I'LL CALL HIM BUD

I’ll call him Bud, because that’s what he was drinking, methodically draining each can and then tossing it on the ground before belching, heaving himself up from the cooler, retrieving another can and then plunking his ginormous ass back down with a sigh and a loud, yawping fart.

Bud was my hunting partner for the evening. We met quite by accident—if you call ignoring the unspoken rule of driving on to the next spot when you see a vehicle parked at this one—an accident.

Bud didn’t get that memo, you see, and as a result I was blessed with his company this fine evening. How lucky can one guy get, right?

I heard him before I saw him, stumbling and wheezing his way up the trail toward the stock tank—my stock tank—like a quivering, 300-pound bag of cholesterol, some 45 minutes before the end of legal shooting light, with beer cooler on one hand, shotgun in the other.

Bud did, however, have the courtesy to wait until those last forty-five minutes of legal shooting light to show up. Apparently Bud knew I only prefer company during the best part of the evening to have no company when you’re sitting on a dove spot.

If Bud noticed me as he jiggled his way past where I and the dog were sitting in the sage brush, he gave no outward indication. He—slowly and with much flatulence—walked past me, directly to the edge of the tank, where he dropped his cooler on the sand, opened it, grabbed a beer, closed it, and then plopped his ass down on top of it with a great sigh and yet another ripping fart. Bud was now ready to hunt.

Bud was swaddled from head to toe in the finest camouflage livery offered by the local WalMart sporting goods department. His Mossy Tree Erection 3D blended in perfectly with the vast stands of oaks not found out here on the treeless Oklahoma plains.

His plastic Dick Commander-endorsed shotgun (in matching Mossy Tree Erection 3D) was designed for just these types of Xtreme hunting conditions (sunny and mild, with a howling 8mph wind). When he stood up to grab another beer—which was often—Bud looked like a leafy bratwurst holding a branch. When he sat, his bulk spread out, turning Bud into a muffin-shaped oak tree sprouting from the top of a blue and white beer cooler.

When the dove started coming in a few minutes later, Bud, perched right on the edge of the tank some fifty yards from the nearest speck of cover, began shooting at them. Repeatedly, and from ranges well beyond the advertised claims of his special hundred-dollar Grim Reaper “XXtended Death” aftermarket choke tube.

Three-shot fusillade after three-shot fusillade of hyper-velocity XXtended Death lead rose up to meet the birds, only to fall softly back to earth, gentle as rain, with nary a feather cut. Soon Bud had a pile of spent hulls almost as large as one of his ass cheeks piled up next to his cooler.

After a few more minutes of watching Bud seed the surrounding prairie with spent shot, hulls, and beer cans, I decided to call it a day. Bud never acknowledged my presence as I rose and began walking back down the trail to the road. He just kept on playing that same three-note tune on the shotgun:

BamBamBam! Reload. BamBamBam!

When I got back to the truck, I was utterly unsurprised to see that Bud’s ride continued the evening’s theatre of overcompensation. His truck, lifted, chromed, bedazzled with giant, massively knurled tires, manly off-road accoutrements and festooned with menacing deer skull stickers (how did I know Bud would be a Boner Collector?) dwarfed mine, rising into the air like some great phallic “look at me” totem. Sigh. What the hell did I expect? A Subaru?

After letting the dog take a long piss on one of Bud’s custom wheels, I loaded him up, got in the truck and drove off with the notes of Bud’s grand finale riding the evening air behind us. BamBamBam! Pause. BamBamBam! Pause. And so on.

One evening a few days later, after the majority of the once-a-year yobs had expended all their promo shells, drunk all their beer and disappeared back to their natural environments (the bar, the couch, the county jail,) I hunted Bud’s stock tank again, expecting the worst.

There was no sign of Bud. Literally. Not a beer can. Not an empty hull. Not a candy wrapper. Every scrap of Bud’s presence had been picked up and carted off. What Bud had packed in, Bud had apparently packed out. The area around the pond was trash-free, littered only by naturally-occurring sandburs and cowshit.

Hell, maybe Bud hadn’t been such an asshole, after all. Incompetent, yes. Clueless, definitely. But perhaps not utterly hopeless and worthy of scorn. I even felt a tiny pang of guilt for letting the dog piss on his ridiculous expensive truck wheel.

I’ve run across plenty of slob hunters since then, but despite hunting that tank every year thereafter I never again encountered Bud following our one magical evening together.

But I like to think he’s still out there somewhere, ruining other people’s hunts with truly heroic levels of incompetence and slovenly behavior and then, inexplicably, cleaning up after himself.

Sometimes, people surprise you…