BAWB V. UBER-FHON

 The best smart phone accessory money can buy.

Remember when, if you wanted a new phone, your choices were wall-mount or tabletop? Oh, sure, you may have had some color options, but guys solved that easily enough by just grabbing the top box on the pile and then whistling happily all the way to the check-out counter.

          The damn phone stayed at home where it belonged and you went in the house and used it when you needed to. It didn’t follow you around everywhere you went like a homesick puppy…(“And this is where you activate ‘bathroom mode’ so you can use it in the shower.”) It didn’t pester and badger you or make strange noises when you were trying to set the hook on a lunker bass. It didn’t buzz and vibrate in your pants at the exact moment a trophy buck stopped broadside twenty yards from your tree stand. When you were camped out in the mountains ten miles from the trailhead you could look into the flames of the campfire or gaze up at the stars at night instead of sticking your nose up to a little glowing screen.

          There were a few occasions when a smart phone might have come in handy for an outdoorsman. But, since you didn’t have one, you didn’t know you needed some obscure app, so you just shrugged and got on with life and found a way to make do without it. This may come as a shock to Gen X, but mankind survived and thrived and was actually aware of its physical surroundings throughout the centuries with no ill effects without being permanently attached to an electronic phone. Hundreds of generations of people lived out their entire lives quite happily and successfully without ever texting, Tweeting, Googling or updating their status.

          I was secretly very glad when we lived over in Granite County. Mountainous and sparsely-populated, maybe 10 percent…12 tops…of the entire county had any kind of cell coverage, so I was spared the “joys” of owning a smart phone. My loving wife did get me a trac phone that permanently resided in the glovebox of my pickup truck. Two or three times a year, an occasion might arise when it would be useful. At such times, I would whip the trac phone out of the glove compartment, turn it on, and have just enough juice to indeed confirm that there was no cell coverage where I was at before the battery died completely. I would make do without it, re-charge it when I got home, and toss it back in the glovebox for another three or four months, at which time I would complete the same cycle all over again. I don’t think I used the initial 90 minutes of call time in the decade I had it. I was more than happy with this arrangement.

          Eight years ago we moved and wound up in a county that is cursed with some astronomically good cell coverage for Montana, something like 65 or maybe even 70%. My wife insisted it was high time I join the rest of the industrial world and I was forced, at gunpoint, to accept the smart phone of her choice. Olivia is very tech-savvy and does her best to educate me about these things. I really am grateful for her tech-support; with the children grown up and gone and out on their own I can’t ask them to help me with computer issues when they get home from school.

As a writer, I have learned a bit about computers over the years since I find them extremely useful, especially considering that I originally taught myself to type as a kid on Mom’s old manual Remington typewriter. With phones, on the other hand, I was just fine with the status quo. If I needed to call someone, I walked in the house and called them. If the phone rang when I was actually in the house, I answered it. If not, I checked the answering machine when I got back. The only phone technology that impressed me over the decades was getting rid of the rotary dial, going cordless, and caller ID so I could, at a glance, choose whether or not to answer the phone and swear at the RNC or simply ignore their call altogether. That was progress.

At first, I tried to resist the smart phone.

“It’s not that hard,” my wife would insist. “My Mom learned to use hers just fine, except for disabling that ‘random and inappropriate emoji generator’.”

“There’s one big difference,” I would reply. “Your Mom wanted to learn to use hers.”

“Oh, for Heaven’s sake. At least let me show you how to use to 3-D Topographic Terrain Holograph app. As an outdoorsman you’ll love it!”

So she would take me through the 158 simple steps required to use the app. A few days later, I would try to actually use the thing and get lost around Step #23. She would come home to find me crouched down behind the cover of my recliner, peeking around one side and poking at the smart phone on the floor with a stick.

One evening a few years back, however, my wife insisted on cooking supper, a meal which made me suddenly extremely drowsy. When I woke up, I was tied to a chair and my new Uber-Fhon was chained to my wrist. The little wife, God bless her, made a heroic effort to educate me on all of its functions. After about the first 372, my eyes unfocused and glazed over and my mouth fell open and began to emit a long streamer of drool. She just set the Uber-Fhon to “underwater mode”, threw a five-gallon bucket of ice water on me, and kept right on going. Only by convincingly feigning death for a quarter of an hour was I able to escape unharmed.

          The new Uber-Fhon has, by my count, some 9,347,332 separate functions, gizmos, devices, apps, widgets, accessories, contrivances, contraptions, doo-dads and thingamajigs. There’s even a corckscrew that folds down out of a little niche like on a Swiss Army knife. Of these, I’ve found, at best, four that are marginally useful and maybe two that I actually use. Even on those rare occasions when I finally do try to use them, I wind up using my fist as a hammer because the touch screen refuses to recognize my calloused finger as a human appendage and after the first three or four dozen unsuccessful swipes my patience begins to wear thin.

I think Uber-Fhon hates me as much as I hate it and does little things just to annoy me. For instance, when I pick it up and look at it, it instantly begins to defy gravity and spatial orientation so that no matter how I hold it the writing on the screen is always upside down. If I try to text, it immediately shrinks the keyboard buttons down to such a small size I can only hit the letter on either side of the one I’m aiming for. When, after muttering and back-spacing umpteen times, I finally type in the word I wanted, auto-correct kicks in and changes it to something completely different and totally unrelated. I usually don’t notice that my painstakingly constructed sentence has morphed into utter gibberish until the moment after I’ve hit the send button. What the duck, Uber-Fhon? I finally found it easier to capture and train a chickadee to peck out texts for me with its tiny little bill.

