...Rusty Schweikert, an astronaut, Bob Fuller, wagonmaster from the old tv show Wagon Train, Claude Kirk, then governor of Florida, Baron Something Von Furstenburg from Bavaria or Bohemia or Prussia or some gawdamned place with castles, and Lauritz Melchior, the operatic meistersinger from Copenhagen.
Add me to the olio and we're off at 4 ayem from the lobby of The Noble Hotel in Lander Wyoming, off to join The One-Shot Antelope Hunt - but first we had to down about nine gallons of Governor Kirk's Florida orange juice which he must have had a whole plane full of, and then we're headed down to the Red Desert (pictured above) - me & the aforementioned 'team', and I, more or less extra baggage along for the ride as editor of The Wyoming State Journal for which I am writing the story of today's hunt, the object of which was to get (as in kill) the most pronghorn antelope per team, and each member only getting one-shot, hence the name, all very macho western and I for one (since I was not in on the actual hunt) was having a grand old time riding with these celebrity folks and being sort of their "guide", and helping Gov. Kirk properly dispose of some Jack Daniel's which he'd also brought.
(Christ it ain't even daylight yet and we're sitting on the tailgate of an old grey bouncing Bronco banging over Le Desert Rouge getting red-eyed while nipping Black Jack's amber bourbon neat beneath an ink-blue sky riddled with golden stars, peepholes into eternity...)
I put "guide" in quotes because in this case it was a nebulous term at best, one dune in the desert looks like another to me and soon we were way lost...the governor ('Call me Claude son...') was magnanimous about the whole matter of being adrift in the desert and didn't seem to care much while the rest were anxiously searching the horizons more for a way out than antelope, with an occasional glare at me; these dudes had visions in their heads of being staked to a ant-covered hillside by Apaches...
My feeling, though I was somewhat to blame, was that if Rusty Schweikert could find his way back from Mars or wherever the hell he went in space, he should be able to get us back to Lander and eventually he did, but first we rode on and on until finally we came to a fence under which an antelope had tried to crawl but had become entangled in the barbed wire and without hesitation Claude Kirk got off the tailgate, went over to the fence, pulled and jerked and shoved and finally got the poor thing loose - I mean, Dude, it was TANGLED in barbed wire, and set it free, and no he didn't then shoot it from ten yards off, in fact we returned much much later in the night than any other team and we had no antelope to show for our efforts.
Why this antelope was ensnared under a barbed wire fence when he could have easily leaped across it - the fence wasn't four feet high and an antelope probably can leap ten feet in the air and fifteen feet across before he touches down again - was a mystery but I've since learned that for all its agility an antelope will NOT jump a fence. Ahhh, the things NFTD brings to your life...
O, and as for the great tenor Melchior? He sat in front humming can you believe that? I'm riding with an icon of opera, Lauritz Melchior for Cris'sakes and he's humming the overture to Il Trovatore...
Add me to the olio and we're off at 4 ayem from the lobby of The Noble Hotel in Lander Wyoming, off to join The One-Shot Antelope Hunt - but first we had to down about nine gallons of Governor Kirk's Florida orange juice which he must have had a whole plane full of, and then we're headed down to the Red Desert (pictured above) - me & the aforementioned 'team', and I, more or less extra baggage along for the ride as editor of The Wyoming State Journal for which I am writing the story of today's hunt, the object of which was to get (as in kill) the most pronghorn antelope per team, and each member only getting one-shot, hence the name, all very macho western and I for one (since I was not in on the actual hunt) was having a grand old time riding with these celebrity folks and being sort of their "guide", and helping Gov. Kirk properly dispose of some Jack Daniel's which he'd also brought.
(Christ it ain't even daylight yet and we're sitting on the tailgate of an old grey bouncing Bronco banging over Le Desert Rouge getting red-eyed while nipping Black Jack's amber bourbon neat beneath an ink-blue sky riddled with golden stars, peepholes into eternity...)
I put "guide" in quotes because in this case it was a nebulous term at best, one dune in the desert looks like another to me and soon we were way lost...the governor ('Call me Claude son...') was magnanimous about the whole matter of being adrift in the desert and didn't seem to care much while the rest were anxiously searching the horizons more for a way out than antelope, with an occasional glare at me; these dudes had visions in their heads of being staked to a ant-covered hillside by Apaches...
My feeling, though I was somewhat to blame, was that if Rusty Schweikert could find his way back from Mars or wherever the hell he went in space, he should be able to get us back to Lander and eventually he did, but first we rode on and on until finally we came to a fence under which an antelope had tried to crawl but had become entangled in the barbed wire and without hesitation Claude Kirk got off the tailgate, went over to the fence, pulled and jerked and shoved and finally got the poor thing loose - I mean, Dude, it was TANGLED in barbed wire, and set it free, and no he didn't then shoot it from ten yards off, in fact we returned much much later in the night than any other team and we had no antelope to show for our efforts.
Why this antelope was ensnared under a barbed wire fence when he could have easily leaped across it - the fence wasn't four feet high and an antelope probably can leap ten feet in the air and fifteen feet across before he touches down again - was a mystery but I've since learned that for all its agility an antelope will NOT jump a fence. Ahhh, the things NFTD brings to your life...
O, and as for the great tenor Melchior? He sat in front humming can you believe that? I'm riding with an icon of opera, Lauritz Melchior for Cris'sakes and he's humming the overture to Il Trovatore...
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