He had arranged our trip for the following week. A trip to the coast range where he had never hunted before. We were going with his cousin, Bob, and Larry and Gary, two friends. We drove most of the evening and arrived after dark at the dent in the road where we were to camp. A miserably cold and persistent drizzle was falling as it usually does on the coast of Oregon in November. I immediately noticed that there was no campground, no outhouses and seemingly, no water other than that dripping from the sky.

     "You stay here in the pickup while we get the tent up," Ken said, giving me a furtive kiss, "you'll stay dry that way."

     "Thanks," I said, "how thoughtful of you." With the engine off and the doors open so the guys could get things, I was freezing, but I could think of no civil way to mention it. Larry and Gary were having some kind of belching contest and trading lewd jokes.

     Ken and Bob pitched the tent and Bob lit his sheep-herder's stove to get some warmth inside those canvas walls just for me, the new bride. Fortunately, Gary and Larry were sleeping in a camper. We could already hear the roar of Gary's snoring as we rolled out three separate sleeping bags and crawled in. Ken and I were in romantic long johns and Bob had on a stylish quilted Union suit. It had been a long day, and we fell immediately to sleep.

     Sometime during the night I was aroused from my sleep by Ken coughing. Bob, too was coughing and gasping for air.

     "What is it?" I cried, "What's that awful smell? I think I'm choking!" The tent seemed to be filled with thick, dark smoke, "Is something on fire?" My voice climbed an upward scale.

     Both men jumped up and, in the beams of their flashlights, discovered that our heat-source, which was a home-made barrel affair that burned kerosene, had willfully decided to backfire during the night. It was quietly puffing out great clouds of acrid black smoke.

     "Get the door! Get the door!" Bob yelled. Ken, who had been unzipping windows, began urgently fumbling with the zipper on the door flap.

     As the flap opened, Bob grabbed the stove and, with a mighty heave, launched it far out into the rainy night.

     "Damn stove," Bob's language was surprisingly mild for the way I felt. "It's never done that before. Why now?" he demanded.

     "Are your hands OK?" I asked, my voice cracking and quavering. I was afraid he had burned them; he had acted so swiftly, he couldn't have considered that possibility.

     "Yah, I think so," he looked at them in the beam of Ken's flashlight.

     "Are you OK?" Ken asked, turning to me. He actually sounded concerned. It must have been that note of hysteria in my voice.

     "Do we have anything to drink?" I croaked. My nose and throat felt like they were lined with cockle burrs and the inside of my mouth was wearing someone's fuzzy wool sweater. What water we had was somewhere in the back of the canopy and none of us felt like going to get it. Getting back to sleep was difficult: it was impossible to get warm and I could not get rid of the gritty, caustic kerosene taste.

     I suppose I should be thankful I didn't have a mirror to see myself, but as I looked in confusion at Ken and Bob in the morning, bubbles of laughter welled up, blotting out the memory of the night. I could not imagine why they looked as if they had prepared for an Al Jolson review but there they were, white eyes and pink mouths shining in coal-black faces. When Ken turned to me, there was not laughter on his face but a look of pure astonishment which turned to some expression I had never seen before and couldn't quite describe. It then occurred to me that I, too, was prepared for the same review. Bob was undaunted by the whole thing and got out a bottle of peppermint schnapps for his regular hunting-routine morning gargle. I, on the other hand, wanted the smoke from that stove cleaned off my face!

     "So," Gary said, "you started hunting without us, huh. I see you got a big one during the night." His sweeping gesture indicated the fat stove lying in the soggy brush, a dead hulk just visible in the pre-dawn light. He and Larry were standing in the door or our tent and it was several moments of astonishment looking at our faces before cognition took place and they knew what had happened.

     "Here," Larry offered, holding out a handful of Kleenex, "it's all I've got." His sympathetic look made me feel even sorrier for myself.

     "Come on over to the light," Ken tugged me by the arm. He tried the "spit and polish" routine usually reserved for small children. He was obviously beginning to feel a bit guilty. We had no stove, no heat, no fire, no hot water. I had to go to the no-bathroom.

     Bob held out the bottle of peppermint Schnapps. "Try cleaning it off with this. It might work," he suggested. Nothing helped. Gary's loud guffaws were not helping, either.

     "Well, hell, just drink the darn stuff, then," Bob finally suggested, "If you drink enough of it, you won't even care." The guys held a meaningful discussion and decided that grease of some kind should cut through the smoke.

     "I know," Gary finally came up with a constructive contribution, "I've got a tube of Chapstick in my coat pocket. That stuff's always greasy." He began rummaging around in his various pockets pulling out pocket knives, shells, toilet paper, candy bars, matches . . . and finally triumphantly held up a tube of cherry Chapstick. Ken gently smeared it on my cheeks. Surely that would do the job.

     "What's wrong?" I asked as a feeling of doom crept over me.

     The expression on Ken's face just barely preceded Larry's gasp and Gary's loud hoot. Bob was silent. Chapstick, it seems, is not an oil base, but a paraffin base and, in that cold, mixed with the smokey residue, it had turned to a hard mass of little black spikes. I looked like a cockle burr! Ken was horror-stricken. He broke off what chunks he could then glanced despairingly towards the rising sun. We had wasted enough time. I choked down my pride, trying not to think about how I looked. We shouldered our rifles and headed out into the underbrush.

     "Mammy," Gary's lusty voice followed us through the manzanita, "how I love ya', how I love ya'. . ."

     The rest of the day is another story. Suffice it to say that we did not get an elk. Late that night, when we finally arrived back at camp, Bob's roaring bonfire (I think he lit it as a signal fire) was a welcome sight indeed: it meant that I'd probably find hot water waiting for me and could quit looking like an escapee from the wax museum's "Little House of Horrors." Bob's face, with only a few streaks and smears left, was even more reassuring.

     In retrospect, and in spite of jokes to the contrary, I think that not all hunters are dumb. Although I met several strangers in the woods that day, not one asked the somewhat disgruntled young woman packing a loaded 308 what was wrong with her face.