Miffed at being outsmarted thusly, Uber-Fhon sought revenge by constantly introducing itself as Skynet and asking me for the nuclear launch ‘go’ codes every time I tried to use it and then, late at night, waking me up by staring at me with an unblinking red light and lisping in its creepy HAL voice, “What are you doing, Bawb?”

 "What are you doing, Bawb?"

          The other day my wife came home to find my Uber-Fhon tied to a chair. Wearing a monocle and jabbing what I hoped were the phone’s short ribs with the muzzle of a loaded Walther P-38, I was snarling at it in my best Major Hochstetter accent, “Ve haff vays of making you talk!”

          “What on earth are you trying to do?” She asked.

          “Make a phone call.”

          “Oh, I’ll show you that one more time. But first, real quick, you need to know that this icon will take you into the set-up menu so you can take pictures and videos.”

          “I have a camera for that.”

          “What about the weather? Before you go hunting wouldn’t you like to check the weather first?

          “I do. I look out that window.”

          “But it’s so easy. You just push this button, swipe this image, enter your password, erect the dish array, connect to the network, wait until this red dot turns green, get three sonar pings, hit this icon, enter the combination 12-4-732, activate the HUD, and voila…it will tell you if there is a hazardous weather outlook anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere! Simple.”

          “Or I could just look out the window.”

          “Well, technically you could. But now you don’t need to go through all that bother.”

          “What bother? Turning my head?”

          “Now just let me just show you how to use the GPS Waypoint-Finder Navigational Beacon System real quick…”

          “I just want to make a damn phone call.”

          “Oh. Uber-Fhon doesn’t actually do that. I’d need to buy and install a new app. Hey! Where are you going?”

“To throw Uber-Fhon in the truck glovebox for the next five months and then go make the call on the land line, like I always end up doing. I just wish it was a wall-mount instead of a desktop.”

THE TACTICOOL GUN STORE...NO SALE!

 Down at the Tacti-Cool Gun Shop

I used to, and often still do, enjoy visiting every little hole-in-the-wall gun shop I come across in my travels. It was a lot more fun in the days before the gigantic nation-wide sporting good chain stores moved in. You know the behemoth “everything outdoors” mega-stores I’m talking about. The kind my wife and I went into in Butte years ago to buy a new .22 Long Rifle gopher shooter, asking the teen-aged kid behind the gun counter to see a Ruger 10/22, the single most numerous and common rifle in the United States. A confused deer-in-the-headlights look came across his pimpled face and he just started grabbing random long guns off the rack and shoving them at us with the query, “Is this it?”

“Nope,” I’d reply. “That’s a Winchester Model Seventy in Four-fifty-eight Win Mag.”

With each failure, he would simply repeat the process a bit faster, over and over. It kind of reminded me of the movie UHF and the brief scene in the park where a blind man is trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube.

If the kid would have slowed down for a moment I could have just told him something like, “Third one from the left.” Instead he continued to thrust random guns at me.

“Is this it?”

“Nope, that’s a Remington Eight seventy twelve-gauge pump.”

“Is this it?”

“Nope.”

“Is this it?”

“Nope.”

          Thus, I really miss places like the Bullet Hole, my favorite little gun shop in Bozeman for many, many years, a sort of mom-and-pop with an FFL kind of place where what the curmudgeon owner lacked in politeness he made up for in decades of firearms knowledge. Alas, that place has been gone for well over a decade and I haven’t found a real replacement yet.

          So, the other day when I was in town and noticed a fairly new but small gun store tucked back in a sort of out-of-the-way area, I wheeled the truck right in there to check it out. It was a nice enough little gun shop but really only some of the older guns on consignment sale piqued my interest. Most of the new merchandise and weapons were obviously geared towards the tacti-cool market. You know, the guy who will buy literally anything the salesman even remotely hints at because the salesman introduces himself as a former SEAL, or the guy who will find an extra inch of Picatinny rail somewhere on his AR-15 when he discovers a new tactical accessory not already included amongst the 27 other accessories already mounted on the rifle, or the guy who instantly purchases a bayonet for his Glock “Foh-Tey” because, by God, he might actually need a pistol bayonet to survive the Zombie Apocalypse.

          Nevertheless, I went on in and the 20-something kid behind the counter was polite, well-informed, and had pretty good knowledge about the consignment guns especially. My mistake was asking about the .460 Rowland, which I had been looking into of late. He didn’t know anything about them, he realistically confessed, but the store owner sure did and here he comes now.

          I never did learn much about the guy himself, but at least he had Army veteran plates on his truck when he pulled in. For all I know, though, he could have been a clerk-typist or chaplain’s assistant. By unfortunately using the words “handgun” and “bear” in the same sentence, I apparently inadvertently keyed some kind of trigger words and a Pavlovian response sent him into a very passionate and seemingly endless rant about the most awesome bear medicine under the sun.

          Any spark of interest I had almost immediately evaporated when I found out, to my astonishment, that the latest, greatest uber-grizzly whacker turned out to be the Glock 10-mm Auto pistol fed a steady diet of the end-all and be-all of bear loads in the form of a solid copper 115-grain bullet with lots of little ridges all over it. This little pill was so devastating, he claimed, that merely informing a grizzly bear you were locked and loaded with one was sufficient, in 73% of the cases studied, to cause the bear to simply die of fright on the spot. The single determining factor which made this little copper bullet more deadly than a .500 S&W Magnum was velocity, which was repeated so many times that it will likely be stuck in my head for eternity.

