The mrrr…mrrr…mrrr of the tires on the semi-molten asphalt gave way to a cloud of dust as Sewa Singh spun the wheel sharply to the right. The old Ambassador taxi pitched and yawed as it swung off the highway, hit an earthen mound and came to a halt in front of the paan gumti, a tiny shop not any bigger than a large wooden crate, supported on four bamboo legs.

I figured we were at the outskirts of Purulia, a town approximately half way between Jamshedpur and Bokaro, in the eastern Indian province of Bihar.

Let me tell you what a paan gumti is all about. It’s like a mini convenience store, a small box-like structure on stilts, with the front side that swivels on hinges. This side is the store front. If you stand facing it, the floor will be at the level of your waist. Looking in, the first thing you’ll note is a thin square polished stone slab in the foreground on the floor, tilted slightly toward you. The shopkeeper (paanwala) rolls the paan you ordered, on that slab and it’s tilted to allow excess water from the wet betel leaves to drain off. If you’re standing too close, the excess water will drain off right onto your pants, where the zipper is. And if you’re not the sort who pees in his pants, you won’t like it, trust me on this.

A small mat right by that stone slab, is where the paanwala sits, cross-legged. Around him are spread his wares – loose cigarettes in a tin, beedis (Indian hand-rolled smokies, a penny a piece), paan (betel leaves), supari (betel nuts), paan masala (stuff that’s goes inside a paan), zarda(chewing tobacco), all in small round cans made of brass or aluminum.

There’ll be around 10-20 of those cans within his reach, with their lids open. And since the lids are always open, there will be a number of dinner guests, each a few millimeters in length and having the characteristics of a WWII Stuka dive bomber. They’ll buzz in for a sit-down meal and leave without paying.

——————————-

Outside, in the back of the paan gumti, sheltered from the loo is a kerosene stove on a crate, shielded inside a cardboard box, along with paraphernalia for preparing tea.

Relax, a ‘loo’ is Bengali for the dusty, searing hot wind that whips around through arid Indian towns on summer afternoons.

The tea stall is kind of like a high-margin wholly owned subsidiary and it’s CEO is a plump woman in a dirty petticoat, rolled up to the knees and no saree over it. She has a blouse on, with no bra under it, the bottom-most two buttons of the blouse having not been able to stand the stress and left.

The woman’s blouse has round patches of sweat where the aureolas of her bubby-boos are. Wait a minute, is it “aureolas”, or aureoli? One must be careful when writing a blog. Being lusty isn’t enough. One must spell his lust adequately. Aside from the sweat patches on her boobs, the broad also has sweaty armpits.

The woman is a strangely erotic sight. Oh yeah, I have a sweaty-Indian-country-girl fetish. I feel a stirring in my 25-year old crotch.

That woman is the paanwala’s wife, reporting directly to the chairman of the board, the paanwala. She’ll be hunched over a dekchi of boiling frothing tea while their sole employee, a snotty little girl, washes the dishes in a stream nearby.

Don’t ask me why, but paanwalas always have plump, bra-less, petticoated, wives and snotty kids. Just say “Hallelujah” and read on.

—————————

The paanwala is most likely an avid paan chewer himself and will need to spit out the stuff from time to time. So he’ll have his tiny ‘pikdani’ (spitoon) right next, into which he’ll make regular deposits as he busies himself rolling you a paan or hands you a cigarette with grubby fingers, permanently stained red by betel juice. If you ask him a question, please stand well away out of range, if you don’t want to get sprayed. He’ll reply with his mouth filled with paan, face tilted up, lower lip basin-shaped, his speech having to do without being able to pronounce the ‘t’s, ‘th’s and the ‘d’s.

A paan gumti is the only place on earth where one can buy just one cigarette if he likes and not the whole pack. This has helped me stop smoking so many times while I was in India. If paan gumtis hadn’t sold single smokes, by now I’d be where you’d be only be able to communicate with me through an ouija board, I swear to ya.

And if you’re planning on getting yourself a paan from him, better have some loose change on you. If you don’t have small change and take out, say, a C-note, you’ll make the paanwala decidedly uncomfortable. He’ll fish around in that tin can of his, where he has all his change and a few tightly rolled 5s and 10s. Then finally he’ll put his fingers inside his bulging breast pocket and bring out a dog-eared notepad and myriads of small slips, receipts etc. Wedged in between them will be a few carefully folded 20s and 50s (maybe even one or two hundreds, but unlikely). He’ll carefully unfold the bills and count out the exact change, checking and rechecking his calculations repeatedly to make sure he isn’t giving you back more than you deserve. All the while, his eyes will be screwed close together, eyebrows furrowed in deep concentration. If he were sitting on Bikini Atoll while the Castle Bravo test was going off, he wouldn’t know it, believe me.

Every paanwala has a naked light bulb that he calls ‘balab’, hooked up to the ceiling, it’s wiring connected to a multi-plug which also feeds a radio, blaring ‘man chahe geet’ (hindi film favourites) or ‘sipaiyo ka man pasand’ (requests from our troops) on All India Radio. Requests for songs will be pouring in steadily from a hick joint called Amravati, giving you the distinct impression that it’s all that Amravatians do the whole fookin day, send in song requests. 

That same multi-plug also connects to a tiny table fan that is suspended from the corner of the ceiling facing down, the swivel movement performing half-rotations incessantly. And there’s no electricity meter, the power connection having been directly bled off a junction box nearby.

Even considering the free illegal electrical power line bleed, the average paanwala still just manages to eke out a precarious living.

———————————-

But hey, not all paanwalas are just getting by. Some, especially the ones at the main downtown traffic lights, do really well for themselves. I wouldn’t be surprised if the one at the corner of MG Road and Moledina Road in Pune is sending his daughter to a convent school in Lausanne. 

The MG Road Paanwala is wealthy and that’s because, besides the regular paan shop revenue, he also acts as the bag man for the bribes that traffic cop stationed there collects. And the paanwala gets to keep a cut thereby. You cross a red light and the cop siddles up to you, a book of blank traffic tickets in hand. “Go give that paanwala over there a twennie and you’re free to go”, the cop says. You pay. It’s expediency, economics.

Some paanwalas also dabble in marijuana and hashish balls that they hawk in little paper sachets, Rs10 a sachet. Low grade stuff, diluted and cheap, meant for the hoi-polloi – the coolies and rickshaw-walas. More like the ‘khat’ they chew in Yemen.

Of course, you can’t just walk up to the paanwala and demand a sachet. You’ll have to know someone who knows someone who knows him. No big deal. You just grab hold of a rickshaw-wala and get him to introduce you. All rickshaw-walas are addicted one hundred percent. It helps them to fight hunger and exhaustion while they get through the day, carrying loads or pulling rickshaws.

