- Outdoor columnist Ben Smith winds through a tale that tracks him from hunting dogs to a gas station.
I have a friend that has told me several different times about how amazed he is that some of these columns just seem to write themselves. And he’s not wrong. Sometimes things just happen, or I just happen to be in the right place at the right time. This week is a great example of just that.
See, I’d already planned to write something regarding hunting dogs. Not that I’ve ever really had a true hunting dog, but I’ve been around a lot of them through the years. I’ve written about my uncle’s dogs and how neat it was to listen to them chasing deer through a hardwood bottom on a cold morning. And I’ve mentioned his rabbit dogs that helped me kill my first ever rabbit as a kid. And I’ve got several friends that have deer tracking dogs. I’m not sure they fit into the category of hunting dogs, but if it were up to me, I’d place them there. I mean, without those tracking dogs half of y’all would never find the deer you shoot. Unless you’re like my business partner Matt, who never recovers a deer with the dogs.
Even with my planning to write a story about hunting dogs, I never could have imagined how this week’s column would change in just a few short minutes. Let’s begin by agreeing that the world is a rapidly changing place. Not all bad, not all good, but changing for sure. In the last eight years alone, we’ve elected a felon and an Alzheimer’s patient to be the leader of the free world, so nothing should really be that shocking. But then you encounter something so far-fetched, it takes you several minutes to even process what the heck just happened.
This whole story starts with Louisiana Remoulade sauce. I bought some shrimp at the grocery store for lunch and brought it back to the office thinking I was eating healthy. After digging around the office fridge, I found some remoulade sauce to go with it. The expiration date was from September 2024, but I decided to roll the dice anyway. To me, that wasn’t really that long ago, so what harm could it really do? Well, around 5:30 that evening I found out the answer to that question. It began as a little discomfort and quickly turned into Satan himself infiltrating my digestive system. For the next couple of hours, my body was locked in an interdimensional battle with Beelzebub for control of my bowels.
Between rounds six and seven, I made the decision to leave the comfort of my porcelain palace and replenish my nicotine addiction to get me through the rest of this heavyweight fight. To the gas station I went, no pun intended. Little did I know what awaited me there.
Remember, this article was supposed to be about hunting dogs. And it kinda is. I just didn’t expect to find one during the brief halftime of my painful lesson regarding remoulade sauce and expiration dates. I was standing in line at the gas station behind two other gentlemen when I felt a cool breeze on the back of my neck from the door being opened behind me. I didn’t immediately turn around, but the look on the face of the man paying at the cash register piqued my interest in what just walked in. Before I could completely turn to look, I was being sniffed and somewhat growled at by…a woman dressed up as a dog.
Accompanied by a man in what I guessed to be in his mid-50’s, this person/dog/moron barked a couple of times at the patrons in line before scurrying over to the fried chicken section of the store. The man, dressed in slacks and a bath robe, began to apologize for the behavior of his companion stating that she had been going through a rough time. At first, I thought it was some kind of joke, but the look on his face was far too somber for a prank. I’m sympathetic to people going through a rough (not ruff) time, but this whole thing had me so baffled that I completely forgot what I was in the store for. The little guy in front of me, all four feet eleven inches of him, was so distraught that he prepaid for forty-five dollars of gas with a fifty-dollar bill and didn’t bother to stick around for his change.
I gathered my thoughts for a moment and asked the cashier for a can of snuff. She produced it all the while keeping a close, watchful eye on the characters at the chicken counter. After I paid and turned to leave, this lunatic wearing the dog costume aggressively approached me barking as loud as her little human voice would allow. I’ve got to level with you guys. I didn’t know what to do, or what to say. My mind was completely blown. I did finally muster some words out letting the owner (I guess at this point that’s what he was) know that he’d better call his dog off before things got dicey. He called her back, and I left before being bitten and having to go get checked for rabies.
Not once on the drive back home did I even think about the battle that was in intermission between Lucifer and my colon. I arrived back at the house and had to sit down and process this whole thing. When I told my family about it, they weren’t nearly as shocked as I was. They’d all either seen, or heard, about these people before. Apparently, they call themselves “Furries” and identify as dogs, or cats. Y’all. What in the actual heck is walking around amongst us? As I said, I have no problem understanding someone going through hard times, but I will absolutely not participate in someone’s fantasy world where they think they are a dog. No sir, ain’t doing it.
As the evening wore on, the title match resumed until my body had given everything it had to give. The devil finally relented and abandoned my body giving me the opportunity to try to sleep. As I laid in bed thinking about the day’s events, I couldn’t help but wonder a couple of things. One, what in the heck was in remoulade sauce that would cripple my insides like this? And two, could that woman at the store blood trail that buck that Matt shot today?
Ben Smith
