The Sick Pack

 

When I was sixteen, I bought my first shotgun. It was an H&R single shot twelve gauge. I wasn't really a hunter, but I thought it would give me a chance to spend more time outdoors when the fishing had slowed down. Though I had originally bought the gun for hunting rabbits or pheasants, or possibly quail, I never thought I'd have to use it on a spider.

When the World War II ship I was stationed on in Key West was decommissioned around 1973, I was assigned to a much newer guided missile destroyer in Charleston, South Carolina. I didn't know anything about Charleston, except that it was in a southern state, and I was under the impression that a fellow who hailed from Ohio might not be all that welcome. I'd heard rumors that even though the civil war had been over for more than a hundred years, there were still some tender feelings.

My fears were somewhat influenced by having just watched the movie, Deliverance, a few weeks prior to having to make the move. For those who have never heard of that movie, in a nutshell: Burt Reynolds and three friends from the big city were going to go on a canoe trip through the Georgia backwoods before the river they were going to paddle down was dammed up. They run into a couple of backwoods hillbillies who are perverted as well as ignorant. Burt ends up killing one of them with his bow and arrow, and the other one stalks them for a good part of the rest of the movie.

Good Lord! Is it even safe to go into the woods? What if they're full of hillbillies and perverts? What if there's a still behind every tree that is guarded jealously by a fanatic Confederate who can't let history be? What am I going to do?

With the movie playing fresh in my mind, I decided that I better buy myself a straw hat and wear a pair of coveralls before I took to the woods. I was hoping that I could fake a Southern accent well enough to keep me from getting shot or worse.

In the early seventies the military was paying wages that barely kept a person alive. While things were so much cheaper than now, my wife and I were nonetheless living on about $5,200.00 a year. We weren't starving, but steak wasn't on the menu either. To help supplement our meager food supply, I went fishing in the spring and summer months and in the fall and winter, I went hunting for small game.

As was my habit, I drove my 1972 Pinto up north to Monk's Corner and turned off on a gravel road that led to the Old Tailrace Canal. Not many people went back there at the time. There was a large expanse of woods on either side of the canal, with many live oaks where the squirrels lived. They have a habit of spotting any movement in the woods, and if you approach the tree they're in, they will run around to the other side out of sight. I found the best way to bag one was to find a log to sit on and wait. They will climb down the tree and start scampering along the forest floor, making a lot of noise in the dry leaves. I would then scuff my feet through the leaves until I got close enough to shoot them. It worked pretty well.

I went hunting one fall day and walked through the woods a quarter of a mile or more.I found a good stretch of trees and a downed log, so I took a seat and listened. Its incredibly quiet in the forest and very relaxing and I think I might have been close to dropping off to sleep when I heard something crawling on the dead leaves about ten yards away. I snapped awake and continued to listen. It wasn't a squirrel, that much I knew for sure. Whatever it was was moving slow, but it was big enough to make a sound as it moved over the dry oak leaves. At first I thought it may have been a lizard. I like lizards. They eat bugs, which I don't like. The longer I listened, the more I realized it was moving much too slow to be a lizard. Curiosity got the best of me and I got up to see what the disturbance was. Walking slowly across the dead leaves and sticks that littered the ground was the biggest spider I'd ever seen. I don't know what kind it was, it was just big. Being of fertile imagination, I could see in my mind that terrible beast making it's way over to where I was sitting, and while I was distracted by a squirrel, it could attack me. I wasn't going to give it a chance. I raised my twelve gauge shotgun and blasted that demonic being with a full load of number six shot from about five feet away. The ground around it was clear of leaves and spiders, and it was still smoking from the discharge. With a profound sense of satisfaction, I went back to the log I was sitting on and continued to wait for some action of the squirrel kind. I can't say I'm proud of myself for killing that spider, but a man has to do what a man has to do, and that's all I'm going to say about that.