Time out, for some nomenclature briefing. You must be wondering about the ‘wala’ bit. Well, adding ‘wala’ to an activity or an object transforms it into a guy. It literally means ‘that guy with the..’ or ‘the guy who has the…’. Thus, you could call a guy with cauliflower ears (like yours truly), ‘Cauliflower-ear-wala’ meaning ‘that guy with the cauliflower ears’.

Further, note that ‘wala’ is masculine and ‘wali’ feminine. No guesses on what ‘Watermelon-boob-wali’ could possibly mean to depict. Come on, this is a tutorial. You pass and I’ll give you a zarda paan that has just been vacated by the one of those 5 millimeter long Stuka dive bombers.

——————————

Now where was I. Yeah, Sewa Singh had just parked his taxi by the paan gumti. I used all my strength against the hot screeching wind to nudge open the car door, got out and staggered toward the paan gumti, leaning way over against the wind, my head buried in my chest, trying not to get pinged by burning particles of hot blowing sand. As I found my balance, I stole a glance around.

There was one other car parked nearby, another Ambassador, bonnet open, the driver’s butt sticking out.  Obviously that vehicle has suffered some kind of a break-down. Poor sod.

This was the late 70s and the Ambassador and the Fiat 1100, a duopoly, were the only two brands of cars one found on Indian roads. Both cars were shitty junk buckets but the Ambassador was the more popular of the two. It was based on a 1940s design of the Morris Oxford, palmed off to a business family, the Birlas, which had managed to leverage the close ties that it’s founder, GD Birla, had with Mahatma Gandhi. In the process, the Birlas had managed to amass a business empire that had India virtually by the testicles. A sorry excuse for an automobile, the Ambassador can still be seen on Indian roads even today.

I felt sorry for the lone passenger whose silhouette I could barely make out in the back seat of that other car. Soon as my senses discerned that it was a female, the testosterone inside my horny brain demanded, “Well, don’t just stand there, go check her out. You know the drill, be nice, be chivalrous, be smooth and suave, offer her a lift. Do what you have ta do, but within the next 30 seconds your back seat should look like she was born on it.”

Bracing myself against the loo, I tottered toward the other car. The driver must have sensed my approach, for he emerged from under the hood and sized me up suspiciously.

‘Kya ho gaya, gari band ho gaya kiya?” (What happened? Won’t start?). I was trying to look concerned, having above strategic acquisition plans in mind.

“Sala, fuel pump gaya. Bhosriwala mechanic kal hi naya pump dala tha. Sala agar kahin dikh giya tho gaar pe laath parega, sala.” (Fucking fuel pump’s broken. The fucking mechanic changed it just yesterday. If I see him, I’ll ream the fucker‘s butt out.”

“Seems like it’ll take you a while. No sense in keeping a lady waiting all that while. It’s not very safe in these parts after dark, y’know. “ I was smooth, real smooth, “where are you headed?”

“Bokaro.”

“Hey, that’s exactly where we are going. Aren’t we, Sewa?” Sewa Singh nodded with a barely perceptible smirk. It’s true we were headed to Bokaro but we were going to Dhanbad first and wouldn’t reach Bokaro before 10-11pm that night.

Having been my longtime chauffeur, Sewa knew the antics I got myself into frequently. I continued without missing a beat, “If you like, we can take the lady with us and drop her wherever she would like us to.”

The driver sized me up and concluded that I looked decent enough. He must have acknowledged the fact that this desolate wayside joint was unsafe to be at for a lady, after dark. He walked up to the back and spoke with her and after a while she emerged from the car.

She must have been at least 70. This time the testosterone inside my head had screwed up. No matter. An offer, once made, had to be kept.

On the drive to Bokaro, the lady turned out to be extremely jovial and a wonderfully entertaining person. She also turned out to be the mother of Charanjit Singh, (Head of Purchasing), Bokaro Steel Plant.

I would rank that business trip as one of the most entertaining I’d ever taken. And the most rewarding.  Charanjit Singh showed his gratitude indirectly. Orders from Bokaro sky-rocketed. Tender contracts were skillfully arranged to favour my employers. I ended up winning the best salesman award in 8 out of 12 product categories that year.

To all the young men out there, here’s the moral of the story : Even a 70-year old can give you a good time.

Addendum to the moral : Fuck the grammar, aureoli-aureolas, it doesn’t matter. What matters is being able to blaze the trail, make the touchdown.

————-

Moscow
Present Day
————

There is an elite unit deep within the Administratsiya Prezidenta Rossiyskoy Federatsii, (Presidential Administration of Russia), called the Federal’naya sluzhba okhrany Rossiyskoy Federatsii – Federal Protective Service (FGS).

The FGS mirrors America’s Secret Service and has the same job – to keep the leader of the nation alive.

Here are those attributes of the FGS that are similar……

The tools of the trade – the bulletproof limos, vests and briefcases, electronic surveillance, eavesdropping and signal jammers, high-power sniper rifles, grenade launchers, shoulder-fired surface to air or anti personnel missiles, multiple rings of agents each surrounding the President at all times, casing and bolting down of neighbourhoods long before a visit, et al.

Like the Secret Service, FGS agents are experts at many things – hand-to-hand combat, martial arts and standing for hours outside, in extreme cold as well as extreme heat, remaining alert and sharp.

Those things about the FGS that are vastly different from the American Secret Service are….

The FGS is answerable on paper to the director of the Presidential Administration but in reality only to Putin and no one else. FGS agents are wealthy, continuously endowed with cash and property worth millions by Russia’s equivalent of the Saudi “sovereign wealth fund”. Just as the Saudi fund is solely administered by Prince MBS, so is the Russian fund, by Putin and constantly topped up by his oligarch brigade. Estimates suggest that the Putin wealth fund owns assets worth over a trillion dollars.

On retirement at the age of 35, agents of the FGS are given plum positions such as regional governor, federal minister, special services commander or presidential administrator, where the opportunities for grift are infinite.

A 2018 exposé by Russia’s Novaya Gazeta and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project revealed how a giant Soviet-era poultry farm and factory outside Moscow was appropriated and its valuable land divvied up among high-ranking officers in the FGS. Among those who benefitted from the scam were three former Putin bodyguards who were recorded flanking him during an official trip to Helsinki in 1999.

Putin has six rings of these agents surrounding him at all times and even multiple agents planted in crowds. In comparison, the American President has only two rings of agents around him.

American Secret Service agents are not given cash or property. An agent is covered by the FERS (Federal Employee Retirement Service) and is eligible to a voluntary 30-year period of employment. The agent starts at around $32000/yr and can end with $190000/yr if he or she retires as the Director of the Secret Service.