The conversation went something like this:

ME: “It’s still a little bitty ol’ one hundred and fifteen grain bullet which, in the Nine millimeter Parabellum, has hardly proved to be a very effective man-stopper let alone bear-stopper.”

HIM: “But that one hundred and fifteen grain bullet has a paltry muzzle velocity of only twelve hundred feet per second. This one has a muzzle velocity of seventeen hundred fps.”

ME: “It’s still a very small bullet which are notorious when used against large and dangerous game for being easily deflected from their true course when trying to penetrate tough hide, muscle mass, and major bones.”

HIM: “But it has radial flutes and acts like a miniature buzz-saw wherever it goes, cutting veins and arteries, and it has a muzzle velocity of seventeen hundred fps.”

ME: “A grizzly bear can keep right on going for a good fifteen or twenty seconds even after being shot through the heart with a thirty-ought six. Little buzz saw cuts through surface muscle and tissue that never penetrate to the vitals aren’t going to slow him down much. You’ve got a few seconds to stop a charge; you can’t wait half an hour for the thing to finally start getting weak from blood loss.”

HIM: “But I have a high capacity magazine and can get off a bunch of rounds quickly and reload fast, and each one of those rounds has a muzzle velocity of seventeen hundred feet per second.”

ME: “Muzzle velocity and even foot-pounds of energy don’t tell the whole story. Since the formula squares the velocity, lighter, faster bullets get higher ‘scores’ of energy, but it doesn’t take into account bullet diameter, shape, or construction, amongst many other factors. Are you telling me you would rather face down a Kodiak bear with a twenty-two two-fifty shooting a fifty grain varmint bullet at thirty eight hundred feet per second than an old forty five-seventy lobbing a four hundred grain flatnose just because the former technically has maybe a dozen more foot-pounds of energy?”  

HIM (facial tic beginning): “I wouldn’t use either! I would use a ten millimeter one hundred fifteen grain bullet with a muzzle velocity of seventeen hundred feet per second!”

ME: “Velocity isn’t everything.”

HIM: “Blasphemer! Heretic! Unholy one! Of course velocity is everything, and mine has seventeen hundred feet per second of it. Your forty-four Mag load is only getting twelve hundred fps and even the four-fifty-four Casull only gets fourteen hundred! Seventeen hundred is higher, and thus obviously superior.”

ME: “Uh, I can’t help but point out the forty four Mag’s actual bullet is a three hundred and five grain flat-nose and the Casull’s throwing a four hundred grain bullet. A big hardcast chunk of lead that size is gonna penetrate a whole lot deeper and do so with a whole lot less deflection from its course. We’re not talking about poking cavities in ballistic gelatin; we’re talking about penetrating heavy hair, a thick hide tough as leather, inches of fat, large ropes of muscle mass, and extremely heavy bone structure.”

HIM: “But your precious big, heavy bullets can’t go seventeen hundred fps, so they’re worthless!”

ME: “Old timers like Elmer Keith and John ‘Pondoro’ Taylor killed literally thousands of head of big game between them; they, and many others, were of the opinion that it takes a big, heavy bullet to take down big heavy animals. Elmer and John even agreed that trying to kill large, tough, dangerous game animals with very smallest caliber bullets fired at extremely fast speeds was a form of mental illness.”

HIM: “Ha! Old School! They may have killed every major game animal on two continents, but they never saw the YouTube video I did of a guy killing a two hundred pound black bear with my magic bean. Besides, back in their day, they didn’t know any better because they did not yet have a hundred and fifteen grain bullet with a muzzle velocity of seventeen hundred feet per second!”

ME: “Two…dollars! Want…my…two…dollars!”

HIM: “Seventeen…hunh? What?”

ME: “Never mind. Eighties movie reference.”

HIM (voice now a high-pitched shriek and emitting spittle in all directions): “Eighties bad! Seventeen hundred fps good!”

ME: “Good God, man. I like the Glock platform and the ten millimeter is a damn fine defensive cartridge. But if I had walked in here with a pocket full of money and the specific intent to buy a Glock Twenty in ten mil, your kind of salesmanship would have driven me out of here without it.”

HIM (frothing at the mouth): Seventeen hundred! One fifteen! Copper! Youtube! Radial flutes!”

ME (Now trying desperately to get back out the door): “Goddamn it, quit humping my leg! Down boy, down!”

DAS GOAT

I acquired goats, as you know, in hopes of someday using them as back-country pack animals so that I might actually get to at least hunt bighorn sheep for a year or two before any more of my body parts run out of warranty.

Why goats, aka Taliban War Brides? I’ve ridden and packed horses in the past and found them to be really expensive and about as smart as a fencepost. Plus I’m too busted up already to be able to afford a horse wreck. I looked into llamas and alpacas and was amazed at how much people want for them critters these days, too. I wanted cheap and low maintenance.

Someone suggested pack goats and I began to look into the subject. I was surprised to find out that when fully mature the bigger dairy breeds can comfortably carry fifty pounds. Removing my shoes and socks to do the math, I realized that came to 100 pounds for two of them, or 200 pounds for four. Not too shabby. Even when I was young and dumb and full of come I learned to limit my pack to no more than 50 pounds, so four times that much without me having to schlep any of it might translate into a pretty comfortable camp.

