brad the hunter
My friend Brad is a pretty strange character, which is why I love him. Last summer he went out to Wyoming and went batshit while he was there. He said it was the lonliness and solitude that did it to him.He worked on a ranch, which might seem like fun if you have never spent any time alone with a big pile of poop and a shovel. Brad has. One of the things he would do while he was out there was bottle his own urine. I think he started burying the bottles after a while. Someday I will go out there and dig one up.
The story goes that he was living in a small cabin on the ranch with a guy who was going to Yale. I think the guy's name was Brody or Chip or Tad or something like that. Anyway the cabin lacked a bathroom, so if Brad needed to pee, he had to make a 100 yard trek across the outskirts of the badlands to a cabin which did have a bathroom.
As anyone who has been in the desert knows it gets cold at night out there, so Brad began to relieve himself in Gatorade jars, or whatever was handy. Brad, a lazy bastard, began to fall behind in throwing the bottles out, so he'd hide them behind books on the bookshelf. Yale found the bottles one day.
Yale picked a bottle up. "Is this piss?" he asked Brad.
"Yeah.", admitted Brad. What do you say when someone finds your bottle of piss? There's nothing to do but come clean.
"No, dude, this is not piss.." Yale insisted. Brad confirmed that it was.
Yale decided that he would open the bottle and smell the piss. He opened it. He smelled the piss. Not only was it indeed piss, but he was a Yale film student, standing in a tired cabin, in his L.L. Bean and Gap clothes, in the middle of Wyoming, sniffing it. I can not imagine this scenario without laughing until tears come to my eyes.
Yale was so traumatized by the whole piss-smelling incident that he told all the girls on the ranch about what Brad had done. Unfortunately, this made getting laid a tough proposition for Brad.
There were other things to do out there than just bottle one's own piss. They had a .22 rifle that Brad would to take into the hills. He'd shoot rodents, primarily a rodent that he called a picket pen. It seems these picket pens were not too smart, because Brad depopulated a square mile area of them in no time (or so he claims). They would also wander into the cabin while Brad was reading.
He would let them wander in, lying very still on his bunk. The picket pen would sniff around, and become more confident, coming farther into the cabin. When it had gotten in far enough, Brad would leap out of bed and slam the door, trapping the picket pen.
Brad described this moment to me as the thoughts that the picket pen might have had.
"Uh oh, it's on, now..".
What followed was a tangled ruckus of overturning beds and chairs to expose the picket pen, with Brad trying to capture it. Brad would wear leather gloves so it couldn't bite him. He said the thing would bite the gloves for a while, and then just sort of look up as if to say "Well, ok. Eat me.".
Brad didn't eat it. He put it on a leash. He paraded the picket pen around on a rope leash for awhile, but the girls on the ranch were so horrified at this display of cruelty to a rodent that Brad agreed to let it go.
Before he did, however, he spraypainted its ass orange with fence paint, so he would be able to spot it later on. No one believed that he had spraypainted its ass, until another of the ranch hands spotted the orange-assed picket pen one day. Thankfully, Brad's integrity was restored among his coworkers.
After shooting so many picket pens, he began to get a reputation around the ranch as a hunter, so the staff started to make bets on how many of these things he could kill in a day. Eventually this got tiring, because he just slaughtered them, so they started to make their bets on how many he could get without a gun.
They sent him out with a broom one day, and he got one. "I hit it with the handle," he told me. Next they sent him out with a large soup ladle. He came back with a battered, but very dead picket pen.
Finally, they sent him into the hills on his weekend off with only a table spoon. Brad crouched over a picket pen hole for 24 hours straight, waiting for his chance. Finally one emerged.
Brad saw his chance and knocked it on the head with the spoon, but it just ran back in the hole. Seasoned hunter that he was, he patiently waited for another opportunity.
As he was sitting there one of the visitors to the ranch walked by with the owner of the place. The visitor saw Brad crouching over the picket pen hole. The visitor turned to the owner of the ranch and said "Don't you feed that boy?".
He eventually killed a picket pen who wandered out of that hole, and it was his last. It had just gotten too easy. I suppose there are only so many times a man can spend the night in the desert, hoping to bash the shit out of a picket pen with a table spoon. For Brad, that number of times was one.
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