The above is as far as my information goes. I have no idea if things have changed with Trump in power.

Secret Service agents have no plum appointments lined up on retirement and as to the patsy (a.k.a body double), to the best of my knowledge an American President does not use one. I doubt if there are any suicidal guys willing to act as a body double for Donald Trump.

Putin’s personal security costs the Russian exchequer $30billion a year, while America spends just $3billion to keep its President alive.

Now, here’s the thing. In spite of all the expense and effort at securing his safety, Putin will not get to see his last wish, that he may die a world changer. He had wanted to see all the ‘prodigal sons’ (the breakaway republics) back in the fold and the Russian Empire at the head of half the civilized world. Even more than that, he always wanted to go peacefully in his own bed when the time comes. 

The end, when it does come, is sudden and quiet, with two sounds not louder than soft coughs. It catches him by complete surprise, his dimming eyes glazed, with hurt and betrayal.

The Russian President had spent the night at Novo-Ogaryovo, his official dacha west of Moscow, on the Rublyovo-Uspenskoye Highway. Now the sun is barely peeking out over the firs in the distance and he is already at his desk in the den, leafing through the press briefing that he is scheduled to deliver this afternoon about what had been achieved at the recent summit with Trump in Riyadh.

The briefing is, as the title suggests, brief. The President hates flowery prose.

There is a discrete knock and his major-domo, Volodya, a Spetsnaz veteran and his judo partner, enters quietly, closing the tall oak doors behind him, as he balances a tray in his right hand. He is a lefty, a fact that the President sometimes forgets on the mat.

Volodya had broken his ribs twice while practicing the ‘harai goshi’, (a judo sweep throw) with Putin, but he would follow his master blindly and unquestioningly. Likewise, Vladimir Vladimirovich trusts Volodya with his life and has made sure that he and his family want for nothing.

Little is known about Volodya outside of the President’s closest circle of aides, but of one single thing there is no doubt in anybody’s mind – that Volodya is to Putin what Martin Bormann had been, to Hitler. Only, in his case he had the same name as his boss – Volodya is short for Volodymyr which is the Ukrainian way of saying Vladimir, a word that means “Ruler of the World”.

There is only one man more powerful than the FSG and that is Volodymyr Antonenko. Of course, it is always a roll of the dice in dictatorships. You are powerful as long as your man is in power. He goes and those multitudes with grudges, the long knives, will be out to get even and you might find yourself on a train to the Kolyma Labour camp with a one-way ticket.

There is only one way you can remain untouchable in today’s Russia – if you are awarded the nation’s highest honour….. Hero of the Russian Federation. A purge at that level would reflect badly on the leadership. 

Volodya is in the running for that honor.

—————————-

Even less known is the fact that Volodymyr is not his real name.

Volodya had actually been born Rustem Akhmetov, the only son of a certain Fedir Akhmetov, a Crimean Muslim Tatar, in a tiny hamlet called Rozovyi in the wilderness just outside Alushta, a coastal Crimean town of 30000, 100 miles east of Sebastopol, Ukraine. Crimean Muslims were generally progressive but by the time the son was born, Fedir had embraced the rabid Wahhabist Muslim version of the faith.

The match that lit the fire of Fedir Akhmetov’s extremism had its origins in the dying days of the Second World War….

For generations, the Akhmetov clan had been living in peaceful contentment in Rozovyi when, in late 1944, Fedir Akhmetov became one of the 190,000 Muslim Tatars who were forcibly rounded up, removed from Crimea and sent by Stalin on a week-long 3500 mile cattle car ride to be resettled in the Uzbekistan S.S.R. All his earthly possessions, his land and his home, were snatched by the Bolshevik apparatchiks.

It was an ethnic cleansing operation that Crimean historians call “Surgunlik”.

An avowed atheist, Stalin was concerned about more Muslim enclaves forming on the USSR’s western borders after the war ended. Already there were Islamist Iran, Iraq and Turkey – a bit too many. His childhood memories of Russia’s continuous bloody conflicts with the Ottoman Empire and later, Hitler’s desperate cozying up with the Islamic nations of the Levant to save the Nazis, were still fresh in the dictator’s memory.

Compared to the idyllic life in Crimea, the refugee camp in Uzbekistan was a hellhole, but the Akhmetovs somehow survived. Then, in 1986, after the Mikhail Gorbachev kindled “perestroika (reform) and glasnost (transparency)”, those memes became the zeitgeist. Under perestroika, Fedir and his family were allowed to return to Ukraine, this time to Donetsk, a mid-sized Russian-majority town in the east.

Deeply resentful of the way that he and his family had been treated, Fedir Akhmetov set about formulating a plan as the train carrying them back chugged through the Uzbek countryside.

First, Akhmetov decided that for the future prosperity of his family, he needed to shed his Muslim Tatar identity. He believed that his version of the Quran allowed him to masquerade as a non-Muslim if there was a higher goal ahead. He shed his Muslim identity quietly and on arrival at Donetsk, registered with the city council as an erstwhile orthodox Christian, Fedir Antonenko, now an atheist. You could get away with makeovers those chaotic days. Then, with the help of a newly acquired friend who happened to be an apparatchik, he got himself a job as a staffer at the Donetsk office of the Soviet external intelligence agency, the KGB.

An intensely loyal and hard worker who minded his own business, Akhmetov was well regarded by his superiors. A string of transfers and promotions within the KGB followed, until his final posting in East Berlin, as Chief of Station for Department V Operations, the Mokroye Delo (known in the CIA as the Black Ops or Wet Affairs – covering assassinations, kidnappings and sabotage).

All through his rise through the ranks of the KGB, Fedir Akhmetov, had managed to hide his true identity. It had been possible only because of the immediate post-war chaos

Sometime in the late 1980s, when on a routine visit to Dresden, Fedir rubbed shoulders with a diminutive, shifty, ferret-eyed man, a 30-yr old KGB agent like himself, a man who spoke in a soft, hesitant voice.

The agent was named Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

It is said that they immediately took to each other.

————————————

[It’s time for my date with the Stella Artois sisters. Toodle-oo. Watch out for Part-2]

—————————————————-

“Therefore, when ye meet the unbelievers in the battlefield, strike off their heads. Then when you have made wide slaughter among them, carefully tie up the remaining captives and render either generosity or demand ransom, until the war lays down its burdens”

– The Quran, Book of Muhammad, verse 4 (47:4)

—————————————————-

Don’t challenge me on the accuracy of this translation of a verse from the Quran. I have not read the Quran (and I don’t intend to). I checked three different webpages before I got this sura off the internet. Like this one, there are reported to be numerous other places in the Quran where similar exhortations against non-believers are depicted.

