The Grasshopper Trap

by Patrick F. McManus

  “Don’t talk to me about it!”

  I held up the grasshopper trap’s gunnysack, which appeared to have been run over at least twice. “I think we might be able to use some of these grasshoppers to go fishing.”

  Rancid raised an eyebrow. “You mean some of them hoppers ain’t squished?”

  “Well, no, they’re all squished,” I said. “But we could make little balls of grasshopper paste and put them on our hooks.”

  At that moment I returned from the mists of time to the stubble field, where Retch Sweeney was just waking up from his nap. Retch blinked and yawned. “You ready to do some more huntin’?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But first let me ask you something. Can you imagine a grown man going berserk just because someone suggested fishing with balls of grasshopper paste?”

  Get Lost!

  Several years ago I wrote what many experts consider the most authoritative work ever published on the topic of getting lost. The idea for the article germinated out of my observation that whereas millions of words have been written on how to survive when lost, absolutely nothing I had ever read dealt with the basic problem—how to get lost in the first place. What’s the point of knowing how to survive if you don’t know how to get lost?

  Getting lost was a subject I knew firsthand. During my formative years, or approximately to age forty-five, I had deliberately contrived to discover all the various ways of getting lost, not only in the easy places, such as forests, mountains, and swamps, but also in less obvious terrain—vacant lots, shopping malls, parking garages, passenger trains, and tall buildings.

  I discovered early in life that I had a natural talent for getting lost, a talent that through practice and discipline I honed to a sharp edge. By my mid-twenties I could set out for the corner grocery two blocks away from my house and, with practically no effort at all, end up several hours later in a trackless wasteland without the vaguest notion of how I had gotten there or how to get back. It reached the point where my wife would not allow me to go down to the basement to clean the furnace without map, compass, matches, and a three-day supply of food and water. I eventually compiled all my research on the subject of getting lost into an article entitled “The Modified Stationary Panic,” which stands to this day, in the opinion of many, as the consummate work on the subject.

  Although many scholars are satisfied to rest on their laurels, I am not. Several years passed without my becoming seriously lost even once, and I realized that I might lose the knack altogether, if I did not get out and do some fresh research. Thus, when my friends Vern and Gisela Schulze invited me along on a November deer-hunting trip in the snowy mountains north of their Idaho home, I quickly accepted.

  The hunting trip started off in typical fashion. Vern assumed command and laid out the plans for the hunt, which included the admonition to me not to stray out of his sight. Vern and I have hunted, fished, and backpacked together ever since childhood, and I like to think that I have enriched his outdoor life immeasurably in providing him with countless hours of searching for me. Vern loves a good search.

  Several opportunities to get lost offered themselves during the morning, but every time I thought to take advantage of them, either Vern or Gisela would come bounding out of the brush and herd me back to the trail. Then, about noon, I managed to give them the slip. I found a fresh set of deer tracks and followed them around the edge of a mountain—one of the best methods I’ve ever found for getting lost, and I highly recommend it. Soon the wind came up and snow began to fall, obliterating my own tracks so I couldn’t retrace my trail, a nice bonus indeed! I can’t begin to describe my elation upon suddenly stopping, peering around at the unfamiliar terrain, and discovering that I could still tell due north from my left elbow, but only because one of them itched.

  I immediately began to perform the Modified Stationary Panic, which consists of running madly in place, whooping and hollering as the mood dictates. The panic will thus conclude in the same spot it began, rather than, say, in the next state. The Modified Stationary Panic, one of my own inventions, eliminates chances for serious injury, as often occurs in the Flat-Out Ricochet Panic, and also does away with the need for your rescuers to comb a four-county area in their search for you.

  No sooner had I completed the panic than Vern showed up. I did my best to conceal my disappointment.

  “I thought you were lost,” he said.

  “No,” I said. “I was right here.”

  “Good,” he said. “Maybe you’ve finally outgrown the tendency. Anyway, I just spotted the fresh tracks of a big buck going up over the mountain, and I’m going to see if I can find him. You swing around the north edge of the mountain till you come to an old logging road. You can’t miss it. When you hit the logging road, follow it back to the car and I’ll meet you there.”

