"Well," he said, hitching up his overall straps, "are ya' ready to go?" With that, Uncle Al took off striding across the field with me puffing along behind.
"Man," I thought silently to myself, "how can that old man go that fast?" I wasn't even carrying anything. He had the pack with all the traps.
I had been fascinated with his furs ever since I could remember. I had tried as a high school kid to do my own trapping but decided it must involve something more than I knew. It wasn't until I was about 27 before I finally asked him to teach me.
"By gummy," he said, turning around and running his hand over his head, "you got lead in your feet or something?" I sped up and tried not to pant as I caught up with him. Al was my mentor for years. I plodded along after him that season and then began setting my own traps. For the first two years he skinned all my critters (except, of course, the skunks . . . it was up to me to dispose of my own there) and we split what the buyer paid. After two years he decided I could skin my own critters - all of em.
Al never trusted the fur buyer, though. I remember when he took in a nice red fox. The buyer graded it a medium number two and offered him $15 for it. "Naw, it's worth more than that. I ain't gonna sell it. I think I'll just keep it." That was one of the best lessons I learned from him. Two weeks later he took the same fur back and, glory be, a MIRACLE had transpired. Somehow, packed away for fourteen days, that fox had grown a couple of inches and had become a large number one. He sold it to the buyer for $35. Smirking all the while.
Not all of Al's critters got bigger skinned in the attic. A couple of nutria he kept live in the barn. They grew a couple of inches on cabbage and garden vegetables. Al even provided them with their own cozy bedroom - an ancient AWOL bag. I never quite had the gumption to ask if Auntie Ann knew about this clandestine activity, though, even if it did encourage me to try to fatten up a couple of them myself by letting them live in my bathtub (we didn't have a barn). My kids loved it but my wife wasn't too overjoyed - especially when they got out and took up residence under the refrigerator.
Al's on-going arguments with the fur buyer were more often then not over Al's mink. No matter how big or how fine a quality they were, the buyer ALWAYS declared them to be "cotton" mink and never worth more than $3. Al never quite forgave him for cheating him about the mink. I remember the one he showed my wife: a very large, soft fur which he had kept for at least a couple of years. Even as a conversation piece it was worth much more than the $1 the buyer had offered him for it.
Al provided me with an always jovial, always youthful teacher. Someone I always had fun around and enjoyed. I remember stopping by one day with a couple of friends after an empty-handed bird hunting trip. "He-e-e-y! You guys wanna do some shooting?" he asked. With that he lobbed an apple at the barn and a few bats flew out. "I betcha you could shoot them things if you tried," he offered. We headed back out to the truck and retrieved our shotguns to join Al in an impromptu game of target practice. Al lobbed apples and used a hose up under the roof to dislodge the bats. We shot up every box of shells we had (about five) and had a great time. So what if we didn't have pheasant for dinner?
Al was a wonderful, natural-born story teller. I only wish I could remember all the stories he told me over the years. The worst part is that even if I can remember the story, there is no way I can duplicate Al's telling of it. With my best imagination and all the prompting in the world I can't tell a story that has all the listeners holding their stomachs and tears running down their cheeks in laughter.
He was such a good story teller, in fact, that he was able to convince me, with a perfectly straight face, that you could let a live, alert skunk out of a trap without getting sprayed if you did it just right and talked to it just right. He regaled me with stories of the skunks he had turned loose. So I did it just right and I talked to it just right like he told me and . . . I still got sprayed. I continued to try to improve upon my technique since if Al could let them out of traps, I should be able to, too. Every time I tried, though, I got sprayed. And I tried several times over the next few years. "By gummy," he'd say when I dropped by, "you musta not learned how to turn skunks loose yet." It was a clear implication that he could smell my success rate. I slowly began to wonder if he was feeding me a line. I began imagining him sitting on his stool in the kitchen and gleefully rubbing his hands together every time I got sprayed. I wondered if I had become the subject matter for some of his stories. I could just hear his beginning line, "I got this dumb nephew . . . " I'll never be sure if I was just too dumb to learn how or if I finally wised up when I quit trying. At any rate, I smelled better most of the time and I just let Al guess whether or not I'd quit or perfected the technique.
He told about the hunting trip when he shot a nice buck. He walked into the woods where it had fallen and was lying dead on the ground. Not wanting to waste a shell by shooting it again just to make sure, he leaned his rifle against a tree and unsheathed his knife to slit the throat. As he got close to it, the buck resurrected itself, jumped up and charged off into the woods. Al stood there, the buck running one way and his rifle out of reach the other direction. A bit disgruntled, Al resheathed his knife, retrieved his rifle and started tracking the buck. Since he was a good tracker, he soon spotted the deer down flat on the ground. Knowing for sure that it was dead now, he again propped his rifle against a tree, unsheathed his knife and prepared to slit its throat. The Lazurus buck jumped up and bounded into the trees. Deja vu! Now truly disgusted with himself for being so stupid and lacking the ability to grab his rifle in time, Al begin tracking the deer yet again. This time, though, it must have figured it had used up all its luck and had amply humiliated the hunter because it had the good sense not to lay down again where Al could find it. And he never did.
One day when my wife and I stopped by to visit, Uncle Al took me back into the garage to show me his trophy rack. The antlers from the buck he had shot that season. Or, rather, the antler from his buck. I remember looking at it skeptically as he held the half-rack in the air with this big grin on his face and a twinkle in his eye that let me know he just couldn't wait to tell me - the REST of the story. To Auntie Ann's chagrin, he told it with great enthusiasm. It seems that Al shot a nice four point but they wanted to put it on Ann's tag so, just to make it real legal, Al lined Ann up to make the "killing shot" while it lay on the ground. Ann pulled the rifle to her shoulder and carefully aimed at the buck. Just before pulling the trigger, she closed her eyes and turned her head slightly away so she wouldn't see the animal when the shell hit it. And hit it it did. "By gummy," he said, "Mother blew away half the darn rack!" Not wanting to risk the other half, he ended up doing the dastardly deed himself.
I love Pat McMannis books. Many of his stories remind me of Uncle Al. Even as an adult, he would challenge me to apple-throwing competitions. We'd skewer the windfalls on a stick and see just how far we could lob them. I think we finally quit when one of the apples narrowly missed a car passing on the highway. Even now I have to chuckle as I envision an old man and me out there throwing apples like little boys. And I think that is probably the essence of Al's charm. He delighted in life with the enthusiasm of a child. His clouds always had silver linings.