Brad the Hunter, revised

A picket pin.

My friend Brad went insane out in Wyoming a few years ago. He got a job working on a ranch, but he was out there alone on the outskirts of the badlands long enough that his senses packed up and fucked off. Brad thought he had known boredom, but this was a whole new extravagant explosion of nothingness.

Out on the ranch there lived some form of rodent that Brad called a picket pin, which research reveals to be a nushagak ground squirrel, or gopher. That aside, the story goes that these rodents were running rampant. So rampant where they that if Brad left his cabin door open, they would wander in and have a look around while he was reading. After a few of these instrusions, Brad decided to catch one.

He let one wander in one night, lying very still on his bunk. The picket pin sniffed around, becoming more confidant. Finally, it came farther into the cabin. When it had gotten in far enough, Brad sprang out of bed and slammed the door, trapping it inside.

There followed one of those man-to-rodent/rodent-to-man looks which is clearly understood by both parties to mean “It’s on, now.”, then a tangled ruckus of overturning beds and chairs. Brad exposed the picket pin, but it scurried to and fro.

Finally he was able to capture it with the help of a pair of leather work gloves he had handy. The thing bit the gloves for a while, and then just sort of looked up as if to say “Well, ok, I give up. Eat me.”.

But Brad didn’t eat it. He put it on a leash. By this time, some of the other ranch hands had arrived for the season. He paraded the picket pin around on a rope leash for everyone, but the girls on the ranch were so horrified at this display of cruelty to a rodent that they made him agree to let it go.

Before he released it, however, he had the immense presence of mind to spraypaint its ass orange, so he would be able to spot it later on. This fact was widely held as bullshit by the other ranch hands for quite some time, until one of them spotted the orange-assed beast in the hills. Thankfully, Brad’s integrity was restored among his coworkers.

Brad later discovered that the ranch had a .22 rifle which he began to take into the hills on his days off. He hunted the picket pins, but it quickly became so easy to kill them that he lost interest in it. In the process, though, he gained a reputation around the ranch as an incredible shot and a great hunter. Some more sporting ranch hands began to take bets on how many Brad could bag in a day. He always made the number and won their money, so they had to up the stakes.

They sent him out with a broom one day, and he got one. “I hit it with the handle,” he told me. Next they sent him out with a large soup ladle. He came back with a battered, but very dead picket pin. He was beginning to make some decent pocket change from the betting pools.

Finally, one of the hands bet that he couldn’t kill a picket pin with only a table spoon. Brad didn’t know if he could do it, but not being one to back down, he took the bet. He put the spoon in his pocket and headed off into the hills on the first day of his weekend off. He found a picket pin hole and sat beside it to wait, spoon at the ready.

After a span of time he claims was approaching 24 hours, one of the things emerged. Brad whacked it on the head with his spoon, but it ran back in the hole. Seasoned hunter that he was, he patiently waited for another opportunity.

As he was sitting there, one of the newly-arrived visitors to the ranch walked by on a tour of the grounds with the ranch’s owner. The visitor spotted Brad, dusty and rumpled after hours of crouching over the picket pin hole. The visitor turned to the owner of the ranch and said “Don’t you feed that boy?”.

Brad eventually killed a picket pin who wandered out of that hole, and it was his last. It had just gotten too easy. I suppose there are only so many times a man can spend the night in the desert, hoping to bash the shit out of a picket pin with a table spoon.

For Brad, that number of times was one.