Now, those who think they have to be politically correct will condemn what I am about to say. To them I say that if you have a long enough richard, then go f—ck yourselves.

It is said that a little knowledge about anything can be dangerous. Maybe so, but the above excerpt does appear pretty graphic. It presents a picture of God urging men to kill in his name, exhorting the faithful to ‘strike off’ the heads of infidels on the battlefield. The oft-repeated Islamic intonation, Bismillah ir rehman ir Rahim, means ‘In the name of God, the most Beneficent, the most Merciful’. Mercy is an act of forgiveness, shown to the wrong-doer.

I suppose that God likes to be picky sometimes about whom to shower his mercy on.

Then there is the ‘tie up the remaining captives’ bit, where you are left with a choice of either letting them go (‘render generosity’??) or demanding a ransom for their release. In Islam’s eyes, both alternatives appear equally reasonable. Let them go or, hey, we need more guns, so ransom the sods, infidels are not human beings, just commodities to cash in on.

Two very disparate choices – show mercy or cash in. The practice of literally paying for a crime is law in most Islamic nations. If you are well-heeled and you kill a guy, you can get off the hook by simply paying his family a court-mediated sum of money. If you happen to be broke, you are history. You can kiss your ass goodbye. You will be looking at parts of you being chopped off at best.

Similarly, in Islam, extracting a ransom for a captive infidel is also very legal. Heck, when did they ever make sense to anybody?

Now let’s turn to the word ‘battlefield’. That could mean anything, not just those pre-arranged open grassy meadows ringed by tall trees, where battles were fought in ancient times. But here’s this – in ideological terms, an Islamist sees the whole world as a battlefield, where every human is involved, in a clear-cut for-us-or-against-us format.

And then there is the term ‘strike off their heads’. The tone implies doing something that shall detach the head from the rest of the body. The human head being attached to the torso with bone, tissue and ligaments, the only way it can be struck off is by chopping it off at the neck, with an extremely sharp blade.

Beheading is mandated by other religions, especially Abrahamic faiths – Christianity, for one.  Take a look at this excerpt from the Bible, where God commands King Saul to slay the Amelekites –

“Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them. Put to death their men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys….” – The Old Testament, Book of Samuel 15:3

I don’t know exactly what the Amelekites did to piss God off so bad. Children and infants? Camels and donkeys? God sounds like an out-of-control Grand Knight of the KKK (or maybe Donald Trump). Maybe the Amelekites attacked the Israelites in the wilderness where they had followed Moses and Moses, like all Prophets before and after, was simply TLWIP (The Lord’s Work In Progress).

And we have all read right through primary school how the Israelites were his chosen ones, remember? Chosen for what? If the almighty God of the Jews chose them as his chosen people, why did he stand there with his shrivelled old richard in his hands while the Nazis kicked the shit out of them at Bergen Belsen? Chosen people, my ass.

——————————

Sure, in both cases, in Islam as well as Christianity, those exhortations I detailed earlier – to slaughter infidels, must have been in context with specific situations, but they set a precedent. Indeed, Holy Scriptures are nothing but that – setting precedents to follow. Holy Scriptures urge us to do those exact same things if we find ourselves in similar circumstances. They show the way and the method.

There is however a subtle difference between the two religious practices. To Christians, the term ‘beheading’ is a metaphor. Christians organize themselves far better, having technology on their side. Christians are the Henry Fords of religion. To them, slitting a throat here and decapitating a head there, is cost-ineffective. Everything has to happen in a grand scale.

A thousand years back, Christians did pretty much the same thing, sitting on horses and calling it a Crusade. Today they stand on aircraft carrier decks and sing ‘God bless America’ and call it a liberation.

——————————

Then we have this gent who got himself the nickname Jihadi John. Jihadi, since he was an ISIS looney and John, since he was believed to be British. Thank god Jihadi John is raising the daisies after a Hellfire missile from an MQ9 Reaper Drone went up his ass.

From the tone of his voice in those beheading videos, J_John seems to be enjoying what he is doing. He has pedigree. I read somewhere that his Dad had been chums with Bin Laden and had an active hand in the 1998 American Embassy bombings in Kenya. Junior was a rap artist before he was “born again” and joined the ISIS and that makes me dislike him even more.

I hate rap music. I detest people who say they are born again.

—————————————-

During the dark and middle ages, decapitation as a form of punishment was the rule rather than an exception. King Henry VIII had particularly itchy fingers. He had two of his six wives beheaded, not because of any sense of jihad. He just wanted fresh p—sy all the time, that’s all. Mark Twain’s Huck Finn was spot on….

“…..He used to marry a new wife every day, and chop off her head next morning. And he would do it just as indifferent as if he was ordering up eggs. ‘Fetch up Nell Gwynn,’ he says. They fetch her up. Next morning, ‘Chop off her head!’ And they chop it off. ‘Fetch up Jane Shore,’ he says; and up she comes. Next morning, ‘Chop off her head’ – and they chop it off….”

If you would like to know more on King Henry VIII, here is one of my earlier posts, which you might find particularly enlightening…..

https://spunkybong.com/2019/03/30/just-imagine-youre-hank-viii/

——————————-

Decapitation has been a favored method of killing even in Hinduism, which Hindus hasten to assure us, is a pacifist religion. It even goes a step further – unlike Christianity and Islam where God only exhorts and then stands back, Hindu Gods are hands-on.

The James Bond / Rock Star of Hinduism, Lord Krishna, the most revered of all Hindu Gods has his own version of the Walther PPK. It is a sparkling, spinning disc with 108 sharp teeth on its periphery.

Lord Krishna has the disc spinning on his index finger, locating it through a hole in the middle. Being an engineer, I’m guessing that the hole has a 3/8 inch countersink so it won’t just slide down his finger and lop of the other four.

Krish calls the disc the Sudershana Chakra and in the epics, he was very liberal when using it on Hinduism’s own bunch of infidels, the non-Vaishnavites. All he had to do was swing his arm at the ‘bad’ guy and the Chakra whirred off in a wide arc, connecting with the poor sod’s neck on the way and slicing it clean off.

Since I have always seen Lord Krishna with his Chakra spinning on his finger, I suspect it behaves like a boomerang, slices the bad guy’s head off and zips back to his finger (unless he has a secretary with a pouch of refills). Also since I have never seen amputated fingers on Lord Krishna, I must assume that the Chakra has a docking radar, like the one that the Space-X Dragon uses before it docks at the ISS.

