If you’re looking for pranks and practical jokes, a hunting camp is the place to go. Maybe that’s a faulty impression on my part, but it sure seems that way. I’ve never visited a camp that didn’t have a rubber snake in it.
The pranks run the gamut from salt in the sugar bowl and porcelain eggs in the refrigerator to hot pepper juice smeared on the mouthpiece of a dog man’s horn. Then there are more elaborate bits of monkey business long remembered as masterpieces of tomfoolery. Here are a few.
Bad glands
At an Alabama camp, everyone gathered to watch as the veteran hunter showed his greenhorn buddy how to butcher his first deer. The old hand gutted the whitetail, then opened the body cavity and showed his rookie friend the tenderloins on each side of the backbone.
“See these here,” he said to the young tyro. “They’re glands. You gotta remember to take ’em out, or they’ll spoil the rest of the meat. Put ’em in a plastic bag so they won’t contaminate anything; then drop ’em in this here cooler we keep special for the purpose.”
The naive hunter had been tricked into giving away the choicest cuts of venison.
Attack duck
Bennie, the camp cook, was always up late. After everyone went to bed, he would finish cleaning the kitchen, turn out the lights and make a trip to the latrine, where he’d sit and read before turning in.
The noises Bennie made in the john late at night were a source of insomnia for some men, one of whom decided to play a prank. A wounded mallard retrieved by the man’s Lab was brought back to camp, and just before everyone retired that night — everyone but Bennie, that is — the bird was placed inside Bennie’s toilet with the lid down.
Bennie didn’t suspect a thing. When he sat on the can, the mad mallard struck like a snake. A blood-curdling scream shook the bunkhouse, followed by loud quacking and cussing.
Bennie has yet to exact his revenge, but to this day, everyone in camp examines their food closely before eating. Are those really raisins in that pie?
Shooting blanks
Two pheasant hunters told me about a prank they pulled on their longtime hunting companion Joe. Seems they always loaded all of Joe’s shotshells for him, and for several years, they had given him shells filled with sawdust. Then they got to shoot Joe’s limit of birds.
“When a pheasant flushes,” one said, “I shoot about the same time as Joe. Then Joe runs out and grabs the bird and claims it. Of course, we know he hasn’t killed a single bird, but by the end of the day, he’s got most of them in his game bag.”
“What happens when a pheasant goes down and Joe doesn’t shoot?” I asked.
“He always shoots,” one man replied as the other nodded in agreement. “A week after pheasant season is over, there isn’t a sawdust pile in the county more than a foot high.”
The backward scope and sweet revenge
A hunter in an Arkansas deer camp — we’ll call him Pete — shot a Winchester .270 with a scope that was the same size on each end. Aside from the click-screw being on the wrong side, you probably wouldn’t notice that the scope was on the rifle backward.
Sure enough, Pete didn’t notice. He rode to his stand with the other hunters, and when he left the truck, the other men bit their lips. Everybody was in on the joke except Pete.
No shots came from Pete’s stand that morning. When the men picked him up at noon, he was shaking his head and grinning.
“Ever try to shoot a buck through a scope that made him look like a gnat?” he asked. All the hunters said no, they hadn’t, and that was all Pete said about it.
Eventually, Pete’s buddy Larry ’fessed up. Much merriment was made of Pete peering the wrong way through his scope at a miniature buck. Pete took it well, laughing with everyone else. Larry walked on eggshells the rest of the week, but nothing happened — not right away.
When the next year’s season opened, Pete was unusually jovial when everyone rode to their stands. He had checked his scope, he said, and found it to be pointing in the right direction. When Larry got off at his stand, Pete wished him a good hunt, and if Pete sounded a bit too jovial, no one noticed it right then.
A little after dawn, the hunter whose stand was closest to Larry’s was jolted awake by a booming rifle shot. Soon there was a second shot, then three more. The hunter was about to go investigate when he heard another series of five shots. A long silence followed, then a thunderous oath. Larry’s buddy thought his friend must have flipped his gourd. He hurried toward Larry and found him leaning against a tree halfway up the slope from his stand.
“Come here! Come here!” Larry screamed hysterically. “You gotta see this.”
It was something to see all right. There was a mounted, eight-point deer head hanging from a nail on a tree, looking downhill toward Larry’s stand. Behind the tree were two hay bales stacked one on the other. Covering them was a tanned deer hide. From Larry’s stand at dawn, the whole thing must have looked like a big buck silhouetted against the sky.
“I saw this thing as soon as the sun rose,” Larry said. “It didn’t move, so at first, I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me. But later, I looked back and the buck was still there. He was looking right at me.
“I bet it took me five minutes to get my gun to my shoulder,” he continued. “I took careful aim and shot, and I couldn’t believe he didn’t go down. So I shot him again. I shot the whole clip out and then went through my spare clip. Still he didn’t go down.”
So Larry reloaded, he said, and then he started stalking the deer.
“I got halfway up the hill before I figured it out,” he said, handing the man a neatly printed note. “This was tacked to the back side of the tree.”
The note said: “Gotcha back, you scope-switching S.O.B.”
Deer scent
And finally, another Arkansas prankster wasn’t really surprised when the cover scent he sprinkled onto his boots and around his deer stand turned out to be perfume. His camp buddies had gotten even for past pranks while he was sleeping the night before, pouring out the buck scent and replacing it with ladies’ fragrance.