  “Right,” I said.

  Ha! Vern’s mind was going bad. Here he had just presented me with the classic formula for getting lost, and he didn’t even realize it. “The old logging road you can’t miss” is one of the great myths of hunting lore.

  As darkness closed in, accompanied by an icy, wind-driven rain, I found myself scaling a precipice in the presumed direction of the mythical logging road. My spirits had long since ceased to soar and were now roosting gloomily in my hungry interior. About halfway up the side of the cliff, I paused to study a loose rock in my hand and recognized it as one that was supposed to be holding me to the side of the mountain. My plummet into space was sufficiently long to allow me time for reflection, although on nothing of great philosophical significance. My primary thought, in fact, consisted of the rudimentary, “Boy, this is going to hurt!”

  Sorting myself out from a tangle of fallen trees at the bottom of the cliff, I took roll call of my various extremities, and found them present, with the exception of the right leg. Rebellious by nature, the leg now appeared to be absent without leave. Well, I could not have been more gratified. Not only was it getting dark and raining ice water, but I was incapacitated at the bottom of a canyon where no one would ever expect me to be. Even so, sensing that searchers might by luck find me too easily, I struggled upright on my remaining leg, broke off a dead tree limb for a crutch, and hobbled for another mile or so away from the beaten track. “Just let them find me now,” I muttered to myself, struggling to restrain a smirk. “This is lost. This is real honest-to-goodness lost. It may be years before anyone finds me.”

  Detecting the onset of hypothermia, I built a fire to keep warm. But that is to put it too simply, too casually. No fire ever enjoyed such devoted attention. Cornea transplants are slapdash by comparison. The proceedings opened with a short religious service. Then pieces of tinder were recruited individually, trained, and assigned particular duties. Over the tinder I placed larger pieces, some approaching the size of toothpicks. At last the delicate structure was ready for the match. And another match. And still another match! I melted the snow from the area with a few appropriate remarks, and tried again to light the fire. This time it took. A feeble, wispy little blaze ate a piece of tinder, gagged, and nearly died. I gave it mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. It struggled back to life, sampled one of the toothpicks, found the morsel to its liking, and ate another. The flame leaped into the kindling. Soon the robust blaze devoured even the wet branches I fed to it, first by the handful and then by the armful. A mere bonfire would not do, I wanted an inferno. A person lost in winter knows no excess when it comes to his fire.

  Next to the inferno, I built a lean-to with dead branches pried from the frozen ground. I roofed the lean-to with cedar boughs, and spread more boughs on the ground for a bed. Well satisfied with my woodcraft and survival technique, I stepped back to admire the camp. “Heck, I could survive here until spring,” I said to myself. “Then again, maybe only three hours.”

  Once the lost person has his inferno going and his lean-to built, the next order of business is to think up witty remarks and dry comments with which to greet his rescuers. It’s unprofessional to greet r
escuers with stunned silence or, worse yet, to blurt out something like, “Good gosh almighty, I thought you’d never find me!” One must be cool, casual. Lying on the bed of boughs, next to the inferno, roasting one side of me and freezing the other, I tried to come up with some appropriate witticisms. “Dr. Livingstone, I presume,” was one I thought rather good. Wishing to call attention to my successful fire-building technique, I thought I might try, “Did you bring the buns and wieners?” It is amazing how many witticisms you can think up while lying lost in the mountains. Two are about the limit.

  I drifted off into fitful sleep, awakening from time to time to throw another log on the fire and check the darkness for Sasquatches. Suddenly, sometime after midnight, a voice thundering from the heavens jolted me awake. “Kneel! Kneel!” the voice roared.

  So it has come to this, I thought. I stumbled to my feet and, wearing my lean-to about my shoulders, peered up into the darkness. A light was bouncing down the side of the canyon! And the voice called from above, “Neil! Neil! Have you found him?”

