I have one of the strangest hunting buddies. I won't say his real name, but I jokingly call him, "The Weasel." Note: It rhymes with "Grease-el." To be honest, hunting is totally hilarious because of him. One thing I can say for sure is that it's certainly not boring. It's like, the things he does is bothersome at the time, but you can look back on it and laugh. Now I have hunted with him for 20 years so there's quite a list of things he has done over the years. This is just what I can remember. There is so much more.
He buys every single hunting toy on the market. Fake antlers for rattling, the thing you cough into so you don't make a sound, super-sonic hearing headphones so you can hear every little thing in the woods, the ultra scope with yardage measure, and deer grunt.
He tends to leave his set of keys to the truck anywhere but in his pocket. Dad just puts them in his pocket until "The Weasel" needs them.
One year we had a "secret knock" for the trailer. He could of course just of knocked and said, "Hey it's the Weasel." We would have heard him just fine. Besides, we never had problems with anyone wanting to get into the trailer with us in there before.
He wears all camo, and then puts blaze orange on over it. (Blaze orange as in accordance with state law.) If you are going to wear blaze orange what's with all the camo?
When setting his rifle at the gun range, no grouping is close enough. Watching him shoot is like nails on a chalk board.
The only time I got a deer, he said we couldn't get it all in the cooler. I said it was just like a puzzle, and we needed to find the right fit. It's not that he said it. It's that he said it 50 times. Guess what? I got the deer in the cooler. Also during this bit, he said he always left the ribs on the ground. I told him there was no way I would ever leave ribs behind. Anyone who knows me, knows I don't leave any kind of ribs behind.
One year he got it in his head that deer don't cross roads. (Note: Why do so many get killed on the highway?)
One year he said that he was going to get a hog. That's all he talked about. Dad ended up getting a hog. So we pulled a bit of a prank. Dad had the trucked backed out down the muddy road. I saw "The Weasel" coming down the road. I told him that I had an idea. We put the tailgate up, but had the hog right in the middle of the muddy road. (In all fairness, both the hog and the road were black.) He walks up and keeps asking us what's in the back of the truck? We say nothing is in the back of the truck. He then walks up, steps on the hog and says, "I'll be damned, it's a hog." True story.
Dad made a joke about getting some Cognac, and "The Weasel" took him seriously. Dad did drink one shot of the Cognac mixed with 7-Up. However, "The Weasel drank the rest of the bottle, and had a hangover the next morning. He couldn't even get up to go hunting.
The one thing that "The Weasel" did to really make Dad and I mad was this. He had his knife taken to a "Professional" to sharpen it. He just tore the hell out of the knife. My Dad and I worked for weeks to hand sharpen it back to normal. We used a piece of an old grinding stone to work off the worn and burnt places of the knife. Then we used progressively smoother stones until it was extremely sharp.
He could never tell when a knife was sharp. He didn't understand that if it was smooth it was dangerously sharp, because there were no burrs on it.
Well he didn't need to use it on anything that year, so before the following hunting season he took it to another "Professional," and that guy completely burnt up and destroyed his knife. All of our hard work for nothing. Dad told him his knife was destroyed, and that there was nothing he could do but get another knife.
Speaking of knives. Dad's is dangerously sharp. We were cleaning a deer, and "The Weasel" was using Dad's hunting knife, and almost cut the upper part of the front leg off. I heard the tendon snap. I really did. He could not get the hang of a really, really sharp knife.
The one thing that makes me shake my head is that he "hears game." He stays in until it is too dark to hunt. In fact, he could get a ticket from the Game Warden because he stays in so late. While he stays in so late, he "hears" game. It's always, "I heard three does and a buck." When I ask, "Did you see them?" He says, "No." And then looks at me as if I'm the asshole.
