Writers and editors have always had a contentious relationship. As a writer I tend to favor my side and found it amusing when Gene Fowler said, “An editor should have a pimp for a brother so he’d have somebody to look up to.”
As we writer-types see it, it’s the writer’s job to create pithy, interesting and entertaining prose while it’s the editor’s job to suck the life from the prose and turn it pedestrian and boring, but with perfect grammar.
Another anecdote that writers love to tell illustrates this well.
A writer and an editor are lost for days in the desert. Just as they abandon all hope they top a hill and see a golden oasis below them. Being the finer physical specimen, the writer sprints ahead and reaches it first. He dips his head into the ambrosia and drinks his fill. It tastes like heaven mixed with love and life and with overtones of chocolate. It is the most perfect drink he has ever experienced. Once full, he falls on his back, closes his eyes and rejoices in his salvation.
Then he hears a splashing sound and opens his eyes to see the editor urinating into the pool.
“What the hell are you doing?” he screams!
“Improving it,” says the editor.
So it falls that writers and editors usually don’t like each other much. Except for Ike and Mike. They work in the hunting industry and, despite the odds, they have been friends for several decades.
They met many years ago on an industry hunt for upland birds and waterfowl that was trying to pack as many writers as possible into an abandoned farmhouse. All the beds were full, most with multiple bodies, and every chair, couch and flat spot on the warped floors had somebody trying to sleep there. The place had two bathrooms, but one was claimed exclusively for a lovely woman who was one of the organizers of the trip and suffered from a severe gastric disease that made the decision for her exclusivity pretty easy for the rest of the crew.
The other bathroom defaulted to the domain of multiple men and by Wednesday resembled a hazardous waste disposal area. There were unconfirmed rumors after the fact that the government declared it a superfund site, which was no doubt a financial boon for the outfitter.
Ike and Mike, left to fend for themselves for the day unguided, were stuck in a tiny duck blind beside a puddle that was threatening to evaporate at any minute. Just before dark a half-dozen teal came, as teal do, screaming over the blind from behind. They were lined one behind the other and approaching Mach 2 in flight. This was years before the collective gunfire had its way with Ike’s stereocilia, so he could hear the whistling approach of the ducks. He quickly sprang into action and fired his shotgun. The last teal in the line crumpled and fell.
“That’s the greatest shot I have ever seen,” Mike exclaimed.
Ike never told him he was shooting at the lead duck, several feet in front of the one that fell. The next day he missed an easy shot on a rising wild pheasant, which Mike crumpled with a clean head shot. Somehow, the synchronicity of the events spawned a friendship that has lasted through decades, several hunts and many empty whiskey bottles.
A few years later they were both invited to a Midwest shotgun-only whitetail hunt to test a new slug that had been developed and guaranteed (by the maker) to revolutionize that emerging market. It was in fact a pretty good slug and performed well both at the range and on the big Midwest bucks. That was the last time anybody ever saw it.
The slug’s historical penetration was illustrated by a very funny story the gunmaker told one night at dinner. Seems there was a negligent discharge inside his shop. The slug passed through two walls, including the exterior wall that was well insulated. It then penetrated through a car and a pickup truck in the parking lot and sailed off into never-never land so it was never found. Given that this was a full-bore, flat-nose slug that measured three-quarters of an inch in diameter, that penetration was most impressive. Of course, only a gun guy can see the humor in this kind of story that would shock the unknowing public. Still, the guy had the table in stitches by the end. To paraphrase a favorite writer’s line, “If that story is not true, it should be.”
During the hunt, not one slug was recovered from a deer. All punched a huge hole clean through the deer, although not always where it was expected.
Illinois was at its peak in fame for producing giant whitetail bucks and the shotgun season overcame the distance dilemma imposed in the earlier bow season. The deer that seemed to sense how far is too far for a stick and string were in for a shock.
First light, opening morning found Mike in a stand watching a very good buck passing through. One well-placed shot and he was finished hunting for the week. Not expecting a pick-up for several hours, Mike stayed in the stand. An hour later two more bucks wandered by. The second one looked like something out of a Dr. Seuss book with giant antlers rocking on his head like an Irish elk reincarnated. As the bucks chased a doe into the thick woods, Mike cursed himself for shooting too soon.
It was too early to goad Mike about shooting too fast, so Ike kept his mouth shut at camp that night, which was not as easy as you might expect.
Ike was in the same stand the next morning when he saw two bucks chase a doe into the far end of a patch of woods, headed his way. The big buck was leading the chase and he was world-class, probably making the record book. It was the same buck, no doubt, which had taunted and mocked Mike the morning before.
The doe flashed through an opening and Ike snapped his shotgun to his shoulder and fired just as the buck behind her entered the opening. The severe recoil of the shotgun caused him to lose sight for a split second. When his vision returned to focus on the woods, nothing was there.
Everything stopped. He waited, frozen and ready, eyes flicking, anxiously looking for a clue about how those deer could disappear instantly. After several minutes the smaller of the two bucks, still a trophy by any measure, walked out toward the stand and laid down. Ike thought, “Go away, I want your big brother, not you. I don’t need you here messing up things.” Ignoring the deer, Ike looked intensely into the woods for some time, and when it was clear the doe and the big buck had made good their escape he took a moment to glance at the buck lying near the stand. That’s when he noticed the pool of blood from a severed artery and that the buck was in a very deep sleep.
The two bucks had switched positions in the woods, and the smaller one came through right behind the doe. He was hit too far back, but the slug had done its job very well.