  Within moments, Vern, Gisela, Neil, and the other members of the Boundary County Search and Rescue Team were gathered around me. It was a moving and dramatic scene, if I do say so myself. Calmly shucking off my lean-to, I tried to recall one of the witticisms I had thought up for the occasion. But the only one that came to mind was, “Good gosh almighty, I thought you’d never find me!” All things considered, that wasn’t too bad.

  Never Cry Snake!

  I never have been particularly fond of snakes, but they have their uses. As a child, I used them to good effect in psychological studies I conducted on my older sister. The Troll, as she was known by me, was older and stronger than I, and won most of the skirmishes in the long sibling war we conducted over the years of my youth. Then I discovered her fear of snakes. By suddenly whipping a little garter snake out of my pocket I could stop one of her frontal assaults in mid-stride and send her into bellowing retreat. My mother once accused me of turning the Troll into a “nervous wreck.” My feeling was that Herbie the snake and I had improved her reflexes by about three hundred percent.

  In college, I discovered this same fear of snakes in my roommate, a nervous chap named Richard. (How nervous he was before becoming my roommate, I don’t know, but he was certainly nervous afterwards.) I had become interested in the occult sciences by this time, and discovered that by placing a toy rubber snake beneath his sheets, I could induce Richard to levitate three feet straight up from the bottom bunk, where he would then cling like a possum to the springs of the top bunk. (I should point out that it is difficult to precipitate this reaction with a rubber snake unless the subject has first been conditioned by sudden and unexpected exposure to real snakes, such as might turn up in the subject’s study desk.) Richard’s screaming of vile epithets at me would bring Thorton, the senior who supervised our dorm hall, on the run. Thorton enjoyed an experiment in levitation as much as I did.

  I ceased my levitation work on Richard right after my bedtime bowl of popcorn began to taste funny. “Eat some more,” Richard would say. “How do you feel? Like a little more salt on it?” It then occurred to me that pharmaceutical majors are entirely unsuitable as subjects in scientific experiments, or so I deduced from the fact that my hair had begun to turn green.

  My hunting partner Retch Sweeney, a tough, burly fellow, goes absolutely berserk at the mere mention of snakes, something that used to happen quite routinely when hunting was slow and I needed some amusement. As we walked through tall grass, I would suddenly turn, point at Retch’s feet, and yell, “Snake!” He would instantly turn into a darting blur—a reaction that prompted me to nickname him “the Blur Darter.”

  Over the years, I refined this technique to the point where I needed only to point at the ground by Retch’s feet and he would respond appropriately, bounding up into the air and darting about in a blur. Then one day while hunting chukars on the Snake River, of all places, I pointed suddenly at Retch’s feet. He didn’t bound into the air and dart about. “Snake!” I cried. He grinned at me.

  “Ha!” he said.

  It seemed scarcely less than miraculous. Perhaps through my diligent work with him, I had cured Retch of his abnormal fear of snakes, an amazing achievement for a person still in his twenties and whose only credential was a “D” in Psych 101. I tried to conceal my disappointment.

  “You ain’t never gonna scare me with snakes again,” Retch said.

  “Well, the least you can do is thank me,” I said. “It wasn’t easy for me to cure you. Furthermore, I did so at the cost of losing one of my favorite forms of entertainment.”

  “Wasn’t you what done it,” Retch said. “I took this workshop with a psychologist on how to get over fear of snakes. First we just looked at pictures of snakes. Then we looked at a stuffed snake. Finally we looked at live snakes. At the end of the workshop, I actually held a live snake! The doc showed us it was all in our minds.”

  “Gosh, that’s really wonderful,” I said. “Snake!”

  Retch didn’t blink an eye. “See? I’m cured.”

  We continued our hunt for that mythical bird, the chukar, but saw nary a one all day. Our faithful hunting dog had disappeared hours earlier and was now probably out on the highway, trying to hitch a ride back to town. The sun pounded us, insects gnawed us, stickers stuck us, but we pressed on. Working our way up a rocky canyon, we discovered it came to a dead end. A dilapidated corral sagged into the earth beneath a rock cliff. We leaned against the corral boards and studied the precipice.