Bad time management. He is terrible at time management. We get up at 5AM. Out the door at 6AM. He will want to stop at a convenience store. That makes us late to get out in the woods at 7AM. Namely, because he will want to talk to the Game Warden. Then we try to get to our hunting spot at 7:30AM. Hunt till 10:30AM. After that, he will want to drive all over the place scouting. His memory is so bad he can't remember all the places we've scouted before. We eat lunch, try and get a nap in, then go in the woods to hunt around 2:00-3:00PM. We then tend to come out of the woods at 5:30-6:00PM. Or should I say that me and Dad come out at that time. I was once lost in the dark, and never again will I go through that. Never. This is where "The Weasel" put us through Hell. He comes out at 7PM, and wants to talk. He takes forever putting his stuff up. We have to check out at the check station, and he'll want to talk to the Game Warden again. It's then an hour back to town, so it's 8PM. We then have to eat. So figure an hour there, and it's now 9PM. Then, he will have to go to Walmart or some other crazy place for some oddball item. It's then onto the trailer where we need to take showers. I can swing it in about 15 minutes. Well, it takes him at least 1-2 hours. He has to shave his face, the back of his neck, and wash every hair on his body. Dad and I will at least be in bed around 10:30 to 11:00 PM. This does not work for me. I need at least 8 hours, and this 6 hour crap just doesn't do. In fact, there was one night he was going through his stuff till 2 or 3 in the morning.
Really, it does take him forever to shower. He really does use a mirror to reflect the back of his neck in the big mirror so he can shave it ..... every night.
Dad suspects The Weasel smoked so much pot in the Coast Guard that he can't remember shit.
I've never met anyone worse with a map. He makes it so much harder than it should be.
One year he said that the Weatherman lies. He checks all three weather channels, adds up the temperatures, then divides them to get the real average temperature. Really, I can't this stuff up.
Whenever he runs into a poisonous snake, he has been known to beat it with a stick instead of shooting it. Why? He didn't want to make a lot of noise. Really.
One time he beat a snake, and it wasn't quite dead. So I pulled my pistol to finish it off. Every time I went to pull the trigger he told me to stop, and then proceeded to tell me how to shoot it. I finally had enough, and shot the damn thing. He then told me I should have had snake shot in my gun. I told him, "Why? I just shot it's damn head off with a hollow point. I don't need any snake shot."
He orders food like a woman. I once asked the waitress to only spit in his food, I just wanted one pancake, and nothing else. He also tends to want everything ordered burnt.
He is always late. Always.
He drinks scuzzy beer (Keystone Light.) When we were at Green Swamp, we had met some other hunters. One guy looks at my Dad with his Coors, and says he's alright, but he didn't know about his friend (The Weasel) with his Keystone Light."
One time he said he had a theory on the deer. I knew it was going to be silly, so I started singing the song, "I've got a theory," from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer Musical. Dad asked me, "Son, what the Hell are you doing?"
He tends to believe anything that anyone tells him, but us. He once "found out" about this great hunting place from this drunk guy. Turn out it was a place that we had once hunted that was terrible.
Instead of us picking him up, he drove over here to our house, dropped his stuff off, then had Dad unhook the truck from the trailer, drive back to his place so he could park his Jeep in his garage, and then drive back to our house. If it had been agreed upon before hand, no problem. However, he just sprung this on us. It also made us about 2 hours late for leaving to go hunting.
He tends to hunt in other people's spots. That has earned him some not so happy hunters when they turn up at "their" spot.
He has "Little Man, Big Gun" syndrome. Every year he got a bigger and bigger gun to compensate for his small stature.
On the radio he once said that he saw, "Six turkeys." So I called him "Sex Turkey" after that because it that's what it sounded like over the radio.
One time he wanted to get up at 3AM, so we could hit the snooze button until 4AM. Dad just set the alarm for 5AM as usual.
He can never decide where to hunt. He will ask us, and I will immediately tell him where. It still doesn't help him decide where to hunt.
He damn near blew a hole in his hand. He cocked back the .357 he had, and had his hand over the revolver. He then touched off the trigger. Well, luckily he was wearing gloves because it blew a hole right through the glove, and burnt his hand. That could have been bad.
He once opened a can of sardines in oil inside the truck. Even though it was 45 degrees out, Dad lowered the windows. It was that or throw up.
This one is not so funny. He is a bit shorter than me. When he was walking by, and getting stuff out of the truck he kept sticking his gun under my nose. He had it slung over his shoulder, but since he is so short it kept going up my nose. He thought we were making fun of him being short. I told him no it wasn't about that. Dad pulled him to the side, and had a serious talk about gun safety.
Every year he forgets something. It can be medicine, license, wallet, chair, ammo, toothpaste, and God knows what.
So we end up going to Walmart a lot to get what he needs. We even had to go from store to store (in a small town) to find the travel size Colgate toothpaste. He couldn't buy the regular size one. No it had to be the travel size one.
