Ol’ Bill and the City Fellers

The pool hall had a big picture window all the way across the front, and long before I can remember, a coat of green paint covered the lower half of it, about seven feet high. I think it was to keep wives and mothers from looking in. But inside, there was a small stage about three feet high that the coke machine and cigarette machine sat on. I could stand on that stage and look over the top of the green part of the window, out onto Main Street. With the big chest-type soda machine there before me, I could sit on a stool and use it as a sort of desk when I wanted to do my homework. More often, I sat there and wrote stories… hunting and fishing stories, stories about wild animals, about dogs, about boys who did great important things.

The deer season of 1962 brought a potful of hunters to our small town from the cities. Ol’ Bill and Ol’ Jim and many of the other front bench regulars didn’t much approve of those city hunters. There weren’t nearly as many deer back then, and every year the number of hunters in the Big Piney country was increasing. Sometimes it seemed downright crowded!

I don’t remember when we had our first deer season, but I think it was about the time I was born. I didn’t hunt deer until years later, but I learned a lot from those old hunters in the pool hall when I was just a kid.

“Big bucks like to stay in the brush, boy,” Ol’ Bill told me. “The does and young deer come out in the fields, but big old bucks like to stay in the heavy cover ‘til it gets dark. That’s why I like my old guvamint .45-70. You can shoot right through a hickory saplin’ if you need to, and knock a big buck flat.”

I didn’t know much about calibers, but I saw one of those bullets when he pulled one out of his overall pockets and it looked big enough to stop a bull elephant.

Bill and Jim never used deer scent or grunt calls or anything like that. Back then, those things hadn’t even been invented. But they were great woodsmen, and they knew all about deer; what they did, how they moved and where they would be when the rut came about. They explained the rut and mating season to me rather colorfully!

They knew how to find bucks and how to kill them. There were only 3 or 4 days in those early deer seasons and you were not allowed to kill a doe, only bucks. In later years, Ol’ Jim got to where he would kill his deer on the day before the season opened so he didn’t have to be out there with all the “greenhorns and would-be’ers” as he called them. I think the game warden knew what he was doing, but every opening day morning just after the check station would open, Jim would be there with his buck, stiff as a board. That was legal enough.

In 1962 on opening day, I was looking over the pool hall’s green window, when a big long car pulled up with a buck deer tied across the hood. They parked in front of the Big Piney Inn across the street; two hunters all decked out in red clothes, just like you’d see in the pages of the outdoor magazines I read religiously. Back then there was no blaze orange, and no law requiring you to wear red. Jim and Bill both wore red caps during the hunting season, but no one ever had on a red coat and red pants like one of those fellows had on. Several of the front bench regulars peered over the top of the green window, watching those two city fellows go into the West Side Café, just beside the hotel.

“Lands sake,” Virgil Halstead exclaimed, “That one feller looks like a giant walkin’ fire hydrant!”

“Looky there at that deer on the hood,” Ol’ Jess Wolf exclaimed, “It ain’t even been gutted!”

Ol’ Bill came up and looked out the door and shook his head. “Gosh almighty,” he said, “strapped on that hot hood with the entrails still in it… reckon that’s a new way of seasonin’ the meat.”

About that time the two men left the restaurant and headed for the pool hall. When they walked in, there were a few smiles and a snicker or two, but everyone tried to act like they hadn’t noticed the buck across the hood. It was done often in those days, when beginners got a deer and didn’t own a pickup. A couple of years before, a fellow from St. Louis had pulled into a local filling station in a big Oldsmobile with a billy-goat strapped across the hood. No one told him what it was, and he got directions to the check station and left, with several fellows near about rolling on the pavement with laughter when he was gone.

The two red-clad hunters came right in the pool hall, and to the surprise of everyone asked if Bill Stalder might be there. Bill had just left the West Side Café after having a piece of pecan pie and coffee, bragging to the waitresses about the 10-point buck he had bagged that morning. He was a little surprised to have someone come in looking for him. It may have been the first time anyone but someone’s wife came in the pool hall looking for anyone.

They were trying to find someone to clean and skin their deer, or at least help them with it. They said they were willing to pay twenty dollars. Bill would have done it for five, I imagine. He rubbed his whiskered chin and acted like he was trying to figure out if he had the time, then turned and asked me if I reckoned my grandpa was at his home, out on Brushy Creek east of town. I reckoned he was.

My grandfather and Ol’ Bill had been trapping partners for years on the Big Piney. Grandpa had no equal at skinning and cleaning fur or game… any kind of game. I had heard all the stories about how, when he was young, grandpa would travel to different farms around and butcher hogs for folks, just for the feet and head, and steers for little more than the head and hide. Ol’ Bill said the man never lived who could equal Fred Dablemont at preparing furs, or butchering.

So in little time, the two city hunters were following Ol’ Bills red International pickup to my grandpa’s place. They talked for years about that day and the easy money they made, and how bad that buck deer smelled.

But the big surprise came later that week when everyone was laughing about those two fellows, and Ol’ Bill only smiled. “You know, they was different all right, and greener than poke sprouts in the spring,” he said. “But they was pretty good guys, once you got to know ‘em. They wasn’t so much like I figgered they’d be… not such bad fellers for city folks.”

None of the front bench regulars ever got to know anyone from Kansas City as far as I know. But Ol’ Bill did. And the next summer, he and my grandpa took the two of ‘em catfishin’ on the Big Piney, and they all had a big time. I think they paid 20 dollars for the guide service and the johnboats and planned to come back in the fall to go gigging.

Ol’ Bill said that as strange as city folks were, there was gettin’ to be so many of ‘em that someday they’d sure enough outnumber the rest of us, and we all needed to get along. I expect that twenty dollars had a lot to do with his progressive way of thinking. But who knows?