Beheading and letting the head roll away ignominiously in the dirt or sticking it to a spike, is the ultimate symbol of triumph, especially in asymmetric conflicts, between unequal antagonists, as in the case of America’s so-called ‘war on terror’. To the ‘beheader’, like Jihadi John, it is the ultimate Adrenalin rush.

Beheading is a contagious disease.

“No one has ever taught animals sexual foreplay. They know it by instinct. They know not to rush it. They know it isn’t the prelude, but the main course” – Spunkybong

———————

I had been in my tree stand nearly four hours, muscles cramped from sitting stock still, drained and famished, itching ta reach inside my Sitka Hudson Camouflage Hoody and pull out an O’Henry bar, hoping my camouflage wouldn’t give me away.

I turned my wrist a fraction and my watch lit up. It said -5°. The weather app translated that into -8° with windchill. On the colder side but manageable, in the Sitka Hudson. It was 5:40 and in ten minutes, hunting hours would begin.

The doe call on the IHunt app hadn’t worked and I had switched to Plan-B (rag soaked in the doe-in-heat pee) and hung it from a sapling on the far side of the clearing.

The northwest wind had been flipping red maple leaves around and now suddenly it had settled. The rustle of the saplings at the ends of branches quietened. The fox squirrels had been scurrying around, but suddenly they weren’t there anymore. Even the blue jays had quit their shrill piping and fallen into a hushed silence. Nothing stirred, until…

There he was. He was magnificent, must have been eight feet. I counted the antlers – definitely 15 points. The slightly out of kilter antler point on the left and the same imperious tilt of the head were the signature. My gut told me it was the one that the SpyPoint had caught, pre-season – the one I had named Zorba.

He didn’t plunge through the saplings or crash through the undergrowth – he just stood there facing me – twennie yards to the north, his front legs on the trail and the rear ones in the weeds. His large eyes – neither soft nor mean – seemed matter of fact, clearly visible through the Zeiss Victory. Fifteen soaring, tined points – 220 inches by 90 inches tall give or take – sheer majesty that a hunter prayed ta set his eyes on just once in his lifetime. The adrenalin made me feel like I was in the air, levitating over him. 

‘It’s time…’ I breathed.

The Lapua was leaning against the guard rail of the stand to my right and I had ta twist my torso  to reach for it and as I did, the weight shifted and the floor of the tree stand creaked. Zorba’s head whipped up in a jerk.

——————————

I was sure I was busted then, but the buck stared at a point past me, to the right. He stirred and it looked like he would soon begin moving directly toward me and I figured I would let him pass me by, right underneath where I sat. I would twist my torso around and take him soon as I had a clear shot. At ten yards, the soft nosed .306 round would get him where I needed it to – in the jugular.

But he just stood there and stared, for an honest five minutes…then he spun, as if on a heel, and slunk back into the ragweed and saplings.

He came to a halt at fifty yards, circled over and stepped broadside into another small clearing and once again he just stood there – muscled, brawny and perfect. He was undecided. He had caught the scent of the rag and he had ta come check it out. I could have taken him then. At 50 yards, it was a cinch.

I had the Lapua positioned now, nestled against my shoulder, barrel steady on the guardrail, my Thinsulate gloved finger on the trigger. A trickle of sweat began running down the back of the heavy collar of the Hoody and suddenly I felt very very hot. The urge ta remove my jacket, my gaiter, my crew singlet and let the chill cool my heaving chest was overpowering.

But the message made me pause. It was a message that only I could understand. Still standing there at the edge of the clearing, his hooves far apart and his antlers thrown back, Zorba let out a curdling roar. It said, “Look at me, wannabe hunter mo–er f—cker. This is what a real whitetail buck looks like, see? And this is what you’ll never get ta have….” Then he turned and slunk off behind a copse of maples. Soon he was gone, out of my line of sight.

———————————————–

Drained, I turned and slouched, my back resting on the guardrail. I reached into my backpack, opened up the thermos and poured myself some of the coffee.

The coffee mug was suspended in the air inches from my lips, when the crash jerked me around. The bent left antler gave him away – it was Zorba and this time there wasn’t the same reticence in him. He crashed through the undergrowth, his antlers snagging here and there as he whipped them viciously around. He burst into the clearing and the first thing he did was raise himself up on his hind legs and let out an ear-splitting guttural growl of frustration.

In that instant I noticed his richard – thick, maybe four inches at the base, long and tapering, almost touching the ground. It was semi-hard, its weight bending it downward in an arc, ending in a hooded conical knob that was tiny, compared to the diameter at the base. The last six inches to the knob were albino white. Behind it were two tennis ball-sized testicles that sagged at least six inches down from his crotch. As he repeatedly raised up on his hind legs, that thing swung and slapped against his thighs.

He had caught the scent of the doe from the rag but where the fuck was the broad?

———————————

A good hunter is like a good actor, who learns ta speak his words or throw a punch instinctively, on cue. And this was my second cue – he was no more than fifteen yards from me and I could have taken him.

But passion – to want to make love – was a natural thing. Zorba was expecting ta do what he was born ta do. He was there ta take what was his by right. To deprive him of it would be so unfair. Entranced, my index finger slipping off the trigger, I slowly let my breath out, strangely unable to bring myself to end the life of something so human.

Then, seemingly out of control, the massive buck began to scratch and stomp on the ground. Stray leaves and dirt began flying all around, as he let out a series of grunts. I had seen whitetail bucks stomp before – it is a mating call. The stomping releases a scent from a gland – known as the interdigital gland – that is situated between the buck’s hooves and is designed ta attract a doe during season. The stomping and the secretion also sends an indirect message to other aspiring bucks – beat it, two is a crowd over here.

When he had had enough, the giant whitetail stopped and let out a long stream of noisy pee on the very spot he had cleared with his stomp-scratch routine. He then gave another resounding Grooaarrr, as if ta say,” Hey, baby, where the fuck are you?” Once in a while, he tilted his head to one side, cocked his ear and waited, front hooves planted in the middle of the pee pool on the ground and his rear hooves furiously scratching the ground as his rear slowly turned in an orbit around the pee. The Lapua Magnum, now forgotten, was lying on the floor of the stand, its safety on, as I stared down mesmerized.

——————-

And then Zorba suddenly froze, his antlers reared up and he stood stock still. To the left, the saplings stirred and a doe appeared.

She was a little more than half his size, her head low, her snout almost touching the ground. As she walked hesitatingly into the middle of the clearing she let out a continuous stream of strange soft cooing sounds that I was certain I hadn’t heard in the IHunt app.

