Fair Play (or How to Survive a County Fair) #western @JacquieRogers

All’s Fair in Owyhee!

by Jacquie Rogers

Website | Pickle Barrel Gazette

When I was a kid in Owyhee County, Idaho, the year was divided up in two parts — 3 days of the fair, and 362 days preparing for it. The Owyhee County Fair & Rodeo outshined every other event, at least it did for me. The heat, sawdust, animals... the excitement of winning a blue ribbon or sometimes even a purple... yep, that’s when people kick back and enjoy themselves.

This year, I rented a booth in the Commercial Building, where I featured my Hearts of Owyhee series. More about that later.

These days, the fair is four days and it’s the second week of August, not the third. Lots has changed over the years. The old and young go, but we didn’t see many twenty-somethings there. The food and art exhibits were fewer, but the livestock barns bulged as always. Good to see.

Speaking of livestock, they’ve now added goats. I never once saw a goat the whole time I lived in Owyhee County, but apparently lots of folks have them now.

Of course the standard dairy, beef, swine, and sheep. The granddaughters had a great time snapping pictures. Here are a few:

A few prize chickens shared a barn with the cute little lop-eared bunnies. I’m gonna get one of those someday.  (A bunny, not a danged chicken.  I've had enough of those.)

The Tumbleweed Theater had several fun acts including Larry—and I’m sorry but I can’t remember the name of his act. He walked around the fairgrounds, twirling loops around people. Everyone got a real kick out of it, and not one kicked his stilts out from under him.

We all love the rodeo but we only managed to go one night. Loved the mutton-busting. The wild horse race lived up to the bill. A horse dragged a man all the way around the arena (and it’s a big one) three or four times, but he hung on to the rope, and eventually they got that horse saddled. Not sure if he won or not, but he finished the race. Not very many do.

Ranch bronc and the normal bronc events are always a treat.

Ahem.  Back to work.  My booth turned out pretty well even though I had no idea what size it was until I got there. What decorations to bring was purely by-guess and by-golly. Turns out, the stuff we brought actually worked out, and even fit right. I figured the commercial stall would be about the same size as the dairy stalls, and I’d spent many an hour in the dairy barn as a kid, so I figured 8’ x 9’. Imagine my surprise when I was actually right! Well, close. I was assigned #7 and it measured 7.5’ x 9.5’ so my banner worked and things just came together.

Hearts of Owyhee booth... mostly finished

It was the second day of the fair when we realized the banner had a typo—misspelled “Owyhee” of all things. How embarrassing. My husband didn’t say a thing when I told him, just stapled a cover flat over the two offending letters. Worked great.

Other than roasting half to death, we had a great time—met with old friends and made some new friends.  Even some relatives showed up.  I gave away tons of promo material but only sold half my books.  Since most people there live too far away from stores to buy print books and most that I talked to were strictly ebook readers, I thought that was pretty good.

The Owyhee County sheriff deputies wouldn't take my Hearts of Owyhee junior deputy stars, but we gave out over 500 to the kids and a lot of adults.  Everyone's up for a good time.  Like riding a mechanical bull.  The operator told me that little girls generally do the best.  

And of course there's fair food.  Fair food is unique in and of itself, but in Owyhee County, no event is complete without a chorizo.  The Basque kind.  Absolutely heaven.  

So there's my "what did you do this summer" essay.  Actually, that only took up a week and the rest of the time I've been writing.  What's your idea of summer fun?

ONE MOMENT, PLEASE! by CHERYL PIERSON

I don’t know about you, but when I write, I use the word “moment” quite a bit. I never really stopped to think about how long a “moment” was until my first editor for Fire Eyes made me take out a description of a moment—I had deemed it “a long moment”—she let me know that there could be no such thing as a “long moment”—it was either a moment or it wasn’t.

A MOMENT OF PRAYER
Ever since then, I’ve paid close attention to my writing about “moments”—because it dawned on me that I believed there were more than just one kind of moment. There are the long, awkward pause moments; the quick can’t-believe-I-said-that moments; the long steady stare moments that say “I saw what you did and I know who you are”. There are the moments in between the blink of a firefly’s light in the summer night, and the breathless moments in between the first assault of a tornado’s devastating winds and the eye of the storm. There are the moments that tick by into minutes, and then hours…and hopelessness; and there are the moments of despair that settle quickly only to be lifted by a smile of forgiveness or understanding.