Plus goats are supposedly able to pack on game trails, scree slopes, cliff faces, and otherwise inaccessible rugged country where other stock dares not tread. Our nearby Crazy Mountains are a steep and rocky island range where some of the high country trails are signed with warnings of “Not Suitable for Stock Use.” Trails too rough for horses and mules remain just fine for smaller, more sure-footed goats and, from what I’ve read, they can even out-do a llama or alpaca. 

                                Goats as babies...Awwwwwww.

 Goats as teen-aged boys...just like real kids!

          Hence, back in May, we became the proud owners of four 5-week old goats. A nearby dairy has no need for the extra males born during lambing (calving? goating?) season, the male of the species being exceedingly difficult to get milk from, and was actually giving them away. So we wound up with four free whethers (castrated males).

Driving them home in the back of the pickup was the last inexpensive and low maintenance part of the whole deal. There are times when I wonder if it might be cheaper to just feed them greenbacks. They would eat dollar bills, no problem there.

          The first difficult goat-related task I had to face was one I hadn’t counted on. My wife insisted we had to name them all. I immediately thought of my friend Doug’s spastic Brittany bird dog. He claimed its name was “Bear.” After witnessing the two of them working a field in search of pheasants one morning, another friend and I immediately concluded that the dog’s full name was actually “Bear Goddamn It!” Although with hindsight I now know that “Goddamn It!” is actually a very appropriate goat name, that idea was vetoed by my wife when originally suggested. Later, she also turned down my idea of calling one of the goats, “Bleeping Little Bleep of a Bleep!”

The goat with LaMancha blood turned out to be easy enough to name. He’d recently been de-horned and sported the little tiny LaMancha “gopher ears”, so he looked kind of nubby, and I just started calling him that. Nubby. Later on, I began to notice his tiny ears make his eyes look really big compared to the other goats. Looking into those big yellow eyes with the tiny black slit pupils reminded me of Kermit the Frog, so we sometimes call him “Kermie” now as well.

          My wife got collars for the goats and called me “intellectually lazy” (not the first time I’ve heard that phrase…no, wait, the term Doug and I proudly earned in high school was “academically lazy”) when I christened the Saanen with the blue collar Blue and the Alpine mix with the red collar Red.

Simply not true. “Blue” and “Red” are great, traditional American critter names. For instance, there’s a Chris LeDoux song about a bucking horse called Old Red and Grandpa Jones of Hee-Haw fame had a song about his ‘possum hunting dog Blue. And in the Ringling Five classic Sheep Dog Rap, an under-appreciated musical masterpiece often mentioned in the same breath as Mozart’s final piano concerto or at least Weird Al Yankovic’s Angry White Boy Polka, the dog in the song is named Ol’ Blue.

          Which left me with one last goat to name. The collar theme had already played out and besides, his collar was brown. “Ol’ Brown” just doesn’t have any kind of ring to it.      

Contrary to what your spouse may have told you, there’s no such thing as watching a Clint Eastwood movie too many times. So I named the last goat Clyde, after Clint’s orangutan co-star in Every Which Way But Loose. Even now I am eagerly anticipating that glorious future day when the goats and I will find ourselves at a trail junction somewhere high in the Crazy Mountains and I can say, “Right turn, Clyde.”

          With the goats named, I went on to learn new information about the species. Yeah, sure, we got a couple of books on goats and there is some good information on-line if you’re willing to dig for it. The most valuable information garnered, however, was stuff I’d picked up years ago from old Warner Brothers cartoons and an episode of The Andy Griffith Show where Jimmy the Goat ate a case of dynamite.

 Old cartoons: a much more accurate source of information on goats...or any other subject, for that matter...than the MSM.

          Oh, sure, scoff if you will, but the info you can get from Bugs and Daffy and Andy and Barney is a great deal more factual and reality-based than anything we’ve gotten from all the MSM TV newscasters combined for the past eight years. Old cartoons, on the other hand, depict goats as creatures with cast iron stomachs who delight in eating the most inappropriate items, ranging from the odd tin can to entire Model T Fords, which turns out to be fairly accurate.

          Goats are browsers rather than grazers, and their tastes can be quite eclectic. I’ll never forget when, more years ago than I care to think about, my daughter got two Nubian goats. Turned out into a pasture of tall, lush creek bottom grasses, they immediately sought out and gobbled down every species of thistle they could find to the exclusion of all else. Mmmmm. Nummy. Herds of goats are in fact seeing considerable use in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming as biological weapons in the battle against invasive noxious weeds like leady spurge and knapweed.

          Our goats lean more towards the eating of Model Ts, or at least petroleum-based automotive products. It was for this reason, even more so than the fact that I found myself tripping over one of them every three to five seconds, that the goats were confined to quarters while I was building fence around their pen.

          First I turned around and caught Ol’ Blue attempting to lick the yummy mixture of creosote-treated fencepost sawdust and bar oil off of the recently sharpened teeth of my chainsaw. Once the chainsaw was safely put out of reach in the back of the pickup, it only took him a few moments to find another automotive goat delicacy; he began sampling the grease on the tractor’s drawbar roller. Hey, if you can’t find a convenient tit, I guess a grease zerk is the next best thing.

As I attempted to herd the varmints back through the main area of our pole building “barn” and into their corner pen, Ol’ Blue sidestepped me in an attempt to suckle one of the terminal posts on of an old 6V tractor battery. I grabbed him and carried him to the pen and turned around only to find his brother Clyde wagging his tail vigorously while attempting to sample the sweet-smelling delicacy of fresh WD-40 on a bicycle chain. Nubby appeared to be licking his lips as he eye-balled and headed straight for a Dolamr full of two-cycle mix.

