Slim Randles' Home Country

The blissful microcosm of a hunter

[October 05, 2015]  "There’s a word”, thought Dud, silently. “A word to describe this … this pristine fall morning sitting here in a blind with a bow and arrows and anticipation of finding the same buck we saw last year. Maybe this year we’ll have a safe shot at him.
 

“This world, this tiny world around me. Right now. There’s a word. Look at that deer track just to my right, for example. See the edges of it begin to crumble? That tells me it is maybe an hour old, because it takes that long for the mud walls of the track to dry enough to flake off.

“When did I learn that? Which old timer told me about that? My granddad? He was a hunter all right, and I learned a lot from him, but there’s this feeling in the back of my brain that it came from someone else. Bert? Hey, maybe Bert. Bert was a guide in his younger years and he showed me all kinds of things out here.”

Dud smiled to himself behind the gauzy camo face mask. “It’s almost impossible not to smile on a morning like this one. Even if it rains, I’ll still smile,” he thought. He felt like telling that pine tree over there … ‘Hey, I’m back. Dud Campbell. Remember me?’ The tree looked the same as it did last year and the same as it did when he sat right here as a 10-year-old boy with his grandfather. “I guess some things change and some don’t. That big rock down by the creek will probably never change. Not even after the pine tree decays and falls someday long into the future.”

A movement by his left foot caught his eye and he looked down without moving his head. It’s an art form for a hunter. And there was a deer mouse, poking up out of the leaf litter, looking around and going back down, but slowly and unafraid.

Dud smiled again. “I fooled him. Maybe when that buck comes along …”

But that word. “Come on, you’re writing a book, you should know that word for this little world you create, you visit, each fall morning like this one.”

Oh yes. Microcosm. The blissful microcosm of a hunter.
 

[Text from file received from Slim Randles]

Ol' Jimmy Dollar is Slim Randles' first children's book.  The book is for kids K-3rd grades and is even better when parents read it with children.  Ol' Jimmy Dollar makes for sweet dreams and if you have a dog even better.  Available now on Amazon.