Nearly enough to hurt my feelings

This is one of the installments about my recent trip out of Georgia to another state to hunt. What I hunted, how the hunts went and so forth will be gradually explained in the coming days, with picture and video!

We loaded up at Camp on Friday morning. The back of the truck was packed full of coolers of meat. The trailer was packed full of coolers of meat. More meat was just thrown in the back of the truck with bags of ice on it.

The trailer also held the heads brought back for mounting.

Yeah.

Heads. Bloody hides still attached.

One of the other hunters at camp said we needed a sign "PETA Rescues!" We will do this next time.

We hauled out of camp taking a county-maintained road which resembled a badly paved driveway and I am not kidding. We finally got back on a road with actual striping and wide enough for two fat people to pass each other without getting extremely personal.

Shag drove. Both ways. Shag is my brother who went with me and actually drove the entire distance, both ways, as I said, while I alternated between leaving deep finger-shaped grooves in the door, pointed at the vertical scenery and tried to keep my eyeballs shoved back in my head when we came up on a curve in the road that made hairpins look straight by comparison.

Did I mention the edge of the road was crumbling off and falling 1,000 plus feet to the bottom of the mountain we were riding on? Well now I did.

But the great part of this section of the ride home was the people. Folks constantly passed us (it was a 4-lane road), only to slow down, pace us for a moment and speed up grinning widely and giving us massive thumbs-up after eyeballing the HUGE antler racks on the truck and trailer.

I don't know how many asked to take pictures. Which we of course agreed to. No doubt there are pictures all over the internet now of a red S. Georgia pickup with a small trailer packed with coolers and giant bloody animal heads.

We stopped periodically to re-ice the exposed meat, check the coolers and make deposits with the local treatment plants. At each stop, people gathered around the truck to take pictures and ask about the critters.

"Where'd you get 'em?" invariably was asked.

"Up north." was the only cryptic reply I gave. Shag, OTOH, fired off whatever reply he felt was best at the time.

The best two stops were:

Stop 2. An old man walked over and asked about the bison head. Assured it was a buffalo, he asked for the tongue.

So, I helped him remove the tongue. He intended to eat it.

Before you ralph, if it is not too late, on your keyboard, I ask you: "Do you eat hotdogs and sausage?"

"Not any more," you reply.

No. 2 was when we stopped in N. Ga. for a meal and several restaurant employees left the business to come look at the truck and contents.

Anyway, the mad grins, thumbs up and people slowing down to take a better look and pictures continued until we hit the metro Atlanta area. There we started getting disgusted looks and people actually covering their face as they passed up. Well, yes, Shag and I had not shaved since we left home to go hunting (and would not shave again until we got home) but I still felt that was rude of them.

The mad grins and pictures resumed almost non-stop by other drives once we got south of Macon.

We pulled into Ashburn, nearly causing several wrecks as we eased down 41 to my house. Shag parked on the northbound side, close to the house, and a minor traffic jam ensued. Several people turned around to come back and look.

"I told Noel we've got to turn around. If Shag is involved in this, it's got to be big," said Lori Wooten.

Now normally I don't go around repeating things people say unless they give me permission to, say it in a public meeting or such, be she said this in front of my house on Highway 41 in front of the entire world, so it's OK to repeat it.

I do wonder what she meant by that. Was she implying that I am never involved in anything big?

I tellya, between that and the people in Atlanta ashamed to look at me, why it's nearly enough to hurt my feelings. But for that to happen, I'd have to have feelings.

More stories to come.