          Even though the price of gas isn’t that bad these days, it was time to lock the goats up in their indoor pen until I finished.

          Goats can certainly bring strong emotion into your life. Sometimes they can be cute and cuddly and amusing. Other times, you find yourself secretly wondering if you could actually beat one to death with a pair of fencing pliers. It usually depends on just how inappropriate the item is that they are trying to consume at the moment, especially if it’s physically attached to you or your clothing.

          However, goats cannot just randomly ingest any old thing they come across with complete safety. One common farm item in particular is apparently highly disagreeable, even toxic, and possibly even radioactive to goats. That item is store-bought $75-per-bag goat/sheep milk replacer.

          Feeding our bottle babies milk replacer mixed as per the directions (see why men don’t read them?) was not a winner. Over the first few feedings it caused three out of four to bloat up like ticks.

          So I spent a couple of long mornings and evenings trying to get a mixture of vegetable oil and baking soda down the gullets of various young goats who were quite expressive about how much they hated the procedure. OTOH, they did really seem to enjoy me massaging their tummies for fifteen or twenty minutes afterwards. Goats apparently express gratitude by unleashing a concert of burping and farting that puts the eating-beans-around-the-campfire scene in Blazing Saddles to shame.

Fortunately my wife found something called Probios at the local farm & ranch store, Hooter’s Hardware. Its addition to the morning feed finally cured what ailed ‘em.

We gradually weaned them on schedule and they took to hay and COB and mineral with gusto. As they grew they were given the run of our twenty acres and eventually put a big dent in the thistle crop, although a great deal of electric fencing was still required to keep them off and out from under the tractor and cars. When I take them for hikes up in the mountains, sub-alpine fir, commonly called “piss fir” or “pitch pine” for its copious amounts of sticky Krazy Glue sap, becomes the Holy Grail of goat culinary delight. Lately, we’ve been raiding the Christmas tree dump in Bozeman and “recycling” Douglas fir into goat poop.

I was going to point out here that goats think only of eating and pooping, but that’s not true. No thought whatsoever goes into pooping. They just go ahead and let fly no matter where they are or what they’re doing…at a dead run, halfway up a cliff face, when their butt is over the water bucket. The only time they can control pooping is if they suspect they might be able to get on the porch in the next few minutes, in which case they can save it for at least that long.

They love to climb on stuff, too, which is why I constructed “Baby Goat Mountain” out of some slabs of limestone we had laying around the property and later half-buried an old tractor tire standing up in the backyard. This playground equipment kept them entertained for a good five minutes before they decided it was more fun to climb on the Jeep, pickup truck and tractor.

Sure, you get 'em all kinds of nice toys, but they just want to play with Dad's shit.

Which is why getting goats reintroduced me to the joys of electric fencing. Having grown up on a hog farm, I didn’t think mere goats could show me anything new since hogs are pretty good at opening gates and making holes in fences themselves. Ha! Hogs are rank (pun intended) amateurs! Silly me! Goats are the Houdinis of domestic stock fencing and with electric fences you have to use considerably more juice than you’d expect just to get their attention. Here’s a quick and handy guide I made up which should be of use for prospective goat owners. Now I know when the goats are trying to get on the porch because three nearby communities suffer electrical brown-outs.

I also learned plenty more about regular fencing, which isn’t as big a pain as some people claim. I’ve found that any fence that is strong enough to stop a charging rhino and tight enough to keep out mosquitoes will also work…most of the time, anyway…for goats.

Is this fence goat-proof? Don't be silly! It can't even hold a lousy T. Rex. Goats would through it in five seconds flat.

I do have to admit the four boys have already put a serious crimp on our formerly abundant thistle crop. When I figure up the cost of feed, fencing and accessories for the past eight months, however, I reckon I could have sprayed them with something costing about five thousand dollars per gallon and still have come out ahead cost-wise.

Just think. In only three more years I can actually start to do some serious packing with them. That should get me back in shape and back up in the high country, if nothing else just so I can get some of my money’s worth out ‘em.  

"BONUS POINTS" AKA WHY I HAD TO GET GOATS

As near as I can tell, Montana FWP's "Bonus Point" hunting tag drawing system is based upon this tried-and-true Federal Agency model.

 

WHY GOATS?

          A few people have asked what possessed me to get goats. The rationale behind the decision requires a column of its own and a rant about one my favorite pet peeves; Montana Fish, Wildlife & Park’s “system” for drawing Special Tags, i.e. moose, mountain goat, and bighorn sheep.

Hunting the high country would be a dream come true. So every spring I am afflicted, thankfully for increasingly briefer periods each passing year, with this insane, wild-eyed delusion that I might actually, finally, somehow, at long last draw a Montana bighorn sheep or mountain goat hunting tag. If I were to ever do so, such a hunt would require considerable preparation.

Historically, this has not been much of a problem. I’ve been putting in the drawings for Montana special hunting tags (goat, sheep, moose and now bison) since 1994 and thus far I’ve drawn exactly zero, zilch, nada, nothing.

I’ve also been putting in every year for the Super-Secret Choco-Fudgie “Bonus Points” ever since FWP initiated that system. In theory, by accumulating bonus points, you increase your future chances of drawing a special tag. In practice, they have proven about as useful as a screen door on a submarine.

Alas, it does not work like Wyoming Fish & Game’s system of Preference Points. In Wyoming, you eventually accumulate enough of these points that you WILL draw a tag. If you started applying at a young enough age, you WILL get a tag for the district you actually WANT to hunt.