I was expecting ta see Zorba grab her but he remained like a statue, quivering in anticipation, as the doe approached and stopped directly over the pee stain on the ground. Then her hind legs buckled, her butt came down a foot and she let loose a steady trickle that ran down the insides of her thighs and seeped into the ground, mingling with Zorba’s pee. It was a kinda ‘okay, tiger, let’s do it.’

As if he was coming out of a trance, Zorba moved at last. He whipped his head around raking the side of her neck with his antlers savagely and his snout made a beeline for the honeypot. The doe scrambled ta get out of his way but she didn’t attempt ta run from the clearing. She just hung around, shaking and quivering, jiggling her butt, letting his snout nuzzle her pussy and then teasing him by pulling back and keeping just a few inches from him as he lunged forward ta get at her – until all of sudden she seemed ta give in.

The rough stuff moved on to the gentle. Zorba went around her till they were facing each other and then, taking care not ta hurt her with his antlers, he began gently rubbing his cheeks against hers, his tongue slipped out and he licked the side of the doe’s neck. It was all exquisitely choreographed. They took their time, first rubbing cheeks, then necks and finally circling, their torsos bumping and grinding against each other.

Animals have never needed to be taught sexual foreplay. They know it by instinct. They know not to rush it. They know it isn’t the prelude, but the main course.

——————————

We are so similar, I mused. Hawaii 1990 flooded into my brain. Shirley, in her lingerie, was the ‘damsel in distress’ and I was the ‘blood thirsty Bela Lugosi’ and we loved role play. It began with her running around the bed in mock terror and me snarling, giving her chase in my jockey shorts, pretending to try ta get at her but not quite able to grab her, a massive rounded bump growing inside my shorts.

Shirley kept giggling and scrambling, until she couldn’t take it anymore. She waded onto the bed on all fours and stooped forward till her nipples raked the frilly bed sheet, her knees spread wide open and her butt weaved drunkenly, high up in the air. Her mane of hair spilled over that beautiful face as she bent her head ta stare back at me. And then – her buttocks still swaying – she reached under, shoved her panties to one side and began rubbing the lips of her womanhood feverishly with her middle finger.

Watching Zorba and the doe, it struck me that, no matter how wild, how base their instincts might be, these two still understood the importance of foreplay and the rules it was governed by. And right now – like Shirley and I had – those two were enjoying the same process, the chase, the courtship. I was now an integral part of something exquisite that was playing out in front of me. Interrupt that? Never!

I let the third cue slip by. I was no longer me, I was Zorba.

“Not every hunt ends in a kill, but the hunter always comes home with a story. Some are short, others epic – like this one. But those stories are all special because they remind us what we really are, at heart, predators.” -Genuine Spunkybong Quote

————————————

I usually don’t sleep over at Cedric’s, but in season I do. It is easier, since the hunt always begins very early. Regulations allow you to be at your tree stand a half hour before sunrise and leave a half hour after sunset, max. Hunting is prohibited at night for safety reasons. You could kill another hunter, mistaking him for game.

There is another reason you can’t hunt at night – fairness toward the prey. It takes the edge off the feeling of guilt and makes you feel less like a cold blooded killer. In the hunter’s convoluted mind, killing a whitetail while it is snoozing is considered the lowliest form of hunting sin.

It is paramount that you settle in at your station as early as possible, so that by the time the whitetail are out and about, you are already an indistinguishable part of the landscape and the whitetail won’t notice your presence when they appear for breakfast. Unless the winds have changed and you find yourself upwind, in which case you might as well pack up, shimmy down the ladder and go look for some cover downwind, that you can crouch behind. Whitetail are notoriously sensitive to smell and if they smell you, man, they are gone.

Cedric couldn’t make it that Sunday because an aunt in Trois Rivierès had suddenly been hospitalized and she had nobody, so he had to go be with her. The night prior, Gina had let me into the outhouse after dinner and I spent the better part of an hour checking out my gear. It is essential that nothing malfunctions out there in the open.

I had already cleaned the Lapua Magnum but even so, I broke it apart and rechecked that everything was where it was supposed ta be. I stuffed the pockets of my Fanatic Hoody jacket with ammo, as well as dry munchies like O’Henry bars and cashew nuts and filled my water bottle. It could be a long day. I cleaned the scope, put my Iphone on the charger, rechecked and updated GPS coordinates online and tried out the IHunt app to see if the doe-in-heat call worked. It did.

I turned to my heavy duty back pack. More ammo, paper towels, extra batteries, Iphone charger pack, my Zeiss Victory binoculars, a tiny first-aid box with sterile gauze, adhesive tape, waterproof bandages, antiseptic wipes, scissors and a tiny bottle of Advil for inflammations and headaches. Sundry stuff like the 20W speaker for my IHunt deer call and the bottle of doe-in-heat pee (its actual doe pee) went in next. And chap sticks for my lips. You have no idea how dry it can get sometimes, in the chill.

And alcohol. Alcohol warms you up, sure, but it dehydrates you, compromises your immune system and attacks your power of logic and reasoning. If you want to make it outa the woods in one piece, leave the bottle of vodka behind.

For hunting wear, I go with Sitka. If you want ta keep warm and dry, Sitka is unbeatable. Expensive, yes – a head to toe Sitka gear will set you back by a grand easily, but hey, its your health and well-being. Why feel frozen and miserable when you are supposed ta be having the time of your life? October can get awful wet and chilly. You might not get frostbite but you sure could come down with pneumonia.

I laid out my gear on the spare bed in the exact order I would put them on : Gore-Tex thermal long johns and a Merino crew neck thermal undershirt. Over my long johns I would pull on my Incinerator Bib, an ultra-heavy duty coverall that feels as if it weighs a ton. Next came the Sitka neck gaiter – it would protect me from the chill, from the bridge of my nose down to my shoulders. Beside the gaiter, I placed the Gore-Tex camouflage balaclava, through which only my eyes and lips were going ta be visible. The Fanatic Hoody jacket came next – thermally sealed and waterproof, it would keep me at room temp even at -40℃.

Now for the extremities – for gloves, I went for the best : UnderArmour Scent Control 2.0. Solidly thermal and bone dry, they trap 100% body heat. My Gore-Tex thermal socks came next.

I wasn’t done yet. The most important part of my gear – my MuckBoots rubberized fabric knee high hunting boots – came last. I got the boots two years back when I went hunting for caribou in the Tundra. They are deceptively lightweight but capable of keeping your toes warm even at -65℃.

The MuckBoots are life saving in more ways than one. The deadly massasauga rattlesnake has yet to sink its fangs through them and believe me, you’ll find the wriggly vermin in the unlikeliest places. Itself a hunter, the massasauga knows when hunting season is on and it packs a bite that can kill within minutes. The venom of masssauga, a cytotoxic venom, destroys tissue. It has digestive enzymes that disrupt blood flow and prevent blood clotting. Severe internal bleeding causes the death in minutes. In the wilderness, the massasauga is a death knell.