He told my Dad that he should get rubber snake boots instead of his leather ones. That way they wouldn't leak. Dad said, that his don't leak. But, "The Weasel" said that Dad should give his boots to me, and he should get some rubber ones.
When I got my one and only deer, the first words that, "The Weasel" said to me upon seeing it were, "Thank God it's not the big one!" You see, the day before I had missed the big one. I don't talk about it. I get too upset. Anyway, I couldn't believe he said that.
One time, Dad told him to put his seat beat on. "The Weasel" said that it was a dirt road, and he didn't need to be buckled on a dirt road. Dad then hit a huge pothole, and, "The Weasel" hit his head on the roof.... hard. He's always worn his seat belt since then.
As stated earlier, what he thinks is dark, and actual dark are two different things. I once told him that a Game Warden could give him a ticket if he's out there in the woods with a flashlight, and a loaded gun during that time of night.
One time while driving around scouting woods we saw a buck. His head started spinning around like Beaker (from the Muppet show), and he started yelling, "Oh, my God, it's a buck!" What made it funny was that his voice was high pitched like he had been sucking helium when he said it.
He ended up in the hospital out hunting once. True story. Too much alcohol + not enough sleep + over-exertion = heart going out of rhythm.
We had an old fashioned alarm clock (still do.) It would click 2 seconds before it would go off. He would hear the click, and turn it off. For a while we thought the clock was broke. It just do happened that Dad had to go to the bathroom, and at that second the clock clicked, and he saw, "The Weasel" turn the clock off. When Dad called him on it, "The Weasel" denied it, and called my Dad a liar. That was one of the nastier arguments they ever got in. Dad eventually put the alarm clock where no one could touch it. It worked fine after that.
He once shot a hog (hey, that's great right?), and then gave it too someone else (What?!!!) He should have offered it to us first, or not shot it if he didn't want it. Now to be fair he did give it to a very poor local family. So it went to good use.
He knowingly put his guns in the back of the truck before hunting season when we were going on management lands to scout. Under the old rules this was illegal, and could be considered poaching. We could have lost everything. I called him on this, and he blew me off (I was 13 at the time). I told Dad, and he set him straight.
He once left his .44 magnum loaded under the seat.
Out duck hunting years ago, he would swear he shot ducks that Dad shot. Dad would say, "Ok, fine" and give them to him.
I wish I could remember more, but these are the highlights. "The Weasel" is not a bad guy, but he is the most anal retentive person I have ever met.
He buys every single hunting toy on the market. Fake antlers for rattling, the thing you cough into so you don't make a sound, super-sonic hearing headphones so you can hear every little thing in the woods, the ultra scope with yardage measure, and deer grunt.
He tends to leave his set of keys to the truck anywhere but in his pocket. Dad just puts them in his pocket until "The Weasel" needs them.
One year we had a "secret knock" for the trailer. He could of course just of knocked and said, "Hey it's the Weasel." We would have heard him just fine. Besides, we never had problems with anyone wanting to get into the trailer with us in there before.
He wears all camo, and then puts blaze orange on over it. (Blaze orange as in accordance with state law.) If you are going to wear blaze orange what's with all the camo?
When setting his rifle at the gun range, no grouping is close enough. Watching him shoot is like nails on a chalk board.
The only time I got a deer, he said we couldn't get it all in the cooler. I said it was just like a puzzle, and we needed to find the right fit. It's not that he said it. It's that he said it 50 times. Guess what? I got the deer in the cooler. Also during this bit, he said he always left the ribs on the ground. I told him there was no way I would ever leave ribs behind. Anyone who knows me, knows I don't leave any kind of ribs behind.
One year he got it in his head that deer don't cross roads. (Note: Why do so many get killed on the highway?)
One year he said that he was going to get a hog. That's all he talked about. Dad ended up getting a hog. So we pulled a bit of a prank. Dad had the trucked backed out down the muddy road. I saw "The Weasel" coming down the road. I told him that I had an idea. We put the tailgate up, but had the hog right in the middle of the muddy road. (In all fairness, both the hog and the road were black.) He walks up and keeps asking us what's in the back of the truck? We say nothing is in the back of the truck. He then walks up, steps on the hog and says, "I'll be damned, it's a hog." True story.
Dad made a joke about getting some Cognac, and "The Weasel" took him seriously. Dad did drink one shot of the Cognac mixed with 7-Up. However, "The Weasel drank the rest of the bottle, and had a hangover the next morning. He couldn't even get up to go hunting.
