Giving a good friend his due

May 02, 2008 12:06 am

— I am not much of a practical joker, but a few weeks ago I planned and carried out a good one on my friend Glynn Harris, who needed his goat gotten badly. You see, he and I were somewhat in the same skill range as guitarists and boy did we have fun playing guitars together. Glynn is a lead guitarist and I am a rhythm guitarist and do a little Chet Atkins style picking. I always wished I could play lead and Glynn has said he envied Chet’s picking.
Well, I understand my role in our picking sessions and I stay within it. But does Glynn behave himself and stay in his musical place? NoooOOoo! He goes and starts picking Chet Atkins stuff. And I can tell by how good he is that he has been practicing a bunch; clandestine sessions you understand. Now old fancy fingers has up and got better than me. So I decided to sting him a little to teach him a lesson.
I invited him over from Louisiana to hunt wild turkeys with me. I finally found a property for us to hunt that had been cutover and had very few turkeys on it. So it didn’t take me long to work on the few gobblers that remained on the lease; you know, shooting at them and hollering at them and flushing them off the roost and sicking dogs on them and blowing my horn at them and stuff like that to be sure they couldn’t be called in.

Bedding down

Before Glynn arrived for our hunt I messed up the sleeping cabin by throwing stuff on the floor and cluttering up the chairs and couches and bunks. Then I nailed up rattlesnake skins all over the ceiling and made up several snake stories to tell Glynn after the lights were turned off at night. Luckily he didn’t get suspicious when I slept in my truck and left him inside with the snake skins and camp varmints at night, my excuse being that my snoring would bother him.
I arranged with the nearby Meridian Naval Air Station to schedule their training flights so they would blast off overhead at seven a.m. every day so if any gobbler got brave enough to answer one of Glynn’s yelps the jets would drown out the exchange. The flights were right on schedule.
Glynn wore his ear muff type game ears, telling me it was so he could hear the turkeys. But what he was doing was minimizing hearing loss from the jets. I looked at the muffs when he was asleep and he had them turned down to zero and had the cavities stuffed full of cotton!
I even stole his face mask one day to make him visible to any sane and fearless tom turkey that might wander into our woods after the locals had received my trauma therapy.
Most of my efforts turned out fine; like rubbing out all the gobbler tracks I found and telling Glynn I heard a gobble across a slough with lots of swimming cottonmouths and slamming the door of my truck good and hard at the crack of daylight every morning.

Insubordinate mouse

But one of my initiatives gave me some trouble and took up way too much time. I was able to trap several live mice from the cabin kitchen and train them to accomplish certain feats for special surprises I had planned for Glynn. The most troublesome mouse was the one I planted in the deer stand with instructions to give Glynn a start. After hours of training, that mouse forgot to run up Glynn’s pants leg.
Upon sending Glynn to the stand to watch for a turkey, I was anxious to get his report when he returned. “There was a mouse in that stand,” said Glynn. “When I opened the door, he looked up and smiled at me!” he continued. My mouse knew he was about to make that bald headed man jump out of that stand and he hesitated a moment to enjoy the thought instead of just going ahead with the plan. Glynn suspected the mouse was up to mischief and he just closed the door and left for another hunting spot. It was the only glitch in my scheme.
My goal was to see just how far I could take this sabotage thing before Glynn would catch on to me. Well, I should have never doubted his gullibility. When he left for home after several days in the turkeyless woods with me, he thanked me profusely and lied that he had had a wonderful time. I was chuckling under my breath.
I had so much fun preparing things for Glynn that I had little time to scout the woods in my secret spots and get ready for the season. My lack of preparation for myself took its toll on my hunting. But bringing Glynn down a notch was worth the time spent. He just shows off his picking too much. And I could learn that simple lead guitar stuff if I wanted to, but I wouldn’t horn in on a friend’s territory like that.