———————————

The reason why you go in for the best in hunting gear is that it has got to be scent and odor cancelling. Suppose you are up on your tree stand and the wind changes. You can’t just climb down, carry your tree stand on your back and go set it up some place else.

———————-

A tree stand is a permanent fixture, fixed to the tree with solid bolts, straps and lattices for your own safety and it remains in place through the year, right up until the next season. With the ladder and foot rests, it can weigh upwards of 80 lbs . Dismantling that, taking it off the tree and setting it up again at another spot is a half-day job for at least two hunky guys. The only time you remove a tree stand is when the prey have moved away from that region for good or if the stand has rusted and grown unsafe or the tree has weakened somehow. Moving a tree stand every time the wind changes is something only a certified schmuck will think of doing.

However, in spite of all scent cancelling gear, it is still a good idea ta station yourself downwind, because you will always expose scent-emitting parts of your anatomy, like your eyes, cheeks, lips or other stuff like the steam from your coffee mug. Or maybe you’ll want ta remove your balaclava for a while because it suddenly feels hot and stuffy or you’ll remove your gloves ta scratch a sudden itch under your armpit.

Remember, a whitetail can smell you from great distances, though given the location and ambient conditions, the distance can vary widely. I hunt at Cedric’s farm, an area that is heavily farmed, with a fair smattering of humans going about their daily chores. The whitetail here have come to recognize humans and have gotten used to their presence. A doe might walk up pretty close even though she has detected my smell. Then there is the wind – if it is a gentle 20kmph breeze, a whitetail can detect you at maybe 2-300 yards.

There’s one other thing I do that gives me a high kill chance – remember Part-5, the prep for the hunt, those fifteen days prior to season start? Every one of those fifteen days, I come and go in broad daylight, first ta fix the SpyPoint cameras and then ta choose the right spot and fix the tree stand.

Thereafter, every day I go there to replenish the lure – the salt and the piles of apples and carrots and even if I cannot actually see them when I enter the clearing, I know they are there, just outside my line of sight, fully conscious of my presence. I let ‘em smell me and grow accustomed to my smell.

What with all the largesse in the form of apples and carrots, I figure that the whitetail see me in a positive frame of mind.

——————————

You’ll note that I haven’t mentioned all the gear needed ta skin and clean the kill, after it’s over. If you’ve been paying any attention, that’s because I have written about that in one of the prior parts in this series, I don’t remember which. Suffice it ta know that all those items – the Gerber kit of skinning and the dressing knives, the winch and rope for stringing up the whitetail and of course the coupon that I’d have ta attach to one of the deer’s earlobes as proof of my permit – were already stowed in my pick-up truck, ready ta roll.

Before I went to bed that night, I did one last thing – I laid out my Alpha Chef Bullet Shaker Thermos flask on the table, ready to be filled with piping hot Colombian mild, first thing in the morning. The Alpha Chef carries a 24-hour steaming hot guarantee.

The season would start 5:30am next morning and one of those whitetail in the clearing, gorging on my apples, taking me to be Santa, would find out I actually wasn’t.

I was hoping it would be Zorba.

—————————————-

Take it easy. Part-7 is waiting ta burst forth, once I get some inspirayshun.

———————-

So now you have a gun and you think you are ready ta rock and roll. Actually you aren’t. Not until you get acquainted with the rules first.

Hunting is strictly controlled in Canada and if you are a serious hunter, before you even entertain the thought of going out on a hunt, you have to read the bible on Quebec hunting laws, Sport hunting – General Regulations, cover to cover. It clearly lays down the law.

You start by getting acquainted with the definition of ‘prey’ – what you are allowed ta hunt. And those are – Caribou, whitetail (common spotted deer), moose, black bear, bearded wild turkey and the last category, defined as ‘other small game’ – rabbits, partridge, duck, ptarmigan and other wild fowl.

———

Once you are clear about what you can kill, you move on to where you can hunt – ie:the ‘zone’, the region where you are allowed ta hunt. Quebec is divided into 29 hunting zones and the guide comes with a map of those 29 zones. You have to pick a zone and go buy a one-season license, that will allow you ta hunt only in that zone. You also need a “hunter’s certificate” for the weapons you’ll use.

If you are an experienced hunter, you’ll know the zones where the chances of a kill are the maximum. But remember, the more the game in one particular zone, the more the zone will be crawling with hunters.

Take for instance Anticosti Island, the spit of land that looks like a traffic island at the mouth of the St Lawrence. It has more deer than humans – in fact so many that it might as well elect a whitetail for mayor instead of a human being. You could kill a whitetail there even if your gun went off by accident.

————————

But I won’t advise you to hunt in Anticosti. I know I could get my kill but I don’t venture there because I’m smart. Places like Anticosti attract huge hordes of hunters in season, most of whom are stupid schmucks who are nothing but drunks with loaded guns. I don’t like the odds that some pissed drunk son of a bitch will mistake me for a whitetail and put a bullet in me. Stories of accidental shooting deaths while hunting in Quebec are legion and more often than not, the perp is able to get away with a suspended sentence for involuntary manslaughter.

M

It isn’t even about the meat harvested from a hunt, which can be sizeable. I mean, a 250kg whitetail can easily yield around 100lbs of prime meat and that’s a lot. But if a hunter tells you he does it for the meat, to put food on the table, trust me that’s BS, he’s lying. He does it for the adrenaline.

————————————

One other thing about hunting zones – every zone has privately-owned and public land. You needn’t seek permission to hunt on public land, your permit takes care of that. But if you wish ta hunt on privately owned property, it has to be an understanding between you and the landowner, whereby he allows you to hunt on his land in exchange for a certain amount of cash as rent. $500 per head for letting you hunt is normal, a nice spot of change.

Like I told you in Part-4, I hunt at my dear friend, Cedric’s prime 100-acre spread that abuts a massive wild life reserve known as Parc Omega, in Montebello, just over an hour’s drive from where I live. I don’t pay Cedric anything for the privilege, for reasons explained in Part-4, if you have cared ta read it. To Cedric, I’m family.

In general you are safer if you hunt on privately owned land since it is expensive and therefore less crowded and consequently the chances of your catching a misdirected .306 slug between your shoulder blades are minimal.

——————————————–

Let’s say you got yourself a hunting license for a particular zone. Now you got ta sit down and read the rules for that zone, which tell you when you can kill a certain species, what kind of weapon you are allowed ta use, whether you can kill a male, a female or a calf of that species and just how many you can shoot – the bag limits.

