Due to the position, I was expected to be in each of four
offices around the country at least twice every three weeks, and the rest of
the time I spent on the road (or in the sky) among more than seventy
territorial offices, and whenever I could spare the time, I was to visit the
individual company stores. Since I was
almost completely in control of my own schedule, I was able to take “down time”
just about anywhere I wished, and I used my “down time” in the best hunting and
fishing areas I could find.
Hunting was never at the top of my list of things to do, but
I did hunt a few times each year. The
basic problem was that hunting usually took more than a day to accomplish, and
it almost always required “tags” to hunt what I wanted to hunt. More often than not, I wasn’t successful
when the drawings occurred, but luck was there from time to time.
One year I drew a deer tag for Colorado, but I missed out on
the elk tag. Oh well. I took some of my down time in southwest
Colorado in the rough Uncompahgre National Forest area and started my
hunt. I hiked about six or so miles
from the campground into the wilderness where I came upon an old barbed-wire
fence (in Texas we would call it bob-war).
It was mid-morning and warm so I sat down and leaned back on one of the
fence posts to look out across the large mountain meadow in front of me. I guess I was tired and fell asleep, because
the next thing I knew a foot was nudging me in the side.
The game warden said he was just testing to see if I was
alive. Apparently I gave him some cause
for concern. He checked my rifle to see
if it was loaded, chambered, safety on or off, etc., and I passed the exam
since I was still carrying the rounds in my pocket instead of the rifle. Then he asked if he could sit down and have
some lunch with me. That got my
attention. I checked my watch and
realized I had been asleep at least three hours. We had lunch.
Just as we were finishing up, I noticed a movement at the
far end of the meadow and motioned to the warden to take a look. Neither of us could see it clearly due to
some shadows, but he encouraged me to load up and use the scope on the
rifle. I did, but it wasn’t a deer. Instead it was an eight by eight elk. It was beautiful, but I didn’t have the
right tag, and I was sitting beside a game warden. I handed the rifle to him to look at it, and he sat there looking
at it no more than four seconds before he pulled the trigger.
I didn’t quite know what to do. He handed me back the rifle and thanked me for the opportunity to
harvest such a trophy. We found the elk
within twenty feet of the impact point, and it was just plain big. The warden had some kind of a portable
two-way communication radio with him, and he used it to call for help. About forty-five minutes later, another
warden with a 4 x 4 pickup arrived, and we winched the elk into the bed. It was about that time I realized these
wardens had done this before. Now I was
thinking I had better disappear before someone decides I shot the elk. But before I had a chance to run, they drove
away leaving me to my own fate.
Not all down times were as exciting, and few were more than
just a day or so visiting the great open cathedral we call nature, but another
instance comes to mind where I took a day to go fishing.
I was at one of our stores in Minnesota, and the store
manager asked if I would like to go fishing.
The store sold licenses, so I was ready in less than an hour. We traveled to a nearby body of water that
covered maybe ten to twelve acres, and there we threw our lines in the
water. He was a fly fisherman, and I
was a wannabe, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask for lessons. Instead I used the spinning gear I always
packed for my travels. I don’t know if
there were any fish in that pond, or just why we chose it in the first place,
but it wasn’t work, and you know what they say about the “worst day fishing…”
We had been there about twenty minutes or so when we heard a
racket just to the north of us. Looking
over that direction, I spotted the first badger I had ever seen outside of a
picture book, zoo, or taxidermy shop.
It was actually fun to look at until I realized it was mad at me. Apparently I had invaded its territory.
Reggie the store manager said that these things usually
won’t try to out run us, and if we just move away it will settle down and leave
us alone. So we moved about fifty yards
or so to the south. About ten or
fifteen minutes later the hissing and racket returned. We looked up to see the badger had not given
up on us. So we moved further south and
around the westward turn of the pond.
This time we were about one hundred or more yards from the critter.
One hundred yards wasn’t enough. The old badger was relentless, so we moved on, this time circling
around to the northwest corner of the water, where we were left in peace for
about an hour. But the peace was again
disturbed, and we circled back to where we started. When we heard the hissing again, we decided it was time to
leave. At this point one would think
the badger would give up, but one would think incorrectly.
Reggie and I returned to the store, where we discussed
business for a few hours, and then we walked over to a restaurant for
dinner. We returned to the store for
another hour or two of discussions before he started to take me to my hotel for
the night. When we walked out to his
car, the two rear tires were flat. He
called the car club he was a member of and soon a tow truck was there to do
some tire repair. When the first tire
was pulled off, the repairman commented that we must have hit something hard to
knock such a piece of the tire off. The
second tire had the same problem, but this time, caught in the cracked edges of
the ruined tire was a large tuft of badger hair.
I had a good laugh over this, but Reggie did not. At least not until I had him put two new
tires on my expense account. I figure
that the work accomplished after the few hours of fishing was far more than if
we had worked the entire day, therefore, the new tires could be justified by
the time savings. Well, that’s what I
told Reggie. When I got back to my main
office in Chicago a few days later, I wrote a check to cover the tires.
My boss didn’t understand.
All he could comprehend was that I had used the expense account to cover
personal expenses. He backed off some
when he found out I had already written the check to reimburse the company, but
he didn’t let it go. As the months went
by, he would still remind me about it from time to time.
Almost two years later I found myself back at Reggie’s store
and of course we went fishing. Needless
to say we went back to the same pond, but this time we caught a few fish, and
we heard no hissing. We laughed and
joked about the badger the entire time we were there until we decided to go
back to the store. When we got to the
car, the two rear tires were flat, and crawling off into the brush was the butt
of our jokes from the last few hours.