The one thing that "The Weasel" did to really make Dad and I mad was this. He had his knife taken to a "Professional" to sharpen it. He just tore the hell out of the knife. My Dad and I worked for weeks to hand sharpen it back to normal. We used a piece of an old grinding stone to work off the worn and burnt places of the knife. Then we used progressively smoother stones until it was extremely sharp.
He could never tell when a knife was sharp. He didn't understand that if it was smooth it was dangerously sharp, because there were no burrs on it.
Well he didn't need to use it on anything that year, so before the following hunting season he took it to another "Professional," and that guy completely burnt up and destroyed his knife. All of our hard work for nothing. Dad told him his knife was destroyed, and that there was nothing he could do but get another knife.
Speaking of knives. Dad's is dangerously sharp. We were cleaning a deer, and "The Weasel" was using Dad's hunting knife, and almost cut the upper part of the front leg off. I heard the tendon snap. I really did. He could not get the hang of a really, really sharp knife.
The one thing that makes me shake my head is that he "hears game." He stays in until it is too dark to hunt. In fact, he could get a ticket from the Game Warden because he stays in so late. While he stays in so late, he "hears" game. It's always, "I heard three does and a buck." When I ask, "Did you see them?" He says, "No." And then looks at me as if I'm the asshole.
Bad time management. He is terrible at time management. We get up at 5AM. Out the door at 6AM. He will want to stop at a convenience store. That makes us late to get out in the woods at 7AM. Namely, because he will want to talk to the Game Warden. Then we try to get to our hunting spot at 7:30AM. Hunt till 10:30AM. After that, he will want to drive all over the place scouting. His memory is so bad he can't remember all the places we've scouted before. We eat lunch, try and get a nap in, then go in the woods to hunt around 2:00-3:00PM. We then tend to come out of the woods at 5:30-6:00PM. Or should I say that me and Dad come out at that time. I was once lost in the dark, and never again will I go through that. Never. This is where "The Weasel" put us through Hell. He comes out at 7PM, and wants to talk. He takes forever putting his stuff up. We have to check out at the check station, and he'll want to talk to the Game Warden again. It's then an hour back to town, so it's 8PM. We then have to eat. So figure an hour there, and it's now 9PM. Then, he will have to go to Walmart or some other crazy place for some oddball item. It's then onto the trailer where we need to take showers. I can swing it in about 15 minutes. Well, it takes him at least 1-2 hours. He has to shave his face, the back of his neck, and wash every hair on his body. Dad and I will at least be in bed around 10:30 to 11:00 PM. This does not work for me. I need at least 8 hours, and this 6 hour crap just doesn't do. In fact, there was one night he was going through his stuff till 2 or 3 in the morning.
Really, it does take him forever to shower. He really does use a mirror to reflect the back of his neck in the big mirror so he can shave it ..... every night.
Dad suspects The Weasel smoked so much pot in the Coast Guard that he can't remember shit.
I've never met anyone worse with a map. He makes it so much harder than it should be.
One year he said that the Weatherman lies. He checks all three weather channels, adds up the temperatures, then divides them to get the real average temperature. Really, I can't this stuff up.
Whenever he runs into a poisonous snake, he has been known to beat it with a stick instead of shooting it. Why? He didn't want to make a lot of noise. Really.
One time he beat a snake, and it wasn't quite dead. So I pulled my pistol to finish it off. Every time I went to pull the trigger he told me to stop, and then proceeded to tell me how to shoot it. I finally had enough, and shot the damn thing. He then told me I should have had snake shot in my gun. I told him, "Why? I just shot it's damn head off with a hollow point. I don't need any snake shot."
He orders food like a woman. I once asked the waitress to only spit in his food, I just wanted one pancake, and nothing else. He also tends to want everything ordered burnt.
He is always late. Always.
He drinks scuzzy beer (Keystone Light.) When we were at Green Swamp, we had met some other hunters. One guy looks at my Dad with his Coors, and says he's alright, but he didn't know about his friend (The Weasel) with his Keystone Light."
One time he said he had a theory on the deer. I knew it was going to be silly, so I started singing the song, "I've got a theory," from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer Musical. Dad asked me, "Son, what the Hell are you doing?"
He tends to believe anything that anyone tells him, but us. He once "found out" about this great hunting place from this drunk guy. Turn out it was a place that we had once hunted that was terrible.
