine. Poe had installed an electric pump, but the old pipes dribbled water and the place smelled of mold and rot and dampness. Crawling through the cool, wet darkness, we shuddered at the ugly little scurrying sounds in the pumphouse and the cobwebs grabbing at us from all sides.

  Just as I was about to convince myself that I didn’t believe in ghosts, I felt a cold and clammy hand on the back of my neck.

  “Hush!” Retch said. “You want old Poe to find us? I didn’t mean to grab your neck. I thought it was a pipe.”

  We pressed ourselves against a wall, holding on to the icy-cold water pipes to steady ourselves. We hoped that whatever business Poe had down by the creek, he would get it taken care of quickly and we could make our escape undetected.

  Then Poe jerked at the door of the pumphouse. His wolves began to growl. Had he seen us after all? I felt Retch stiffen as he pressed back into the stone wall. But Poe didn’t come into the pumphouse. Instead he reached in with his long bony arm and began feeling around for the switch that turned on the pump. Obviously he didn’t like entering the haunted pumphouse any more than we did, particularly if he could reach the switch from the door. Then all hell came loose. Poe screeched like a burst air hose. His dogs fled howling for home. Retch was whipped back and forth from one side of the pumphouse to the other. I thought the ghost had us all for sure. Wishing not to be outdone, I contributed what I could to the overall clamor.

  Retch sprang through the door, with me running up his back. The wolves were now just black streaks going up the hill toward the Poe house. Poe was flailing about on the ground performing what looked like the Australian crawl on more-or-less dry land. Retch and I left him in a cloud of dust. Since we were covered from one end to the other with slimy cobwebs, he couldn’t possibly have recognized us.

  “I don’t know what made me do it,” Retch said later. “All I could see was Poe reaching for the switch, and before I knew it I had grabbed him by the hand. He dang near tore off my arm before I thought to turn him loose.”

  After that, we didn’t fish the Poe farm anymore. A person has just so much luck, and when you use up such a big dose of it all at once, you don’t want to fritter away what’s left just to catch a few fish.

  A month or so after the great pumphouse scare, the old woodsman Rancid Crabtree asked me if I wanted to go with him to fish Homer Poe’s creek.

  “Not me,” I said. “Poe darn near caught me the last time I sneaked onto his farm to fish.”

  “We ain’t gonna sneak,” Rancid said. “Ah’ll jist ask him real nice-like iffen we can fish his crick.”

  “You mean you think Homer Poe is going to let us fish his crick just because you ask him real nice?”

  “Shore. ’Course, Ah might have to hunker with him a spell.”

  And that’s what he did. We drove over to Poe’s and Rancid got out and confronted the old farmer in his barnyard. I could see Rancid’s jaw working up and down and Poe shaking his head. Then Rancid picked up a little stick and sank down into his hunker and began drawing on the ground. Pretty soon Poe sank down into his hunker. After a bit, Poe began to laugh. I couldn’t believe it. I thought Rancid must be drawing dirty pictures in the dirt, to make Poe laugh like that. After about an hour of hunkering, Rancid came back to the truck.

  “Ooo-ah!” he said, rubbing his haunches. “That Poe is a tough man to hunker with, and purty dang strange, too. Ast me iffen Ah knew anythang about riddin’ a pumphouse of ghosts, ’cause his garden is dryin’ up fer lack of water. Now grab your fish pole and let’s go fishin’.”

  The great thing about hunkering is that it has its own built-in time limit. A man can hunker for an hour, but after that his hunks begin to cramp and pretty soon he has a charley horse that could run in a steeplechase. When you enter into a hunker with another person, you know you have just so much time to conduct your business and you’d better get to it. That’s one of the reasons I think we should get rid of those ridiculous seats at the United Nations and make all the diplomats hunker there on a dirt floor. Give the diplomats each a stick with which to draw in the dirt or otherwise wave at each other, and we’d get some of these world problems straightened out in no time. I can almost hear the debates now:

  “Does the ambassador from the Soviet Union have any objections to the all-inclusive plan for world peace set forth by the ambassador from the United States?”

  “Nyet! Nyet! OOO-AH! OOO-AH!”

  Why Wives on Christmas Mourn

  Christmas is nearly upon us, and once again I have neglected to patent my gifts-for-outdoorsmen inventions early enough to get them on the market. Next year! For now I will merely tantalize you with descriptions of the delights that lie in store for you next Christmas.

  The Handy Dandy Hook-Remover—This item relieves anglers of the worst chore related to fishing. It weighs eighty pounds and consists of an air-cooled, gas-powered engine, an air compressor, a heavy-duty cutter, a gouger, and a ripper. No more will you have to suffer the frustrations of trying to remove hooks and lures from the plastic bubble-packages they are sold in.

  The Exercise Machine for Outdoorsmen—My invention combines the major components of stationary bicycles, rowing machines, cross-country skiing machines, and weightlifting apparatus. The way it works is that you balance on a slick stainless-steel bar that simulates a peeled log. Then a 150-pound weight drops onto your back, the steel bar begins to spin under your feet, and as you run to stay on top of it, plastic branches slap you in the face. When you are totally exhausted and begin to collapse, a lever is tripped that causes the machine to throw you against a far wall.

  Deer and Elk Hauler—Numerous devices have been invented to help pack deer and elk out of the mountains, but almost all of them are cumbersome and still require considerable labor. My invention is simple, tiny enough to be carried in
a pocket, and relieves you of all the strain of packing. It will sell for a measly $1.98, too. When the time comes for you and your companions to pack out a large game animal, you remove the hauler from your pocket and show it to your companions. It looks like an authentic pharmaceutical prescription bottle with the words HEART MEDICINE in type large enough to be read from ten feet away. Then all you have to say is, “Well, I’d better take a couple of my heart pills,” and your share of the elk or deer will be packed out to the hunting vehicle as if by magic. It is important, though, that your hunting partners be compassionate and civilized persons. When I tested the “hauler” on my friend Retch Sweeney, he growled, “You better take the whole dang bottleful, ’cause I ain’t packin’ this elk outta here by myself!” Usually, however, you hunt with persons more considerate than Retch Sweeney, in which case the “hauler” works like a charm.

  Fishing Computer—I have been working on a portable computer programmed to analyze fishing conditions, make recommendations on the most effective bait or lure to use, identify species, keep track of the number of fish caught, and weigh and measure them. I have based the program on my own vast knowledge of fishing. In effect, it will be just as if the fisherman had me at his side, offering expert advice. As soon as I can figure out why the computer keeps telling outrageous lies and reminiscing about the old days, I’ll get it patented.

  Thumb Protector—All outdoorsmen know the damage their thumbs suffer during an extended camping trip. The thumb protector is a hard plastic sleeve that fits over the thumb, enabling you to stir your cup of camp coffee in complete comfort and safety.

  Automatic Fish Cleaner and Sealer—There are many useful devices on the market to assist in cleaning and scaling fish, but none so totally automatic as mine. Imagine, there you are, relaxing in camp, a cool drink in hand, while the automatic cleaner/scaler takes care of the day’s catch! With proper adjustments, the only sound during the cleaning and scaling is a rhythmic humming. Now here’s the amazing thing: the scaler will cost only $4.95! It is so small it can be used as a stocking-stuffer. In fact, the operative part of the device consists only of a small, shiny ball attached to the end of a string. As the directions explain, the ball is dangled in front of the eyes of your spouse while you chant, “Your eyelids are becoming heavy, heavy … you are now in a deep sleep … you love to clean and scale fish … you will hum rhythmically while cleaning and scaling fish …”