Clyde is colour-blind (Nov 13)

NOTES FROM THE SCOTCH COLONY

A ‘true’ story of frozen partridge

                                    by Robert LaFrance

            It’s deer hunting season now, which means this quiet community now resembles the 1916 Battle of the Somme when German troops in their trenches and we allies in our trenches kept taking pot shots at each other.

            It took place in the second half of that year and when it was over one million soldiers were killed or wounded for no particular reason except stupidity and lack of empathy by the generals who sent the youngsters on to their deaths.

            I said the 2019 hunting season here in the Scotch Colony resembles the Battle of the Somme, but not quite so many corpses (all deer and partridge so far) have been hauled back to the field hospitals.

            Working out in my orchard a week ago, I was startled by three quick shots that seemed to be VERY close. I left my Cortland, Novamac and 65 other varieties out there on their own and dashed for the safety of my basement. I never did find out – for sure –   the source of those shots, but made a November resolution: stay in the basement until hunting season was over.

            After three or four days, when my basement cupboards were nearly bare, I had to use the bathroom and finally emerged. Going outside, I heard a shot almost right away. Or what sounded like a shot. It turned out to be the owner of the cottage across Manse Hill Road pounding nails – spikes – into his doorstep.

            Then I heard two shots from the woods nearby, but they didn’t sound like shots. They weren’t. It was an ancient Gremlin ‘muscle car’ going by and backfiring whenever the driver let his (her, its) foot off the gas. It was then I decided to stop being afraid of every sound just because it was hunting season.

            Except for this one: “Bob, fill the woodbox and cook my breakfast – NOW!” That’s a scarier sound than any gunshot.

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            Although I don’t hunt because I’m too lazy, I do find that hunting season has its good points. It’s the only season of the year when anybody calls me bright. Last year, in a counter-intuitive move, my wife increased my life insurance coverage to ninety-nine  thousand dollars and the same day she bought me a new and vivid orange hunting jacket. I have heard of other wives doing a similar insurance thing and then buying their husband a nice warm jacket just the colour of a deer. Husbands were dropping like flies for a while until the ones remaining ones caught on to the ruse.

            Coming to the point, I was saying that hunting season does have its good points. When I wear my orange jacket people often remark that I am “certainly bright today”. It never happens in other seasons.

            Walking along a woods road last week, taking my life in my feet, I met up with Clyde Farthing, who came very close to shooting me. Clyde is colour-blind. I asked him why he was hunting down in these parts although he lives up toward Arthurette. “Your wife phoned me a couple of hours ago,” he said, “and suggested I should try here because people have seen half a dozen deer on this road.” What a coincidence; she told me I would be safe on that road because hunters have given up going there.

            You know, $99,000 is quite a bit of money.

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            Getting off the subject of hunting for a spell, I have now joined the No Screens Club. No smartphone, no TV, no tablet, no iPod, not even any screens on the windows for a total of 24 hours. I started 22 hours ago.

            “You look a little pale,” my Aunt Maud said to me when I handed her Agatha Christie books to her. “Come on in and sit down, relax with a mint julep while you and I watch The Secret Edge of Tomorrow’s General Hospital Storm, my favourite soap opera.”

            Of course I took to my heels immediately because I could hear her television from the yard where we were talking and I had two hours left to go. That was only a guess because I didn’t even know what time it was; my smartphone was back home and I don’t wear a watch.

            Well, I am here to report that I was screen-less for the full 24 hours – in fact almost 25 hours because I didn’t get back home until the full time plus an hour had elapsed. Now I suppose you want to know why in the world I would do such a crazy thing. I don’t have even a vague idea, can’t remember why I went berserk like that. It could have been because my cousin Vinnie had gone into the ditch along the Gulch Road (Highway 109) while he was texting a clam chowder recipe to his cousin Georgia. I doubt if that was the reason though; I never liked Vinnie.

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            I will close this column with a wonderful story I heard recently in a certain bake shop and luncheonette in Perth. I can’t remember all the details and won’t give the name, but let’s say that a chap named Arthur was driving along near Two Brooks, above Plaster Rock when he stopped along the road to hunt partridge. Within a few minutes he saw six of them, apparently asleep, sitting on a rock, each of them with claws in cracks. He raised his shotgun and then realized their claws were frozen into the rocks. “I can’t shoot them like that,” he said to himself. “That’s not sporting.”

            So he drove home, picked up a battery powered hair dryer, came back and thawed out their feet whereupon they quickly flew away. I believed every word of that story.
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