Montana’s Bonus Point System, on the other had, appears to have been based on the quintessential federal government program model such is its uselessness and sheer dysfunctionality.

As an example, let’s say you’re trying to draw a tag to hunt bighorn sheep in the Missouri Breaks. Ordinarily, your chance of success is something like 0.00013 percent or one-in-a-hillion jillion (I’ve greatly increased the actual odds for the sake of example). With each Bonus Point accumulated, however, you now get an additional 0.00013% shot to be unsuccessful in the drawing. They don’t actually increase the odds in your favor, they just give you additional one-in-a-hillion jillion chances.

If this were not bad enough, since every other hunter in the state is simultaneously accumulating the exact same number of Bonus Points as you are, the net effect in the real world is that the system increases your odds of a successful drawing from “No Way In Hell” to the “When Pigs Fly” level, which is hardly a marked improvement.

How it worked for me goes like this. Trying to draw a special tag for ten years before the Bonus Point system was introduced resulted in actually drawing…jack shit. By comparison, attempting to draw a special tag for an additional decade while steadily accumulating Bonus Points resulted in…jack shit and higher blood pressure. So you can really see the benefits of the system right from the get-go.

Toss in the wolf re-introduction and how they’ve decimated moose populations, and I’ll bet my odds for that tag now, even with all my “Bonus” Points, are statistically less than they were when I started the ordeal twenty odd years ago.

Whenever I feel bad that I’ve struck out every single time I’ve gone to bat for the last 21 years, I just go over and visit my neighbor Bill, who was born and raised here and has been striking out on special tags for 29 years straight. Of course he’s also been accumulating those handy Bonus Points ever since the system started and of course they’ve done him as much good as they’ve done me.

As a result of all his perseverance, though, Bill’s finally going bighorn hunting this year. Unfortunately, it’s not in his home state of Montana. He got disgusted with the whole thing, sold his very nice life-long collection of elk shed horns, and purchased a guided sheep hunt in Alaska.

Meanwhile, it seems like every time I go to the shooting range or the sporting goods store I run into some (expletive deleted) who’s drawn every special tag for every species multiple times over the years, both with and without Bonus Points. Some guys seem to draw a bighorn ram tag every seven years like clockwork (if you succeed in drawing a special tag for that species, you have to wait seven years to even enter the drawing again).

A young guy in his early 20’s I used to work with in the Forest Circus drew a moose, bighorn and bison tag his first three years as a Montana resident which, by my calculations, is statistically impossible. For all I know he may have drawn a mountain goat tag his 4^th year. I had to quit asking him if he drew any special tags and he quit answering because my fingers were grasped so tightly around his throat after the third year.

Then there was the woman I once met who drew a moose, bighorn sheep and Missouri Breaks elk tag her first five years in the state but who didn’t even go on the sheep hunt because it snowed!!! ARRRGGHHHH!!!!

So apparently the entire system all boils down to pure dumb luck. When it comes to that, I’m right up there with the stub-tailed, 3-legged, one-eyed dog named Lucky. I have all kinds of “luck”, but nothing you could call “fortune”, with one very big exception; meeting my wife. Olivia’s such a peach sometimes I suspect I used up my entire lifetime supply of fortune in finding her.

Come to think of it, though, perhaps more than just random chance is involved in drawing Special Tags. After all, when I accused that guy I worked with who drew all those special tags in a row of having photographs of the FWP Director in bed with a Girl Scout, a nun and a goat, he just laughed…but he didn’t actually deny it.

By my calculations, if I keep entering the drawings and accumulating bonus points, I should be able to hunt the Montana high country myself somewhere between the ages of 197 and 324. Considering how gimpy I am now, I don’t think that’ll work out too well.

Anyway, twenty plus years of this has led me to think that if I’m ever going to be able to at least hunt a bighorn sheep in Montana once in my lifetime, I’m gonna have to break down and do one of the unlimited hunting districts down by Yellowstone National Park.

I’m not all that thrilled with the idea. The Boulder River country especially is wild and desolate and steep and rocky; the entire landscape is essentially one giant rock pile about three degrees shy of vertical. There are actually Forest Circus trails in that country where you skin your nose by simply walking uphill. It kicked my ass twenty years ago before I got all busted up. Nowadays, I have to take a handful of Ibuprofen and a couple of Tylenol just to look at a topographical map of the area.

And if the terrain doesn’t kill you, the grizzlies might. It’s Grizzly Bear Central down there and, after four decades of federal protection, they have come to think of mankind as little more than fat, slow and easy-to-catch snack food located considerably lower on the food chain than they are.

Twenty years ago, I considered that fun; all part of the adventure and the challenge of solo back-packing the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness. Then again, I was fresh out of the service and “young & dumb & full of come.” Plus I got all my information on the terminal effects of the .44 Magnum solely from Clint Eastwood movies. I slept soundly under the stars way back then, my trusty Smith & Wesson by my side, secure in the knowledge that I was ten-foot-tall and bulletproof.

Today, just sleeping on the ground requires a recovery period lasting until early afternoon. Not that I get much sleep what with that nagging little voice in the back of my head telling me that if there’s a Griz around I won’t know it until the sonofabitch is licking my ear. Now a combination sleep apnea, damaged vertebrae, a pinched nerve that sometimes makes my left arm go numb, a hearing impairment and being legally blind in one eye (don’t forget your night vision starts to go to shit this side of forty, too) lead me to believe that maybe…just maybe…I may no longer be able to whip a big boar grizzly in hand-to-hand combat anymore.

