CaveMan the Buffalo Thief

May 16, 2004
Filed under:"H" for "Toy"

Me and the Girl are from an extremely small town in Montana. We are complete hicks because we’re natives and her father, not being a native, full-on belongs there now. He’s a complete CaveMan-Jeremiah-Johnson-Mountain-Man-Outdoorsman and he builds stuff out of rock for a living, so that rounds out the warm and cuddliness that is my future father-in-law. CaveMan has a buddy, “Dickum” who runs the construction company and they’re heading to the bar (notice I say “the” instead of “a”, this is because our miniscule fucking town only has one of everything, e.g. “the” doctor, “the” banker, “the” painful-itchycrotch-disease epidemic). They’ve only got enough between them for a couple beers each (which, in IttyBittyTown, MT is like, $2) so they’re quite proud of themselves after coming up with “Hey, I’ll buy you one, if you buy me one, and we’ll just keep doing that until we’re out of money”. Turns out that this took quite a while and many, many beers. I’m not sure how it happens, part of the mystery that is the small-as-fuck town.

So they’re happy and bullshitting with each other and the bar-wench when in comes this pretentious, somewhat snobby friend of theirs back from his trip to South Dakota with the pride of his hunting career, the crown-jewel in his shooting-large-smelly-creatures empire, a dead buffalo. Snobby is absolutely beaming and bragging and wanting everyone to see his large, smelly, dead beast. CaveMan and Dickum, being the hunting purists that they are (bow-hunters, would probably be “club” hunters if the Fish and Game Dept. would let them beat the deer to death), these purists are not only sack-shrivelingly jealous of Snobby, but they are resentful of the fact that you can just go somewhere is South Dakota, line up, and blast these majestic creatures at will. Probably because they would rather have a spear or at least a large, blunt instrument-of-death.

So CaveMan gets an idea, gets up to go piss, and sneaks out the back of the bar. He gets around to the front of the bar, knowing the street isn’t visible from inside and backs his flatbed Dodge up til its butt-to-butt with Snobby’s flatbed, and… the much-coveted buffalo. He starts pulling this hippopatomic, foul-reeking mass of hair and hooves across Snobby’s flatbed and onto his own. This is where there’s a flaw in The Plan. Buffalo weigh about 1000 pounds. That’s fucking huge. Think about a good-sized milk cow with an industrial-sized steroid hose up its ass. Then, give it a mass of knotted flesh on its shoulders and short, sharp-ass horns.

CaveMan is struggling, he’s a stout fellow, building stuff with rocks and all, but that’s a lot to drag on your own. So he sees this guy walking down the street and hollers him over. Another rarity in a pissant town is to see someone walking down the street (the “only” one walking down the street) and not know them, but it happens. The guy is like, “Yeah?” and CaveMan, having no idea who the hell this guy is, tells him to get his ass up on the other flatbed, grab a hooved, hairy leg and start pulling. This still being the same painfully small town, the guy does it, and they get the buffalo loaded.

CaveMan tears outta there and is heading home, giggling fiendishly as only CaveMan can, with a dead buffalo on his flatbed and it’s head, tongue-lolling out, bouncing off of his bumper. He lives a couple miles outside of town and it occurs to him, about halfway there that if “the” cop happens to stop him, he’s five-shades-of-fucked. He’s got a stolen buffalo in the back of his truck, he’s speeding, driving erratically, oh… and he’s shitfaced. This makes the giggles go away.

He makes it home anyway and pulls into the big side of the garage, by now the giggles are back because he can hardly wait to bust out the newspaper and start making a ransom note to send to Snobby.

Then he starts to think about where he’s going to hide this goddam thing, because the wife’ll kill him if she finds this in her parking space when she gets back. So, he calls an old buddy, a raging-alcoholic-violently-assholish rancher up the road to see if he can hide the buffalo there. “Not home”, says his Peruvian. CaveMan calls all of Rancher’s hired help “his Peruvians” and some of them are indeed, from Peru. “Damn” thinks CaveMan, he’ll have to come up with a backup plan, but first… Back to the Bar!

He walks/hitches the two miles back into town and saunters in the bar, back from pissing presumably. CaveMan knows how long he was gone, but, in the excitement of the buffalo hunters tale as well as much drunkenness, no one has noticed he was gone. “Perfect”, he thinks mastermindedly, “all according to plan”. He waits for Snobby to get himself worked back up into a hunting-story-telling frenzy, then tells the bar-wench to ask Snobby if she can check out this triumph-of-man-over-dangerous-death-dealing-beast. Snobby proudly opens the bar door, sees his truck, sans buffalo and screams loudly and drunkenly “MOTHERFUCKER!”. CaveMan is back with the giggles. This lasts a full minute until he sees the unforeseeable amount of distress Snobby is in. The man is distraught, plunging to the lowest of lows from his previous high. This makes CaveMan feel quite bad.

Eventually, CaveMan sobers up and, with Dickum’s more-sober-than-thou urging, decide that he’ll tell Snobby what happened. Snobby was pissed, no question, but reacted similarly to a woman having her wedding ring stolen, just so incredibly happy to have it back. In this case though, it wasn’t a diamond-encrusted piece of precious metal, but half a ton of smelly, decomposing, hairy, range-roaming, dead monster.

This is my future father-in-law… CaveMan the buffalo thief.

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