A MOMENT OF REMEMBRANCE
I subscribe to a funny little newsletter called “Wisegeek” that addresses all manner of subjects, and their piece on “moments” was what prompted this post. Here’s what they had to say about it:

The amount of time in a moment is 90 seconds, or one and a half minutes, according to its usage as a unit of time measurement in medieval times dating back to the 8th century. This was based on the positioning of shadows on a sun dial, in which shadows moved along the dial 40 times in an hour. After the invention of the mechanical clock in the 13th century, a moment was no longer widely used as a specific unit of measurement. Going forward in modern times, a moment began to be used as a figure of speech to refer vaguely to any very brief period of time.

A MOMENT OF TRUTH
More about measurements of time:

• Time has been measured since at least 1500 BC, which is the first instance of records indicating time measurement through the invention of the sundial by the ancient Egyptians.

• The word clock comes from the medieval Latin word for bell and refers to the bell that was used to signal that it was time for monks to pray.

• The poet Miroslav Holub proposed in 1990 that a moment is the unit of time it takes a person to read a average line of verse.

A MOMENT IN HISTORY (BUD AND TEMPLE ABERNATHY--THE YOUNGEST LONG RIDERS EVER)
So now that you know what a moment really is, what do you think? Would you define it the same way? How would you measure a moment in your writing? Would there be “long moments”? “Fleeting moments”? “Awkward moments”? I’m of the mind that there can be many different kinds of moments—but it’s clear, not everyone agrees. What do you think?

A PRECIOUS MOMENT--SOLDIER SEES HIS DAUGHTER FOR THE FIRST TIME

THE INVISIBLE SOLDIERS by Tom Rizzo

Sniper. Sharpshooter. Marksman. Words that bring to mind the image of a lone gunman highly trained in tracking, concealment, and observation, on the hunt for a human target.

 

The term sniper emerged in the late 18th century when British officers in India sent letters back home referring to a day of shooting as "going out sniping." 

The snipe is a small and fast game bird that dips, dives, and twists, creating an erratic flight path making it difficult to hit. Only the most highly skilled individuals, using flintlock guns, were able to to bring down a snipe.

The term snipe shooting soon gave way to sniping. Eventually the term sniper was bestowed on soldiers who demonstrated precision shooting. But, they were  called marksmen or sharpshooters, never snipers. The term, however, seemed to gather momentum in the press during the early months of World War I. 
 
Training for the role of a military sniper was demanding. In addition to pinpoint marksmanship, contemporary snipers had to develop proficiency in core skills as  tracking, concealment, and observation. The most important skill was  accuracy. Snipers today travel in two-man teams--a shooter and a spotter--although it's believed the Confederacy utilized some two-man units.

A novel I'm writing - The Deadly Gray Dawn - features a former Civil War sharpshooter as one of the antagonists. Here's an excerpt from Chapter Four:

        In the smoky-gray dawn of the following morning, a man sat atop a plateau, his back against a giant boulder. Elbows braced on his knees, he peered through a pair of field glasses trained on the entrance to a distant cave.  He watched and waited, his Sharps rifle within arm's length.
        A former member of the Union Army’s sharpshooter corps, the gunman’s quick-thinking and eagle-eyed vision ranked him among the most lethal assassins in the infantry. His missions involved long-range killing of high-visibility targets—mostly Confederate officers. Long hours on the shooting range perfecting his marksmanship and learning to calculate distances with pinpoint accuracy helped mold him into a weapon of tactical and psychological advantage.
        An icy breeze washed across the high ground and he tugged the collar of his coat tighter around his neck. In the distance, a sliver of sunlight stretched across the horizon. 