By coincidence there was a big-name celebrity hunter in camp filming his bow hunt for his TV show. He arrived at dinner that night loudly spouting off and asking, over and over, “Which one of you so-called experts shot that buck in the ass?” He failed to read the room and was unanimously ignored until he wandered away to find somebody to worship him. A few days later, facing failure himself, he abandoned his bow for a shotgun and promptly shot a very small buck, in the ass!
It’s odd, though, that the resulting TV episode reflected none of those events.
As most shotgun hunters know, but Mike, Ike and Mr. Wonderful were learning, shotgun slugs require a vastly longer lead than do rifles when shooting at running deer.
One of the sponsors, a sales guy for an optics company, had never taken a whitetail and was sent to that stand on the last day of the hunt. At first light he spotted the huge buck, not so far off, and fired a shot, hitting the left antler near its base. This knocked the buck out cold and allowed the hunter to walk closer for a point-blank finisher. Only the broken antler kept it out of the record book. Not so bad for a first deer! All three of the “so-called” experts were humbled. Well, two of them anyway.
Fast forward about 20 years. Opening morning is a very special moment in any deer hunt, but never more so than in the Midwest where the possibility of a huge buck always looms large. Mike, the editor, was dressed in custom-fitted high-tech and expensive hunting clothing, with a computer-designed camo pattern guaranteed to hide anything, anytime, anywhere. He carried a custom-built rifle in the latest wonder cartridge topped with an optic clearer than the Hubble Telescope. The rifle was chambered in the smallest of a trio of new cartridges that were rewriting the book on hunting cartridge design. Combined, it all cost more than a new compact car.
Ike, the writer, had on faded wool pants he bought at K-Mart before they went belly up decades ago. His frayed jacket was a giveaway, bearing the logo of a long-defunct optics company. His boots were pretty good because he suffers from cold feet and spent the entire check from a feature article buying them. He had an off-the-shelf rifle chambered for a sibling whiz-bang cartridge, the middle child of the new family, because the maker sent it to him to use so he would write about it. The gun and scope came with clear instructions that they must be returned after the hunt. Although unwritten, it was generally accepted that it was OK to keep the empty cases from any ammo fired. Don’t ask—don’t tell.
The 20-minute drive to the hunting area was raucous and loud, as hunts are when they are still new and filled with possibility. Mike dropped Ike at his blind and then drove away. Just as daylight was peeking over the landscape Ike saw the truck flying across the cut fields and out to the town road. There it accelerated quickly. A moment later a dictated text came in. “I forgot my $$&%^&^*% ammo! I’ll be back! Tell any big bucks you see to wait.”
There was more, but it’s not fit to print in a magazine that kids might read. Mike was using that new cartridge and nobody in three counties had even seen one, let alone had ammo to loan him. Of the possibilities of disaster, this is pretty near the top. For example, you can still hunt if you fall down and break your leg, but without ammo you are toast. I suppose you can hunt, but with nothing to shoot it won’t end well. In fact, I’ll bet it guarantees you will see a huge buck.
Ike was so deep in mirth at his buddy’s faux pas that he let what turned out to be the best buck anybody saw that week walk away without even picking up his rifle. All morning and into lunch he had a hard time containing himself, and he worked at suppressing giggles that were not really appropriate. It was just too soon, and it might have been physically dangerous to offer any harassment.
After lunch, it started hitting Ike what he had done. The conventional wisdom is that you should shoot any buck you see on the first day that you would shoot on the last day. Of course if you do, as Mike can attest, you will soon see a much bigger deer. Or if you don’t, as Ike feared he would soon enough prove, it might be the one and only chance all week.
At the lodge for lunch, Mike took a break to do editor stuff. Ike did what Hemingway called refilling the well and took a nap. Still recovering from a nasty bout of the Chinese flu, he overslept a bit and they were late getting back to the hunt.
The pair rushed to the truck then sped to the hunting area. Trying to make up time, they flew by the cut corn fields on the way to the blinds. Nobody talked. The silence was ponderous. None of this was going according to plan.
The hunter’s creed is simple: “It’s better to be an hour early than a minute late.” They both knew which side of that they were on now, so the morning’s happy mood had run off to hide in the woods. Everybody was a bit tense and more than a little grumpy. Opening day was not the time to forget stuff or lose track of time. This is a serious business and messing it up is not acceptable. They should have been sitting in their blinds half an hour earlier and there was no good excuse for why they were not. It wasn’t anybody’s clear fault, both were guilty. So it was hard to assign blame, and with no place to direct the anger, they just turned mute.
When the truck stopped in front of his ground blind, Ike jumped out with a grunt of thanks and opened the rear door to get his gear out of the truck. A moment later, he went numb.
“Come on, let’s go, I want to get to my stand before dark!” said Mike.
Ike just froze.
“What’s the matter? Get your stuff and go. We are late, move!”
“Can I borrow your truck?” asked Ike.
“I wouldn’t let my mother borrow this truck,” Mike retored. “It’s unique, custom, and very expensive, so no.”
The silence that followed seemed eternal.
Then slowly, with lots of question in the tone, Mike asked, “Why do you need my truck?”
“I … um … well … sort of … forgot my rifle,” Ike said.
Forgetting ammo is easy, but your entire rifle? That’s a dumbass move on steroids. All Mike said was “get in the truck.” But it was understood that he was banking everything, and once it was time there would be a lot of payback due. The currency of that payment was yet to be determined, but it assuredly would be steep.
It turned out that none of it mattered and they both went home without firing a shot. Still, in every other measurable way it was a good hunt.
The prophecy says the lamb will lie with the lion. I suspect a stronger truth is that editors will hunt with the writers.
Does that signal end times? Maybe. Probably.
