Letter by Clay Warren
May 1998 edition – June 1998 – Colorado Central Magazine
Bear spray under your pillow
Editors:
Mah Goodness!!! Get a few days of Spring-like weather and all sorts o’crazy ideas related to food come to the surface. Sort of like the dog stuff under the ice on the north side o’ the cabin. Anybody with a lick o’ common sense would know that in addition to being a potent mineral supplement, Stringtown eggs, effen they wuz really produced in Lake County, would also carry the prospect of a gold nugget in the occasio
While we’re on the subject of food supplements, my ole buddy Tom Smith goes and exposes one o’ them nasty secrets real outdoors men have kept for years. The only thing better to slather up a young Yuppie with than red pepper spray, so as to make him tasty to a bear, would be a touch o’ molasses with maybe just a pinch o’mustard. This was bound to leak out anyhow, but leave it to some geologist to go spill the beans and eliminate one more population control mechanism o’ the GoreTex crowd.
IN ANSWER TO THAT RHETORICAL question about where to keep your bear spray: any idiot knows you keep it under your pillow, right next to yere 44 magnum. An’ one more thing, just how would you get a “bear proof’ container into the back country in the first place, use a gol dang D7? Does that guy know anything about real bar’s?
From bar’s to fish and PETAs, which here to fore ah always thought was some sort o’ bread like substance. Hit just goes to show you what happens when ole time religion loses hit’s clout with the weak minded. Ah mean if fish have such individual personalities, why in hell do they swim around in schools just like a bunch o’ unsupervised teenagers. And, if they grieve so damn much, why are they always trying to eat the throw backs while they’re being reeled in? Maybe ah was mistaken, that might o’ been just a love sick laker try’in to say goodbye to his sweetie. That would account for the difference in size.
But then I got to tell you, usin’ the words “gentlest” and “blood sports” in the same sentence when talking ’bout fly fishin’ is an oxymoron in the furst place. Bull fightin’, now that’s a blood sport. Hit don’t use a ball neither, and hit ought to satisfy a PETA cause even though the bull is hard-wired to react to external stimulation like barbed ice picks in his neck, he can still kill a horse or bullfighter effen he gets lucky. But ah bet even that wont appease no PETA.
It must o’ been a harder winter than ah thought when even Republican big picture thinkers named George miss the point. The whole purpose o’ havin’ people in one place drive to jobs in another place is simple: hit opens up new locations for convenience stores in between. He wants to “obliterate” county lines, city lines, lines of all kinds, ’cause they’re “irrelevant.” Seems like we just got rid of one such “relevant” place whar one big government fits all ideas like this. Hit was called the Soviet Union. Grieve’n fish and no local government, hit’s no wonder Ed and Martha can’t agree on that subject neither.
And lastly we get to the big ungulates; moose, elk and Texans. That little side bar to the Moose Story don’t begin to tell it all about moose. Fer one thing they will run a red light and take out a Toyota without even thinkin’ about the equally disastrous consequences, as the aforementioned Tom Smith can testify to. Secondly, when yere right next to one standin’ up and yuh really hadn’t quite planned it that way, they is a whole lot taller than they look from a distance. Sort o’ like a mountain on a clear day. Ah reckon we should get that George guy to pass a law to keep all the moose north of 1-70 where they belong, cause I don’t believe even pepper spray will protect a young Yuppie from a mean moose less’en hit is one o’ them Alamosa kind, even then ah’m not sure.
Ah don’t often find much to comment about in Hal Walters column, other than his addiction to burro chasin’, but he really misses the point about Texans com’in to Colorado to go elk huntin’. Havin’ guided a bunch o’em, hit is obvious that while a few o’ them actually want to kill an elk (now there is a blood sport that starts right after the fun ends when you pull the trigger), gut him out, cut him up, and lug out the quarters, which if you have been lucky will slide real easy on the ice underneath that four inches of new snow, most o’them just want to get away from the old lady and the kids. At least until the kids is old enough to introduce to the thrill o’ oxygen deprivation. Ah mean jist you think about hit. Effen you wuz in their shoes iddn’t that what you’d want too?
Yer’s till the Solstice, Clay Warren Pseudonymous in Poncha