        It puzzled him how anyone managed to find access to the cave. He guessed the prospectors wandered off the main trail seeking refuge from the storm and discovered it by accident, or maybe desperation.
        He came across the prospectors’ camp a couple of days ago and found it abandoned, but hid in the underbrush awaiting their return. Judging from the paraphernalia scattered about, there were three of them. The sudden storm apparently delayed their return, He  decided to trail them, a game he often played to hone his tracking skills. The one thing he missed about war was the hunt. And, of course, the kill.
        Not many knew this area like he did. If it weren’t for what looked like a felt hat he spotted on the ledge a few feet from the entrance, he’d have no reason to believe they found the place. A stroke of luck, to be sure.  It’s doubtful they'd simply sit and wait for the weather to clear. Prospectors explore. If they explored deep enough, they’d no doubt make a tempting discovery.
        Moments later, he spotted movement. Adjusting the field glasses, he saw two men crawl outside, stand up, and scan the sky. No sign of the burlap bags that he was told held the gold. It would be too risky for them to haul them off under these conditions, anyway. Chances were they’d return after the spring thaw. Of course, there was an outside chance they hadn’t found anything. But he wasn’t being paid to make guesses. His livelihood depended on immediate and decisive action.
     Retrieving the Sharps, he stretched out on the cold, rocky mesa and poked the long barrel through an opening he created in a stack of large stones. He rested the barrel on a small bag of sand and braced the stock against his right shoulder. Squinting through the iron blade front sight, he estimated the distance at about a hundred yards. Far closer than the distances he usually shot from during the war.
     “Stay in the rifle,” he whispered to himself, a reminder to keep his head down and stay connected to the stock through the shots and the recoils. Slowing his breathing, he cleared his mind, visualizing only the impact of the bullets. He squeezed the trigger back to the rear once, and then again—two shots in less than ten seconds...

 

In the War Between the States, each side relied on these highly-skilled marksmen, but in different strategic ways. 

The Confederate Army fielded sharpshooters in a more flexible manner than the North. They often served as semi-permanent detachments at the regimental level, assigned to larger formations. Rather than the breech-loading Sharps rifle preferred by Union marksmen. Rebel shooters used the Enfield Rifled Musket, or British Whitworth Rifles.

The Whitworth, designed by British engineer Sir Joseph Whitworth, featured twisted hexagonal barrels instead of traditional round rifled barrels. The Whitworth was considered more accurate than that Pattern 1853 Enfield. 

In test firings, the Whitworth design outperformed the Enfield by hitting targets at a range of two-thousand yards compared to the Enfield's fourteen-hundred yards.

According to Author Fred L. Ray, in his book, Shock Troops of the Confederacy, wrote that “Confederate sharpshooter battalions had a far greater effect on the outcome of the conflict."

One of the most feared and effective marksmen in the Civil War was a man named Jack Hinson.

A horrific event in the Autumn of 1862 transformed this once quiet, 60-year old tobacco farmer into a feared Confederate avenger after a patrol of Union soldiers arrested his two sons, ages 17 and 22. 

Despite their denials, the young men were branded Confederate guerrillas, known as bushwhackers, lashed to a tree, executed by firing squad, and then beheaded.

The patrol made its way to the Hinson plantation, summoned the family outside and mounted the decapitated heads of the sons on the gate-posts to the home.

Hinson eventually put his mourning aside and made arrangements for the design and manufacture of a specially-crafted sniper rifle. The expert marksman and savvy woodsman began waging a withering, personal, one-man war of vengeance on Union troops.

Hinson held the upper hand because of his familiarity with the Tennessee terrain, the river channels, the hills, and the valleys. Much of his wrath focused on the Bluecoat cavalrymen of the Fifth Iowa Cavalry Regiment that executed his sons.

According to Tom McKenney, in his book, Jack Hinson’s One-Man War, A Civil War Sniper, Hinson likely killed more than a hundred Union soldiers, mariners, and officers mostly along the Tennessee River in Benton and Stewart counties. His actual rifle, however, bore 36 notches.

In response to the Confederate dominance of the skirmish line, the Federals began to organize their own sharpshooter units at division level under the guidance of Colonel Hiram Berdan. 

