I lied. There are no antelopes in Fannin County but there are bears, deer, coyotes, panthers, the occasional llama and alpaca and various small furry animals that are best lumped under the category of critters. There is even a gorilla sanctuary around here somewhere though I have been told it is down to one inhabitant. If several crazy websites can be believed there are also Bigfoots and aliens from other planets. I haven’t seen any moonshiners or meth manufacturers but I understand they exist in the lonelier parts of the county. I’m told they look a lot like Bigfoot or a gorilla.
The point is that you’re never quite sure what you’re going to encounter when you step out the door round here.
With that in mind, the other night—in the middle of the night I might add—I heard a strange noise outside while I was writing. When something like that happens you have two options. You can go out to see what it is or stay inside and pretend you never heard it. It’s not that I lack personal courage or have a low testosterone level, but I opted for the latter. It’s a pain in the ass to fumble around looking for a pair of shoes and a coat at two in the morning in order to wander around in the cold and dark tripping over rocks and tree stumps looking for God knows what.
Besides, the way I figure it is if there is something big and dangerous outside there’s not much I can do about it anyway. Killing it would get me in trouble with the wildlife authorities. If it’s a Bigfoot I’d probably be jailed for interfering with an endangered species. At the very least I would shit my pants. If it’s an alien it probably has a death ray that can turn me into a smoking piece of beef jerky. It doesn’t help that I have an over-active and inventive imagination.
So early the next morning I left the cabin having forgotten the strange noises in the night. When I turned the corner of my cabin I saw something very strange, but before I get into that I have to set the scene.
We have an outdoor shower on the side of our house. It’s the greatest thing in the world on warm summer days after you’ve been working outside and are hot and sweaty. There’s nothing more refreshing on a hot day than standing under an outdoor shower naked to the world with the wind whistling through your willows.
Taking outdoor showers has helped me to understand why some people get into being nudists. There’s something very bracing and free spirited about being naked outdoors. But I have to think that what passes for the outdoors at a nudist camp is not remotely like the outdoors around here. Around here there are things that fly, sting, bite, and give you rashes, not to mention sharp pokey things that cause scratches and wounds. Running around in your birthday suit in this neck of the woods is not a good idea. That’s why I suspect that the outdoor environment at nudist camps is probably a lot tamer than it is around here.
That got me thinking about one of the essential differences between men and women. Men are dangly, women are bouncy. It seems to me that being naked and dangly is a more dangerous proposition than being naked and bouncy particularly when you’re in the great outdoors. For one thing, the dangly parts are closer to anthills than the bouncy parts.
Then the light really went on. The dangly versus bouncy difference explains why native men always wore loincloths but the native women were bare breasted in all those old National Geographic Magazines. I’ll bet the first item of clothing invented by the homo genus (and I use the word homo in its scientific sense) was the loincloth. I can picture it in my mind. At the dawn of history one of our male ancestors picked up a large pliable leaf and wrapped it around his private parts and shouted, “Eureka, I have solved the dangly problem,” while in the background could be heard the swelling strains of “Thus Spake Zarathustra.” Stanley Kubrick got it wrong in “2001: A Space Odyssey” —before there were tools or weapons there was the banana hammock.
Where was I? Oh yes, the outdoor shower and noises in the night. The floor of the outdoor shower is a large wooden thing I made. It’s what you stand on when you take a shower, and it looks like a wooden pallet. It’s probably six feet long and three feet wide, and it’s awkward and heavy.
That morning when I turned the corner of the cabin, I saw that the pallet had been dragged out from under the shower. Several boards had fallen or been torn off the pallet, and there was a large dead possum next to it with puncture wounds to its neck. “Well shiver my timbers,” I thought. That’s a greatly bowdlerized version of the real expression that passed through my mind.
I have no clue what type of creature killed the possum and dragged the pallet out of the shower. Putting on my detective hat, I assume the two events are related. I mean what are the odds of a dragged pallet and a dead possum happening coincidentally? I speculate that something went after the possum after it took refuge under the pallet and then that something dragged the pallet out to get to the possum. That’s a hell of a trick for one creature so it’s possible there were two or more of them.
What mystifies me is what sort of animal is strong enough to drag the pallet out from the shower. I think it would take one hell of a large, strong and determined dog to do it. Could it have been a bear or (and I’m just being inclusive here) a Bigfoot or an alien? Whatever it was, it had pointed teeth because it left puncture wounds on the neck of the possum.
The mystery remains unsolved, but one thing is sure. My initial decision to pretend I didn’t hear the noise is looking like the right one. Not that I lack personal courage or have a low testosterone level or anything.
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