By Ricky Harpole

I ain’t a biologist,” Uncle Willie once told me, without warning or provocation. “You probably ain’t neither, but I growed up in the deep woods where you could hear a panther squall a mile or two away and still not know which direction he was comin’ from. I took chances in water and didn’t get et by sharks or gators.”

“I’ve mislanded a light aircraft on more than one occasion, got drunk as the Devil’s mother-in-law in more than one episode in two countries and a whole lot of counties.”
Coming from the country-side of life as well as pursuit of wildlife, Uncle Willie had a valid point or two to make:

“I’ve seen thangs in the straits of life,” he said, “and too often in the straits of death.” Then he’d get that ole serious look that he had something to say that you needed to listen to. And we paid attention to his advice although we didn’t always heed it to the letter.

I have come to regard Uncle Willie’s advice as  “food for thought.” One of his philosophies was “Everything in this old world has a reason for being here, from an ant hill to a zebra’s nest.” He carries on, “One or two things I’ve noticed that I haven’t managed to justify an existence for are ‘skeeters, ticks and fire ants.”

“Well as you can see I don’t get around as good as I used to.  I couldn’t keep up with a Beagle on a rabbit trail, much less a Blue Tick Hound after a coon. I don’t see as well as a bat like I once could, but I can observe things after a fashion and ever so often I still get an idea.”

“Years ago,” he went on to say, “ I caught a rat in a kill trap but it didn’t kill it. It just crippled it.

Having an extreme prejudice against rodents, since they chewed up the spark plug wires on my car, I knocked the top off an ant hill, got ‘em stirred up and dropped the varmint into the mix and them fire ants made short work of old Mr. Rat.”

He went on to say, “A few days ago my dog showed up on the porch with a swole-up tick on him. I remembered the rat and fire ants, so I repeated the experiment, this time using the same ant hill with that big old tick.  After all, anything that will organize, mobilize and consume something as nasty as a rat ought to enjoy a tick. But no, them old ants wouldn’t have no part of something as corrupted as a tick, which proves that even a fire ant has standards of a sort and wouldn’t touch a tick with a 10 foot pole.”

“Uncle Willie,” I queried, “What did you do then?”

He said, “I took a fishing pole and fished the tick out of the hill and deposited it in the outhouse and out of respect went and caught them fire ants another rat and tenderized it with a baseball bat.”

These old-timers had a weird outlook,
Ricky Harpole
(Contact Harpole at www.facebook.com/harpolive or www.colespointrecords.com)