A New York City mechanical engineer, Berdan earned the reputation of the top rifle shot in the country for fifteen years in a row. The politically-connected self-made millionaire was credited with inventing a repeating rifle, a patented musket ball, a twin-screw submarine gunboat, and a torpedo boat.

Berdan's weapon-of-choice was the Sharps Rifle, designed by Christian Sharps. In 1848, he patented his design for a four-foot-long Sharps Breechloading Rifle. President Abraham Lincoln personally authorized twenty Sharpshooter companies. 

The term sharpshooter wasn't based on the name of the rifle. The term had been used in America for decades before the Sharps rifle was ever developed.  

When the war ended, the Sharps rifle maintained its popularity. 

In fact, because of its power and long-range accuracy, it became the preferred weapon of professional buffalo hunters, frontiersman, and US troops throughout the Great Plains and the Desert Southwest.

Berdan's Sharpshooters were often chosen for special battlefield assignments targeting high-value targets, such as Confederate officers. 

But they also supported combat units, conducted reconnaissance, and monitored retreats. 

Berdan's Sharpshooters usually wore distinctive green uniforms, a green forage cap with a black ostrich feather, and black leather brogan shoes which enabled them to blend into the foliage they used for camouflage. 

The special uniform proved an advantage and a disadvantage. The green color gave the sharpshooters the clear advantage of camouflage. But, the green color made it easier for Confederates to spot them. 

Qualifying to become a Berdan Sharpshooter required a high level of demonstrated skill. 

The challenge called for the candidate to place ten consecutive shots in a circle of ten inches in diameter from a distance of 100-yards, and an additional ten rounds from 200-yards away. 

Recruits who missed the targets or averaged more than five inches from the center, were disqualified.

The results determined whether the infantryman had the skill required to qualify for an elite unit of crack riflemen for the Union Army.

The South considered the Berdan Sharpshooters high-priority kills.

Being a Berdan Sharpshooter proved a risky venture. Because of their marksmanship capabilities, sharpshooters were usually positioned far in front of the main body of Union troops and, as a result, made the initial with the enemy. Berdan’s force reportedly, “inflicted more casualties upon the enemy than any other unit in the Civil War.” Their key targets included officers, guides, scouts, spies, and other sharpshooters.

But success came at a steep price. 

Even though they got credit for a higher percentage of kills than any other unit in the war, they also suffered the highest casualties. In 1863, for example, the Sharpshooters fought at Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and the Mine Run Campaign, suffering significant casualties.

Of the original 33 commissioned officers and 981 enlisted men in the First Regiment, only 11 officers and 261 enlisted men survived at year’s end.

The Sharpshooters represented the forerunner of the now-familiar concept of special forces.

* * * 

Man-Tracking 101 by Gordon Rottman

I apologize for this being so long, but I didn’t want to do a two-parter and make you wait a month for Part 2. Two of the photos have nothing to do directly with tracking; I just wanted to honor two friends who taught me a great deal about the skill.

We’ve all seen trackers in movies and novels, whether an experienced trail-wise cowpoke or a sage Indian scout. They’re typically depicted prodding along on their house leaning over to locate their quarry’s tracks. This works if distinctive tracks are left on impressible ground. When tracks are indistinct the tracker needs to be afoot to effectively detect what sign he can.

What is laughable is when the tracker is mounted and is tracking at night by torchlight. It is virtually impossible to detect sign by this means other than the most obvious, and most aren’t that obvious, especially at night. Besides dim inconsistent light, the flames are flickering and creating constantly moving shadows and made worse because the torch is moving too. If there is more than one torch, each creates another set of moving shadows which are crisscrossing each other. Steady shadows cast by the sun in daylight greatly aid in detecting sign. It’s a simple rule, you don’t track at night—except though snow are they’re dragging a log behind them.

 

 Giang Chu (aka "Ringo") taught me really serious tracking skills.

I learned some basic tracking skills in the Boy Scouts many many moons ago. I learned more from Cambodian mercenaries and Montagnard tribesmen in Vietnam. Believe me, tracking in a jungle or a dense American forest (it’s about the same) is a challenge. I picked up some additional tracking skills at the British and German-run International Long-Range Reconnaissance Patrol School in Germany—I can tell you all about Russian and Warsaw Pact boot sole patterns.

