Remarkable, really. Not the first of my hunting or fishing companions, even the zaniest, admits to regular outdoor dreams.
I’d suspect subterfuge, collusion, even amnesia. Dreams do have a short shelf life. How many can you remember from last month? Or, for that matter, the past week. It’s like the brain wakes up the next morning, realizes what it’s done, and shreds the evidence.
Maybe the illusions are simply too horrendous or outrageous to recall. Too intimate to bare. Whatever, my chums are standing pat I’d still be suspicious, except that my own after-hours hallucinations track similarly. Dreams of the sporting life are relatively sparse. It evades logic.
Give a brain a six-hour holiday and it automatically jumps into spin-cycle, energized by a volatile mix of imagination and mischief. It skips through the warehouse, sucking data-bytes from a jumble of brain-cell cubicles and leaps into a bender. Voila … a dream! The most bizarre and calamitous of these it chooses to share with our subconscious. All in peripatetic milliseconds, they say. No mystery there. Eighteen hours a day coping with 27 degrees of crisis and calamity it’s easy to empathize with a little craziness. If dreams could be previewed on 10-second delay, we’d keep the good ones and trash the bad ones before they hurt anybody. As it is, you never know when Norman Bates will part your shower curtain.
What I can’t fathom is the dearth of robust, stem-winding, episodic rod and gun adventure.
Of the three quarters of our lives we are conscious, those of us most seriously brain-bitten with the sporting life surely spend more time striking up day visions of Holland shotguns, Leonard rods, FinNor reels, Osthaus oils, Dakota pheasants, Alaskan blacktails, six-by elk, Lab pups and such than plotting out illusions of garrote-wielding serial killers or plagiarizing the pages of the National Enquirer. And what we’re not thinking about. we’re doing. Tell me then, why in creation we must be so disproportionately beleaguered by mainstream societal detritus in our sleep.
With all the sporting material at hand, somewhere the priorities are fouled.
Left to wander, the gray matter deftly conjures up a tryst with Julia Roberts, draped in something even Victoria wouldn’t divulge, in a Dempster Dumpster on the back seat of a taxi dangling from the Golden Gate bridge. Only to have it evaporate mercilessly at pinnacle, as she lapses into, first, Phyllis Diller on a bad hair day and finally Drew Carey in drag. Adroitly, it has us hog-tied in a dungeon at one end of a long, inky tunnel, as Saddam Hussein diabolically readies the hypodermic which will inject rancid tomato juice in our veins. While at the other end, behind a screen door in a tiny halo of light, our mothers admonish us to wash our hands before dinner. And then, a dime a dozen, it serves up the hideous creep, or his variation, stealing bedside and hoisting a 10-inch butcher blade, while we frantically struggle to force ourselves awake.
Why, in the name of right stem/left stem, can’t it as easily place us in a South African bird shoot wielding $80-grand matched Purdeys, alongside Sandra Bullock in safari shorts, where the birds fly like hailstones and every shot’s a hit?
Try as I will. I myself can remember only a one-hand, finger count of sporting dreams in 50 years. Strangely, all have been good. Wacky, but good. Neat even. In those few expeditions, I have hunted native pheasants that turned into Kodiak browns, sage grouse, Maine coon cat, bongo and another variety of bush buck that resembled a Harlequin Great Dane. And never left Carolina.
The latest was a doozy.
Three of us, along with Charlton Heston, were chasing Mississippi green heads. Literally chasing, running after ’em I mean. It was 23 degrees with a windchill of -14 and Charlton was in his Ben Hur togs, carrying a .338 Remington 11-87. We decided to split; they’d cross the river. I’d hang this side. I don’t know how they did it There was no boat in sight. Soon, however, I heard the distant thump of their guns I don’t know — maybe Heston parted the waters. I never saw them again.
I noticed about 5,000 mallards settling into this small pocket off the river. Quickly I made my way there. I eased up and parted the last screen of bushes. Not a duck in sight. Suddenly, there was a sandy beach out front full of girls and umbrellas, under a bluebird sky and the sun was shining.
Meanwhile, a big flock of greenies circled twice and dropped in like doorstops. I let them land and hollered “Shooo!” One lonely duck got up. The rest vanished. The loner, species unknown, uniformly tan with a black breast and head, climbed a high oblique, about as gracefully as a flighted pig I shoved the muzzle out in front of it and yanked the trigger. It flinched, then sailed a death glide into the middle of a small municipality, abruptly annexed to the fringe of the slough.
I stepped out of the willows into traffic, and immediately put on brakes. Jodie, my Boykin spaniel, however, materializing inexplicably, dashed to the retrieve. I cringed as she dodged a local transport.
In a jiffy, she was back, sporting the alien bird. Chasing her was an overwrought gentleman in a tux and derby.
“Good girl” I said.
“The City Manager n-e-e-d-s t-o s-e-e y-o-u fellow!” the gent in the derby said.
Politely, I complied, only to be halted by the City Clerk outside his office. She wore horn-rimmed glasses, a Jones cap and Realtree Extra-Brown.
“You again,” she glowered.
”I’ve never been here before,” I countered meekly.
“Don’t give me that,” she blurted, pulling a Desert Eagle from the middle drawer, and tossing it on the desktop, ”I’d know that mug anywhere.”
About then the City Manager came out. He looked like Mean Joe Green. He was dressed in a three-piece Brookspin stripe with master sergeant stripes on the sleeves. Honest.
“Your dog retrieved a damned dead duck from my out-box!” he bellowed brusquely.
I wanted to ask him how in Jesus it got through the roof, but thought better of it, and abstained.
I was prepared for the worst, when suddenly his craggy face crumbled into a broad smile, and he invited me in for tea. We spent the rest of the morning swapping war stories from our respective government careers. Soon the whole administrative staff was there. At our parting, three voluptuous secretaries came by, laid their hands gently on mine as a covey, and cooed sweet nonsense.
When it comes to sporting chimera, it appears that what we miss in quantity, we redeem in quality.
More please. I’ll take the risk.
And if you know how to program a New Jersey buffalo hunt (the Cape type), where I take a 48-inch bull with a .410 without getting stomped or gored, please write.
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the 1998 July/August issue of Sporting Classics.
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