Instead of us picking him up, he drove over here to our house, dropped his stuff off, then had Dad unhook the truck from the trailer, drive back to his place so he could park his Jeep in his garage, and then drive back to our house. If it had been agreed upon before hand, no problem. However, he just sprung this on us. It also made us about 2 hours late for leaving to go hunting.
He tends to hunt in other people's spots. That has earned him some not so happy hunters when they turn up at "their" spot.
He has "Little Man, Big Gun" syndrome. Every year he got a bigger and bigger gun to compensate for his small stature.
On the radio he once said that he saw, "Six turkeys." So I called him "Sex Turkey" after that because it that's what it sounded like over the radio.
One time he wanted to get up at 3AM, so we could hit the snooze button until 4AM. Dad just set the alarm for 5AM as usual.
He can never decide where to hunt. He will ask us, and I will immediately tell him where. It still doesn't help him decide where to hunt.
He damn near blew a hole in his hand. He cocked back the .357 he had, and had his hand over the revolver. He then touched off the trigger. Well, luckily he was wearing gloves because it blew a hole right through the glove, and burnt his hand. That could have been bad.
He once opened a can of sardines in oil inside the truck. Even though it was 45 degrees out, Dad lowered the windows. It was that or throw up.
This one is not so funny. He is a bit shorter than me. When he was walking by, and getting stuff out of the truck he kept sticking his gun under my nose. He had it slung over his shoulder, but since he is so short it kept going up my nose. He thought we were making fun of him being short. I told him no it wasn't about that. Dad pulled him to the side, and had a serious talk about gun safety.
Every year he forgets something. It can be medicine, license, wallet, chair, ammo, toothpaste, and God knows what.
So we end up going to Walmart a lot to get what he needs. We even had to go from store to store (in a small town) to find the travel size Colgate toothpaste. He couldn't buy the regular size one. No it had to be the travel size one.
He told my Dad that he should get rubber snake boots instead of his leather ones. That way they wouldn't leak. Dad said, that his don't leak. But, "The Weasel" said that Dad should give his boots to me, and he should get some rubber ones.
When I got my one and only deer, the first words that, "The Weasel" said to me upon seeing it were, "Thank God it's not the big one!" You see, the day before I had missed the big one. I don't talk about it. I get too upset. Anyway, I couldn't believe he said that.
One time, Dad told him to put his seat beat on. "The Weasel" said that it was a dirt road, and he didn't need to be buckled on a dirt road. Dad then hit a huge pothole, and, "The Weasel" hit his head on the roof.... hard. He's always worn his seat belt since then.
As stated earlier, what he thinks is dark, and actual dark are two different things. I once told him that a Game Warden could give him a ticket if he's out there in the woods with a flashlight, and a loaded gun during that time of night.
One time while driving around scouting woods we saw a buck. His head started spinning around like Beaker (from the Muppet show), and he started yelling, "Oh, my God, it's a buck!" What made it funny was that his voice was high pitched like he had been sucking helium when he said it.
He ended up in the hospital out hunting once. True story. Too much alcohol + not enough sleep + over-exertion = heart going out of rhythm.
We had an old fashioned alarm clock (still do.) It would click 2 seconds before it would go off. He would hear the click, and turn it off. For a while we thought the clock was broke. It just do happened that Dad had to go to the bathroom, and at that second the clock clicked, and he saw, "The Weasel" turn the clock off. When Dad called him on it, "The Weasel" denied it, and called my Dad a liar. That was one of the nastier arguments they ever got in. Dad eventually put the alarm clock where no one could touch it. It worked fine after that.
He once shot a hog (hey, that's great right?), and then gave it too someone else (What?!!!) He should have offered it to us first, or not shot it if he didn't want it. Now to be fair he did give it to a very poor local family. So it went to good use.
He knowingly put his guns in the back of the truck before hunting season when we were going on management lands to scout. Under the old rules this was illegal, and could be considered poaching. We could have lost everything. I called him on this, and he blew me off (I was 13 at the time). I told Dad, and he set him straight.
He once left his .44 magnum loaded under the seat.
Out duck hunting years ago, he would swear he shot ducks that Dad shot. Dad would say, "Ok, fine" and give them to him.
I wish I could remember more, but these are the highlights. "The Weasel" is not a bad guy, but he is the most anal retentive person I have ever met.
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