Armando Castillo Medina of Rancho el Consuelo, one of the best trackers I've known.

Where I really learned tracking was in Mexico on my wife’s family’s ranch from the vaqueros. I think they can track a field mouse. My daughter learned from them as well. There was once a puma snatching calves on the ranch. Put-out by its marauding on her rangeland where she reigned as queen of the campo, she loaded up her horse and tracked the cat for three days before baiting it and shooting it at 30 feet. Anyway, that’s another story.

A tracker adds color to a story and of course is essential if in pursuit of the bad guys. In The Hardest Ride I made Bud, the protag, an accomplished tracker taught by an old vaquero in much the same manner I was taught by a wise vaquero—tracking kids we sent out and then tracking critters of different flavors, by foot and horse.

Okay, so what’s “sign?” Anything the trackee leaves behind. Some call it “spore.” Mostly this is footprints or hoof prints or paw prints or talons (okay, let’s not go there); scuffs, broken twigs, disturbed pebbles, cigarette butts, piss marks, and so on.

The best time of day to track is morning and late afternoon when the sun is lower to better highlight the ridges and irregularities of prints with shadows. Back to torches. Tracking at night on a horse with a torch held high, its flickering notwithstanding, does not provide the necessary low angle slat of light. In daylight the tracker walks or rides on the opposite side of the trail from the sun so the shadows in the tracks are better defined. Of course the sun may be behind or ahead of the tracker. Before setting out the tracker views the tracks from different perspectives to determine which side offers the most definition.

One can track from a horse if the sign is distinct, but if indistinct and the sun is low it better on foot. For one thing, if high on a horse you are looking more vertically down on the tracks and the low angled sun’s shadows are not so noticeable.

A tracker does not watch for sign looking down at his feet. He looks 10-30 feet ahead depending on the distance he can effectively make out sign. That distance of course changes as terrain and vegetation changes. He can also occasionally glace further ahead for sign. This way if he sees sign further on he can move along faster as it’s unnecessary to detect every track. Peering ahead may also show considerable sign when the trail passes through brush, saplings, weeds, low grass, and so on. It may be bent, pressed down, and generally disturbed. Sunlight will further highlight the differences from surrounding vegetation. Turned or bent leaves and trampled grass can reveal their undersides and this prominently stands out as the color and texture are different.

Tracking in the early morning takes advantage of dew on the ground and vegetation. If the quarry was moving at night or earlier in the morning, it will leave a distinctive trail, unless beneath dense trees.

Speed. Boot and hoof prints at a walking pace are fairly even. A man or horse moving faster makes a deeper impression at the tow and the prints are further apart. A large or heavily loaded man may cause deeper heel impressions.

                             One horse at a walk, the other at a run on a slightly damp road.

About horse prints. I’ll provide an excerpt for The Hardest Ride’s sequel, Ride Harder, a WIP. Bud and his party returning the DeWitt Ranch are overtaking an Army convoy.

“I busied myself watching the tracks the Army convoy left. I watch tracks by habit to keep in good form. Can’t let these eyes get out of the habit of looking for the uncommon things. Things that’s always there, but you might not see them if your eyes aren’t taught to look. Gave me something to do while bouncing down a trail.

I figured the mule teams were two for each of the four wagons and seven riders. Down the road a piece a bunch of riders had come in on a side trail through the mesquite from the right, from the Rio Grande. I backtracked a little and figured they were six, well mounted and traveling heavy. But there were two mules with them making light tracks. They weren’t pack mules. I could tell because they over-stepped the horses and wagon tracks and weren’t side-by-side like the teamed mules.

Some will tell you that mule and horse tracks are the same, but they’re not. Mules have a more oval track and the hind hoof steps right in the fore hoof’s print. Horse’s hoofs don’t or might over-step them just a bit.

These horses and mules were moving at a faster pace than the Army horses. Their toes were dug in more with longer strides between the fore and hind roofs. That seemed strange. Most folks keep a steady walk when traveling any distance. Something didn’t feel, or look right.”

