Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/128995
orizons H By Roger Pinckney T A man can face down a charging Cape buffalo, an ornery boar, a vengeful bear, then get laid low by something he can't even see. he coulee ran from just below the pink and sepia rimrock, spreading and flattening on its way down to the river where it finally fanned onto a sandbar in the willow bank meanderings of the stream. Tufts of grass among the rock, buffalo grass, bluestem and blue gamma wherever seed found soil, thicker, taller the farther downhill. Ragged remains of an old sheep fence at the bottom and I knew a bird would run till he hit that wire, then hunker and explode skyward at the last instant. I was right. The cock's eye shown like the setting sun in barley cutting time and when he opened his beak, his cry was guttural and metallic, like a Timken bearing loaded with rust and sand. What kind of damn bird is this? But there was no bird and there was no coulee. There was no rimrock, no bluestem or blue gamma. I wasn't in the breaks of the Little Missouri. I was laid up sick 2,000 miles away. I was hallucinating and fixing to die. A man can face down charging buffalo in three flavors, a dozen ornery boar, a vengeful bear or three, then get laid low by something he cannot even see? Didn't seem right somehow. It crept on me like a panther, slowly, slowly, ever-so-slowly, and when I realized how sick I really was, it was almost too late. Sweaty, dizzy, short of breath, a death rattle in my chest, I spent my nights in a wing chair, my yellow lab's head upon my knee, his great S deck of an idling 28-footer. Across four miles of deep blue water where another ambulance waited. Then it was across another float, up another ramp and dock. But before the mate cast off the docklines, one of the EMTs hollered. "We got this new privacy law. Once we turn you loose, we can't call and check on you. If you make it, come by and tell us how it went." I promised. here followed three days of flirting with depression, death and bankruptcy. Might as well sell the .375. I'll never see Africa again. Would I ever get back to Costa Rica? What about those two quail hunts coming up in Georgia? Could I ever even walk uphill? They stuck an IV into my left arm and poured me full of some sheep dip formulated to inspire mummification. They weighed me twice a day and noted I had made considerable progress towards King Tut. They injected me with sundry isotopes brought to me in lead-lined boxes. They ran me through an impressive array of gadgetry clinking and clanking like the contents of a moonshiner's trunk. Although I previously struggled to spell hospitalist and cardiologist, pretty soon I had one of each. The hospitalist promised me a boar hunt if I would follow the cardiologist's orders, but the cardiologist limited me to two shots of whiskey a day. Our conversation went something like this: T grieving eyes looking deep into mine. I feared if I slept and could not will myself to breathe, I would not. Maybe the dog knew it true. A man makes compromises when he chooses to live in a remote location, and those of you reading this from the fringes of the world will know well of what I speak. You can call 911 and you can wait as you gurgle and moan and die. Or you can roll into the back of the pickup or safari car and have somebody dump you on the ground beside the nearest medical station, be it five miles or 500. The EMTs got me onto a gurney, plastered electrodes all over my upper body, plugged me into a machine, pondered the blips on the screen. "This ain't good," one of them said. "We got to take you across." Across. Across equals civilization, dreaded here. Down two-lane blacktop, down the dock, down the ramp, across the float, onto the rear P O R T I N G C 134 L A S S I C S