Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/116174
on his sleeve, and I swatted at a fly as I looked back at him from across the gummy table and noted his look of apprehension. Oh, we went back out with our rifles that afternoon despite the drizzle, and the guide and I dropped Stick off a mile down the road from where I intended to hunt that evening. But when we picked him up an hour after dark, Stick didn't look all that well. At first I thought it was just the milky green tint from the mudspattered headlights grazing his contorted face at an awkward angle. But he handed me his empty rifle and crawled moaning into the back seat of the truck, and when we got to camp his skin tone was trending to the sallow side, looking for all the world like the leathery underside of a geriatric porcupine's belly, and he seemed to have lost much of his initial enthusiasm for the hunt and went straight to bed without his supper. I rumbled awake around midnight S accounted for, curled up in his bunk in a semi-fetal hump and shivering beneath the covers. And that's where he was determined to stay, except of course for his regular runs across the hall to the facilities. But by now I was once again feeling fairly chipper, and so, thinking I'd only had a mild dose of Rowdy's rancid stew, I headed out hunting on my own well before daylight. and ambled on down to his end of the bunkhouse to check on him. His bed was empty with the blankets tossed askew, but Stick was nowhere to be seen, though there was a telling and highly suspicious glow coming from beneath the bathroom door across the hall. I knocked gingerly, then quietly called to him using his given name. But the crude and anguished sounds coming from the far side of the old wooden door were vague and indistinct. On the positive side, I could at least tell he was still alive. But by now I was beginning to feel a bit queasy myself, and so I decided it might be wise to avail myself of one of the other bathrooms up and down the long dark hallway. But to my chagrin, they all seemed to be occupied. And so I made my way back to my own bed, determined somehow to whip my unsettled digestive system into shape by daylight. I wandered back down to check on Stick a couple of hours later, and sure enough he was present, if not entirely P O R T I N G C 90 L A S S I D ear friends and readers, I am still trying to figure out how best to describe to you what happened to me that morning without being too indelicate, along with the deepseeded feelings that overwhelmed me an hour or so after sunrise and the trail I wore up and down that tree and back and forth over into the adjoining gulch before the guide finally showed up to fetch me at noon. By that time I was all cleaned out and actually feeling somewhat better. We got back to the bunkhouse a little before 12:30, and Rowdy proudly C S