There’s other things besides prints and disturbed vegetation that can tip off a tracker. We were tracking a VC squad once and would have missed their camp site except we found several pissmarks off the trail to the right. Just beyond this we found where they’d slept, nine disturbed areas where they had tramped down vegetation and grass to sling their hammocks. They had started moving before light in a different direction and we easily found their trail in the turned layers of dead leaves further highlighted by dew.

Horse poop of course is another sign. Yeah, some claim they can tell how old it is by crumbing it, but when it 98°F the poop isn’t going to be the same temperature when its 32°F and both samples are two hours old. You can roughly tell how old a burned out fire is, but that takes lots of practice.

Excellent places to detect sign are on stream banks, gullies—even very small ones, ditches, and fallen trees the trackee crossed over. Man or horse can’t help but leave scuff marks, gouges, dislodged pebbles and rocks. They leave bark scuffs and dirt on fallen trees. Dislodged pebbles, even tiny ones; and this applies to level ground as well, will reveal little pits and the part of the pebbles that were below ground are usually darker than the exposed portion.

You can also find where a man’s climbed over a barbed wire fence as sand and dirt will stick to the strands, if he actually climbed it. Spreading stands and ducking through will not leave sand on the wire, but you can sometimes see drooping wire or trodden down weeds and brush growing along the fence line at the point of passage.

Okay, that’s just the basics. There’s much more to it, a lot of other technics, like how to pick up a trail that you’ve lost. The key to a good tracker is an eye for detecting something different and an eye for detail. And just as importantly, patience.

A comment on one last thing you see in movies. When you drag a leafy limb behind you or sweep your trail, to even a novice tracker, it looks remarkably like someone had swept the trail with a leafy limb.

THAT WHICH KILLS US…Makes for a Good Story-- by Marc Cameron

Nearly every summer of my childhood my family loaded up up and drove to visit my mother’s relatives. It was a long drive, taking a full day. I knew then that I wanted to write and filled many a spiral notebook while sharing the backseat with my sister, writing nonsensical stories that, thankfully, will never see more than the inside of some storage boxes at my parents’ house. It bears repeating that everything that happens to a writer is research. We draw heavily on the things that occur in our young lives—much, I think, from the traumatic. Here’s a glimpse of a couple of things that may have influenced my words….

 

For the first ten years of my life I called mildew “old people smell.”

My mother’s side of the family hails from the piney woods of Louisiana. A heavy must hung in the shadows of their small clapboard homes so it was natural, I suppose, to equate the smell with our summer reunions. In their front rooms (what we called a living room at my house) photographs of dead relatives lined the walls. A sticky smell rose from old Folgers can spittoons, adding sweetness to the odor of mildew.  One of my great aunts had a habit of dipping a twig from a sweet gum tree in a glass of Garrett snuff (all the water glasses in her house were repurposed snuff containers) and then parking the twig alongside her back teeth. With tiny lines of brown tobacco juice running down the creases on either side of her ancient chin, she’d grab me by the cheeks and say, “child you come here and sit next to me.” Then she’d pick up the bowl of purple hull peas she’d been hulling and sit back in her porch swing to tell me a story—usually about one of the dead relatives whose picture hung in the front room.

All my relatives were storytellers. Sitting together shelling peas, eating catfish or playing dominos was the Facebook Wall and blog of their time. Nearly every day when the men came home from work we’d crowd in around a picnic table, eating communally out of two or three split watermelon halves and listening to these sweet old folks reminisce and spit seeds.