  “Looks like we got to turn back without any chukars,” Retch said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Wait! See that ledge over there? It’s only about ten feet high at the low end. If you can boost me up onto that ledge, I can work my way up along the mountain and maybe I’ll run some chukars down to you.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Retch said. “Let’s give it a try.”

  We walked over to the ledge, Retch crouched down, and I climbed onto his shoulders, leaning against the rock wall for balance. He handed me my shotgun.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  “Ready.”

  As Retch, grunting and complaining, slowly straightened up, my head rose above the brink of the ledge. I gasped. There, mere inches from my protruding eyeballs, lay a huge, coiled rattlesnake, ready to strike.

  Speechless, I pushed back from the wall. Retch staggered about beneath me, his big hands clamping my feet to his shoulders.

  “Sn-sn-sn … !” I said.

  Retch slammed me back up against the cliff. “Stop fooling around and climb on up there!” he snarled. “You’re not the lightest person in the world, you know.”

  “Sn-sn-snake!” I stammered.

  “I said cut out the fooling around! That stupid ‘snake’ nonsense don’t work on me no more! Now get on up there!”

  He planted a hand beneath my rear and tried to boost me up onto the ledge with a mighty shove. “Ya gah gah aaaakkkh!” I said, unable to think of anything more intelligent. The rattler and I were nose to nose! And then I realized that the snake was dead.

  Some insensitive lout who liked to scare people with snakes, realizing that this was the only spot possible to ascend the cliff, had coiled the dead rattler right at the brink of the ledge. I loathe people like that. In total disgust, I thrust out my shotgun barrel and swept the rattler off the ledge.

  “It’s just an old dried-up dead snake that some stupid jerk …” I never got to finish the sentence.

  Retch cleared one side of the corral cleanly and took only the top board off the other side. He banked high on the rock wall as he roared around a narrow curve in the canyon, then accelerated flat out on the straight stretch. Six hundred yards later, he finally ran out of adrenaline and chugged to a stop, streaming sweat and gasping profanity. I let go of his hair and dropped from his shoulders to the ground.

  “It was dead,” I said. “The snake was dead!”

  “I know that.”

  “So how come you wen
t berserk?”

  “Well, my mind knows there ain’t no reason to be afraid of snakes, but my feet ain’t learned it yet, that’s how come! So don’t let me catch you smirking. Another thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Don’t never cry ‘snake’ again.”

  And I haven’t.

  Metamorphosis and Other Outdoor Phenomena Wives Don’t Understand

  I had done nothing peculiar. That’s why I was somewhat surprised when Bun asked, “All right, what have you been up to?”

  “Nothing,” I said, innocently enough. “Why do you ask?”

  “Because you haven’t been acting peculiar lately. Every time you put on a show of being normal, I know you are up to something.”

  “Well, maybe I’m having a sordid affair with some beautiful and mysterious woman. Have you considered that?”

  My little suggestion provoked quite a scene. It was easy to see why my wife might be jealous. Beautiful, mysterious women find it virtually impossible to resist handsome, debonair sportsmen. Nevertheless, I think it quite unladylike : for a wife to display her jealousy by squealing with laughter and repeatedly slapping her thighs. In a fit of jealousy, a wife knows how to cut right to the quick.

  “No,” she said, wiping away tears of mirth, “I never considered that. Now stop, no more jokes. My sides ache. Oh dear, but you do get off a good one from time to time. Seriously, I will tell you what I suspect. I suspect you sneaked a new gun into the house without telling me. Right?”

  “Wrong! Wrong! I’ll have you know I do not sneak new guns into the house.”

  “Oh, yeah? Then how come you have nearly twice as many guns now as you did three years ago? Explain that.”

  Here was a classic example of a wife’s stumbling upon an outdoor phenomenon totally beyond her comprehension. Over the years I have noted many such phenomena. I have discussed the matter with other outdoorsmen and found to my dismay that my own experience in the matter is not unique but universal.