Good stories about humorous practical jokes are common at the daily Old Geezers’ Coffee & Gabfest. Here’s a good fishy practical joke as related by my new fishing buddy, ol’ Castin Krankitt.
The story goes that a local Riley fisherman and his buddies decided to spend a weekend camping and fishing a nearby river. They spent several days getting ready for their “fishy” weekend. Saturday morning when they got to the river and after they all got settled, they turned to serious fishing.
One fisherman either was really good or really lucky and quickly filled a stringer with nice fish, which he loudly bragged about to anyone within earshot. When his stringer wuz full, he anchored it on the bank close to the camp and went around a bend in the river to continue fishing. He admonished his buddies to “watch my stringer of fish and keep the turtles from eating our supper.”
When he got out of eye-sight, one of his buddies laughed, “Let’s play a fishy practical joke.” That motivated the ornery rascals to pull the stringer of fish out of the water and quickly sliced the fillets off of every fish, being careful to leave only the heads and bare backbones.
Then they put the remains of the filleted fish back on the stringer and waited with high anticipation for the practical joke’s victim to return.
Before long, the victim returned with a few more fish to add to his stringer. When he pulled the stringer from the water, he quickly surmised that a renegade snapping turtle had made a fine meal of his hard-earned fish. And, predictably, he launched into an obscenity-laced tirade at his “friends” for their slovenly inattentiveness.
When they wouldn’t quit laughing, he looked more closely at the turtle-eaten fish carcasses and realized the prank they had pulled on him.
All’s well that ends well, and the buddies enjoyed a fine fish fry that evening and they all left with a life-long memory of their weekend together.
***
Folks who live in rural areas can expect to have both positive and negative encounters with wildlife.
The positive ones are seeing wildlife in idyllic settings like a doe and fawn coming to drink at a pond, or having a covey of quail nearly stop your heart with its flurry of wings with it flushes, or seeing mother birds diligently feeding their babies through the summer.
But, on the other end of the wildlife spectrum are the negative ones like having your pets, chickens, calves, lambs or kid goats killed by coyotes, foxes, hawks or eagles. Or, smacking a deer with your car or pickup and having expensive damages. Or, happening upon hurt or injured wildlife that you have to put out of its suffering.
And, rural law enforcement officers aren’t exempt from negative wildlife encounters and what happened to one unfortunate Riley County police officer one day last week proves the point.
While on patrol, he received notice of a car/deer collision. When he arrived, the poor deer wuz crippled and he, sadly, but dutifully, put it out of its misery.
He had scarcely handled that accident, when another similar car/deer accident happened nearby and he had to investigate that accident, too. The ugly task of killing the crippled deer had to be done again.
But, his negative encounters with wildlife that day were not over. That afternoon he received a call from within the Riley urban boundary (the stuffy new name for city limits) that a coyote and a dog were fighting in a resident’s back yard.
The officer’s investigation showed the call wuz true. A coyote and dog were squared off in the yard and having a tussle. Fearing that the coyote wuz rabid, the officer carefully approached the fight and wuz able to dispatch the coyote with one shot from his service weapon.
And, that’s when the strangest thing happened. Upon seeing the coyote being shot, the dog promptly turned on the officer and bit his leg.
Luckily, the dog bite didn’t draw blood and there wuz no rabies endangerment to the officer. But, I’ll bet he never has another day to equal his negative encounters with wildlife that day.
***
Two nights ago the area around Damphewer Acres had a really good rain. Five inches of rain provided much-needed runoff into the local ponds and flushed out the stagnant creeks. We had some hail stones up to quarter-size, but very little hail damage.
We were lucky and we know it. A lot of rural folks across the nation experienced floods and tornadoes.
***
A worn-down farm wife started nagging her bedraggled husband to take her on vacation. Finally, her exasperated hubby got a map of the U.S., pinned it to the wall, and told his wife to throw a dart at it. Where ever the dart landed, he promised to spend a week with her there.
Little did he know he’s spend the week with his wife behind their refrigerator.
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Words of wisdom for the week: “Old age is coming at a really bad time for me!” Have a good ‘un.