I kinda figure the only way I can even hike that country nowadays would be if I had somebody else do all the heavy lifting for me, i.e. carry the packs. I might still be able to hunt the high country if I restrict myself to a carbine, canteen and binoculars, and I’m not too sure about the binos. Hell, with only one good eye I probably should switch to a monocular anyway.

Anyway, back to the heavy lifting, none of my buddies are dumb enough to want to hunt that country with me and even if the spirit were willing, the flesh is usually as weak (and old and gimpy) as that of yours truly. I’m not quite sure how this came to pass, or even the precise decade in which it occurred. I’m going blame it all on Global Warming rather than give any credence to my wife’s ridiculous theory about a large number of accumulated birthdays.

At any rate, the desire (desperation?) to hunt the Boulder was the convoluted stream of logic that led me to the conclusion that I should get me a string of goats for use as pack animals.

Little did I know that merely acquiring goats was only the beginning of a long adventure/ordeal and the Boulder River country doesn’t yet appear any closer from the current vantage point despite the increase in elevation from a three-inch layer of goat poop.

But, at least the chances of success appear much better than drawing a special tag.

VIRTUAL TOUR OF THE NEW HOUSE

Aside from the ordeal of actually closing on our new home and land, detailed above, I have been getting many requests (hi Pat!) for pictures of the new digs. SO, to shut folks up, here is a short "virtual tour" of the new place.

In keeping with Owl Gore's admonishments to "go green", we decided to make the home "aesthetically pleasing" to the natural setting.

The living room window has an awesome view and field of fire.

It is an older model home, as you can see from the 75mm gun instead of the 105mm gun now used to accessorize.

You know those ceiling fans designed to look like the nose of a P40 Flying Tiger? Those are for pussies.


I found the basement a little cramped for my reloading bench and gunsmithing hobbies.

Unwanted guests? Just pop out the back door.

I even had room to set up a little riding trail for my ATV.

Although the back yard is a bit restricted, I did manage to set up my own small rifle range to play with my toys. I got an, "I told you so!" from my wife, though. The neighbors do bitch about the noise for some reason.

MORE CZECH FIREARM PRODUCTS WE NEED TO SEE ON THE SHELVES

During the writing of the last post on Czech ammunition, I strayed slightly into blithering about the history of the Czechs' armament industries over the years. So, sure, now you can get some good stuff in the American shooting market…ammo, Cz pistols, VZ24 Mausers, etc.

But what about the really good stuff? The stuff I think we should see on the American shooter and surplus market. Stuff that should be readily and legally available to the ordinary citizen, not just given to Mexican drug lords by the ATF on the taxpayers’ dime. Just a few more of these things would provide hours of fun and a good source of income for the Czech Republic. So, in order of preference, here are Bawb’s Top 5 Czech shooting products which should be on the American market for the benefit of mankind, as well as to entertain the hell out of me and kooks like myself.

Then we wouldn’t have so much time to bitch about Obama and the government destroying the nation. (Hint, hint!)

#1 The Bren Gun

Okay, while the Bren Gun itself as we know it was not made in Czechoslovakia, it was designed there and originally manufactured as the Zb vz. 26. The British Army conducted trials for a new light machine gun and the Zb vz. 26 won. With a couple of modifications to the barrel and magazine to take the standard .303 British rimmed service cartridge, the Brits started manufacturing the Bren under license (fortunately for them before they gave Czechoslovakia to Hitler at Munich). The name Bren came from Brno, the city where it was first designed and built, and Enfield, the British small arms factory.

The Bren was an air-cooled, gas-operated, magazine fed machine gun weighing 23 pounds in its original form. It had a cyclic rate of around 500 rounds per minute and fed from 30-round magazines. It had a bipod as well as a tripod and was also used to arm the open-topped, fully tracked Universal Carrier, which quickly became known as “Bren Gun Carriers”. Adopted in 1938, the Bren was a staple of British & Commonwealth forces throughout WWII and Korea. It was later converted to 7.62x51mm NATO and continued in active British service through the 1982 Falklands Conflict.

A version is still being manufactured by the Ordnance factories in India, hopefully with better quality control than their 7.62x51mm ammunition.

Soldiers and Marines who served with the Bren Gun loved it. And, as much as I am a fan of John Moses Browning, it was probably a much better choice than the Browning Automatic Rifle used by American forces at the same time. Even the Gunny thinks so.



There’s absolutely no reason, IMHO, why every gun owner shouldn’t be allowed to have one or two.

#2 vz. 61 Skorpion

Cool & Sexy

I’m not a big fan of shoulder-fired full-auto, even in poodle shooting calibers, but I have to admit that the vz. 61 Skorpion machine pistol is awful sexy and cool. With a telescopic bolt and folding wire shoulder stock, the thing is only 10-1/2 inches when folded. With 10 or 20-round magazines, you can fire either semi-automatically like a regular pistol or flip the safety one more notch and hose ‘em out at 850-900 rounds per minute.

Name your flavor. Since its introduction in caliber .32 ACP in 1961, they have since been made in .380 ACP, 9x19mm Parabellum, and 9x18mm Makarov. I’m not too sold on the stopping power of any of those cartridges, but with their low recoil and ability to put fifteen rounds out in a second multiple hits would probably make up for it.

Did I mention it’s just so cool and sexy?