When I was about nine, I made the mistake of mentioning I might have had a tick in my bellybutton during one of these gatherings. My uncles swiped the watermelons off the table in a blink and I was laid out on the table flat on my back like Isaac before Abraham’s blade. The old people surrounded me, muttering among themselves and shaking gray heads while they discussed what to do with me. One aunt, the one with the sweet gum twig in her mouth, offered to spit some snuff in my navel. Another used shaky hands to try and dab the glowing end of her filterless Camel on the tail of the offending tick. An uncle opened a wicked looking pocketknife I knew he used to castrate hogs. They all agreed on one thing; they had to get that tick out—all of it. Little Jimmy Joe somebody or other from over near Baton Rouge had taken an infection after his parents didn’t get a tick’s head out the year before—and he’d up and died. I lay there on my back, watching the lightning bugs begin to flash above me and prayed that my parents would take me back to Texas with real hospitals and doctors before I up and died like that poor kid Jimmy Joe.  My sweet mother nixed the ideas involving fire, spit or pocketknives, but the event so traumatized me that I don't’ remember what they ended up doing. Maybe the little bug was just as terrified as I was and crawled back to the sassafras to escape all the gruesome talk.   

Boo

To my young mind it was like living in the pages of To Kill A Mockingbird. I wasn’t old enough to read the book, but I’d seen the movie several times and there was a guy who looked an awful lot like Boo Radley living right down the tracks.  My aunts and uncles told countless stories about human conflict, social injustice, hydrophobic dogs—and death. I have vivid memories of sitting at my mother’s knee, gnawing on a fried chicken leg while the old people around me told tales of those who had passed since our last reunion and the maladies (or tractor or murderer or war) that had killed them.

All day I heard stories of one cousin’s bravery on the Bataan Death March or the way another uncle had been shot in the head while climbing out of a trench—days after World War I was actually over. Then at night, I’d sleep in the room off the kitchen with more pictures of dead people on the walls and a great ticking clock that chimed every thirty minutes. My sister slept in the room with my parents. It’s obvious to me now that they loved her more. In the rare times I was able to drift off between the clangs of the big clock, I dreamed that it was me instead of my uncle climbing out of the trenches in World War I—and me getting shot in the head.

When I was around eight, my sweet old uncle who suffered from dementia shuffled into the clock and dead-people room and stood over my bed in the darkness. “Who are you?” He muttered, eyeing me from under humongous, wild eyebrows. “And why are you in my house?”

Good times.

I quit going about the time I turned twelve. My mom and sister still went but I stayed home with my dad and worked. Digging postholes and moving rock was tougher than going to reunions, but I’d seen my first naked girl swimming in a nearby lake while I was fishing with some friends and I figured the chances I might see her again were slim if I spent a good part of my summer in Louisiana listening to stories about dead people. As I got older, I became aware of the two things that tend to turn a boy’s head away from matters of his childhood—gas fumes and perfumes. It would be years before I went back.

Shortly after I’d graduated high school, my mother reminded me that those folks wouldn’t be around forever. I was sure to miss all their stories once they were dead and gone. Even she couldn’t help but talk about death—but she was right. I did miss the people and the way they could string words together. I felt the guilt of a neglectful son as we pulled into the front yard of my great aunt’s house and parked on a carpet of decaying pine needles. A mockingbird sang in the sweet gum tree. It was sunny and the smell of sassafras and jasmine blew in from the railroad tracks. Maybe my youthful memories were skewed. Surely these kind old people shelling peas on the porch talked of other things besides cancer and war and death. I’d just been so young and scared of my own shadow that I could only remember the gruesome parts.

            One of my uncles came out to greet us. I’d always liked him because he had good bird dogs and talked to me like I was a grownup even when I was a kid.

            “Is that Lou’s son?” he asked taking me by both shoulders. “Lord a mercy, I haven’t seen you in years. You remind me of my brother. You wouldn’t remember him. Died of cancer when you were just a baby. You might know his boy though, he got half his foot blown off in Nam. Come on up to the porch and I'll tell you about it….”

Marc Cameron is a retired Chief Deputy US Marshal and 29-year law enforcement veteran. His short stories have appeared in BOYS’ LIFE Magazine and the Saturday Evening Post. He's published eleven novels, six of them Westerns.   

TIME OF ATTACK fourth in his USA Today Bestselling Jericho Quinn Thriller series, is the newest release from Kensington February of 2014. DAY ZERO will hit the shelves February 2015.

Marc lives in Alaska with his beautiful bride and BMW motorcycle.

Visit him at:

www.marccameronbooks.com 

http://www.facebook.com/MarcCameronAuthor