#3 The Hetzer

Let's go hunting the ultimate big game...panzers!

The Skoda LT vz 38 tank was, at the time of its adoption, considered a medium tank and a dandy example of tank technology of the late 1930’s. It was being built for both a lucrative export market as well as for the Czech military. Then came Munich, and the LT vz 38 became the German Panzerkampfwagen 38 (t), and was used in Poland, France, and the early days of Barbarossa, the invasion of Soviet Russia. The Panzer 38 (t) was actually superior to the two most widely-used German-made tanks at the time of its adoption/theft; the Panzer Mk I, which had only twin machine guns, and the Panzer II with its 20-mm cannon. The 38 had a 37-mm main gun, the standard anti-weapon of the day, and boasted great mechanical reliability and maneuverability.

Eventually, the little tank was obsolete against the newer Soviet tanks, but the reliable chassis was adapted to a variety of other roles. My favorite was the Jagdpanzer 38(t) tank destroyer. With a solid frontal hull with 60mm of armor sloped at a good 60-degrees, the little hunter had the equivalent of 4-3/4 of armor protection. It’s 75-mm Panzerjagerkanone 39 (L/38) main gun, while not as impressive as the dreaded “88”, was good against most Allied tanks with the exception of the Soviet monsters like the JS-1 Stalin, firing a hard-cored AP round at 2,500 fps which could penetrate 82mm of armor (sloped at 30-degrees) at a thousand meters. Other rounds included HE for those pesky infantrymen, as well as a roof-mounted MG34 7.92mm machine gun on top, which was fired via remote-control from inside the vehicle. As a big bonus, the Hetzer was barely seven feet tall and just over eight feet wide, making it easy to hide while lying in wait in ambush and providing a small target to hit as well.

After WWII, the Swiss decided the Hetzer was custom-made for the defensive military strategy and purchased 185 of them, while the Czech Army kept 180 in service, both armies using the weapons up to the early 1970s. I see no good reason why you or I can’t own one of these things to go tooling around in. It would make a helluva great elk hunting rig.

#4 DANA

8x8 = twice the fun as 4x4

What’s that you say? Your elk is out of range of the little Hetzer’s 75mm gun? No problem! You've got a date with DANA. DANA's a Delo Automobilni Nabijene Automaticky (self-propelled auto-loading gun). No matter how reliable, tracked vehicles are a bit of a pain in the ass in the maintenance department, especially if relying on a government re-supply system such as the Army Quartermaster Corps. Wheeled vehicles, on the other hand, are relatively cheap, easier to maintain (with civilian truck parts in the case of the DANA), and can really move on down the road at 50 mph. Mercy sakes, looks like we got us a convoy.

The DANA was built in the early 80s on the chassis of the Tatra 815 military truck, a HEMMITT-looking 8x8 rig, which was then the best off-road military truck around. Eight-wheel-drive, tire pressure regulation for cross-country travel, a 350-horse V-12 diesel engine, power assist on the front two steer axles, air-conditioning (I shit you not) in both cab and turret, and the ability to cross a 5-foot vertical obstacle or ford 4-1/2 feet of water. What’s not to like?

But wait, we haven’t even gotten to the good part yet; a handy-dandy 152-mm gun/howitzer in an armored air-conditioned turret with a traverse of 45-degrees, elevation of 70-degrees, and a 20 km range. Say you spot a coyote on a distant mountain top. No problemo. Just start lobbing 96-pound high explosive projectiles at him at the rate or 3 rounds per minute until you whack him, or rearrange the terrain features enough that he gets hopelessly lost. For those little pests at short range, you also have the good old DShK 12.7mm machine gun, aka the “Russian Ma Duece”.

Uh-oh. You can’t find enough 152-mm and 12.7mm ammunition at the local sporting goods store on the Mexican border? Not to worry. There are also export versions fitted with the popular 155-mm cannon and a 7.62x51mm NATO machine gun. So there's no reason not to rush out and buy one today!

#5 M53/59 Praga

Without the option for a jumping front axle, the M53/59 has not been popular with Mexican drug cartels so I think the ATF should sell them surplus to American citizens.

Let’s say you’re also a duck hunter, and an increase in gas prices has you looking for something a little more economical in the mileage department. The Czechs have you covered there as well with the M53/59 Praga self-propelled anti-aircraft gun.

Based on the ”indestructible” V3S Praga 6x6 truck chassis, aluminum armor helps keep the weight down and the Tatra 6-cylinder 110-horse diesel gets you 500 klicks on a single tank of fuel, roughly 9.8 miles per gallon, or the equivalent of my old F350 work truck. Just don’t let the DOT catch you using red dyed agricultural use only diesel fuel.

In back of the cab, you’ve got one hellva gun rack, mounting twin M53 30x210mm auto-cannon in an open-topped turret. Each gun carries only a 50-round magazine but don’t worry, you’ve got 800 more spare rounds stored. With High Explosive rounds you can pick off ducks and geese at up to 3,000 meters. With Armor Piercing Incendiary you can take out prairie dogs using light armored vehicles to 2,000 meters.

No legitimate sporting purpose my ass.

WARNING: Ben just emailed and said this column isn’t up to our usual obnoxious and irreverent standards, so I'll close with an insensitive ethnic joke.

Czech guy goes to the optometrist to see if he needs glasses.

The doctor points to the eye chart, the lowest line of which reads Z-B-R-O-K-Y-X, and asks the patient if he can read it.

“Read it!” The Czech exclaims. “Hell, I know the guy.”