Oh yes, the bag limits – very very important stuff. Here are some numbers you can bag per season, in a very general sense, since they vary, zone ta zone – Caribou (two per hunter), Moose (one per two hunters), Black Bear (two per hunter), Bearded wild turkey (two per hunter), Whitetail (one per hunter) and so on. For whitetail, in order to make life interesting, they have lucky draws and if you win, you can have an extra whitetail or say, in a doe-only season, you are allowed ta bag a buck too, over and above the doe that you are already eligible for.

There are bag limits even in the ‘other small game’ category. For partridge, it is 5 per day and you mustn’t be caught in possession of more than 15 at any given time, even in your basement freezer back home. Likewise, for ptarmigan it is 10 and 30 respectively and so on.

Check out season dates as they depend upon the zone you are going ta hunt in. Just as a rough ball park, moose season is September->October, whitetail : September->November, black bear : May->June and September->October, bearded wild turkey : April->May and so on. The longest season is for caribou : August->October and then December->January. The extended season is partly because no one wants to hunt them for meat (the taste sucks) and also because the -50℃ Canadian Tundra, where you usually find caribou herds, is too hostile an environment to enjoy a hunt in.

————————

Always be aware of when the season has ended in your zone. Get caught post-season with a dead whitetail in the back of your pick-up truck and you are looking at a serious fine, north of five grand, plus the confiscation of your hunting permit and gun. And if you are dumb enough to be sitting having a beer inside your truck or a skidoo or ATV, celebrating your kill when the rangers catch you, your vehicle is gone too.

All confiscations are permanent and confiscated stuff are auctioned off in public auctions.

Canadian forest rangers are very different from their counterparts in my country of birth, India, where a twenty rupee bill will allow you to go on a massacre and swagger around like Roy Rogers and no one will bat an eyelid. If you’re a rich movie star in India, they might harass you a bit, slap a case on you just to soften you up for the eventual palm greasing and then let you walk away. Hey, the ranger in India will even recommend for you a taxidermist, who just happens to be his bro-in-law.

———————————-

Okay, so now you really are ready ta rock and roll. If you’re going after large game, don’t begin with black bear or moose – things can get nasty with those. So start with the harmless whitetail.

Well before the season begins, find yourself a good spot, preferably a clearing in a copse of trees. I did and it was easy. I fixed six SpyPoint Castorama internet-ready infra-red motion sensing cameras at various points on Cedric’s land. I found that the camera north of the Parc Omega Reserve clicked the maximum shots of whitetail and chose that one.

That weekend, still two weeks ahead of season, I took my tree-stand in my F150 and had Cedric help me erect it at that spot, taking care to remain downwind of the little clearing where the SpyPoint had caught whitetail milling around. The whitetail must have watched me setting up the tree stand but whitetail are whitetail – dumb as ever.

A tree-stand is a camouflaged perch, around fifteen feet up on a tree and it looks like a chair with armrests and a bar in front to rest your rifle for the shot. The camouflage, while essential, isn’t enough. Whitetail have a strong sense of smell. Your camouflage might fool ‘em, but your smell won’t. They can smell you from a hundred yards and if they do, you might as well pack up and go home.

Besides a strong sense of smell, whitetail also have a very keen eyesight that can detect motion easily. So, before you climb up onto the tree stand, you have ta make sure you won’t need ta go pee or poop or eat/drink or anything else, because you have ta remain stock-still for hours at a stretch, if you want a kill.

And for heaven’s sake, make damn sure the stand is sturdy and can take your weight. A hunter pal of Cedric’s is now a paraplegic, after crashing to the ground when his tree stand came loose. (pic courtesy:sportsmanguide.com)

——————————————–

So, now you have your tree stand ready, at a carefully chosen location that you know to be thick with whitetail. Here’s what I do just before the actual hunt. Still two weeks from season, I drive down to Cedric’s and launch a ‘hearts and minds’ exercise – the lure.

In the middle of the clearing where I had erected my tree stand, I leave a large lump of salt on top of a tree stump for the whitetail ta lick on and they love licking salt.

Before the season is done, I’ll have burned through 300lbs of salt.

Next, I pay 60 bucks for eight plus eight 25-lb sacks of apples and carrots I leave a pile here and a pile there, on every one of those pre-season days. My trips to Cedric’s farm are essential. I replace the SpyPoint batteries and leave fresh piles of apples and carrots behind. Soon the SpyPoint begins going off feverishly every ten minutes and that spot where I fixed my tree stand starts looking like New Delhi’s Connaught Place in rush hour. Whitetail of all sizes converge on the clearing ta gorge on all them yummy apples. Variety is the spice of life, so I get a few bags of carrots too, just for a change of taste. I pamper them.

Important – those fifteen days, I come and go in broad daylight and even if I cannot actually see them when I enter the clearing, I know they are there, just outside my line of sight. I let ‘em see me and grow accustomed to the sight of me entering the clearing every day and leaving all that yummy stuff out for them. They are so dumb they think I’m Santa.

Here, I’d like ta qualify my statement – the females are the dumb ones. They get trusting and friendly real fast. Last fall, after I had been laying the piles of apples for a few days, one just walked up to me while I was arranging a pile of carrots and began merrily chomping on them just a few feet away. I held out a carrot in my hand and she unhesitatingly came over, sniffed at the carrot for a micro-second, before pulling it out of my hand with her teeth. As she came real close, I had the chance to gaze into those mesmerizingly serene, guileless and trusting doe eyes. It wasn’t season yet and so I couldn’t touch her, but I’m not sure if I would be able ta, even if it was season.

Hunting females is a cinch, but a word of caution here – we are all emotional beings, we humans. If you want ta be a hunter, don’t let your prey get too friendly and pull at your heart strings. You’ll find it impossible to put a bullet in her. Remember what you’re there for – to kill her and shrink-wrap and freeze her in little chunks in your basement freezer and BBQ her through the year over beer. You’re not here ta cuddle her.

The males are another thing. Whitetail bucks are mean and suspicious and won’t venture into the clearing unless they are absolutely sure you aren’t around. Or unless they are horny and think they’ll find a doe there.

————————————

Whitetail hunting season coincides with whitetail mating season, which makes it a lot easier ta lure them. I only use lures as a fall-back, if the season is about ta get over and I still haven’t got my whitetail.

There are two kinds of lures I have zeroed in on. Foremost is the call – if you can imitate the sound of a doe in heat, trust me, any bucks within a mile will come charging, their richards long and distended. Here’s what I did – I checked out hunting call apps and found some interesting ones in the ITunes app store. I chose the IHunt app since it sounded the most natural to me. It has the calls of every kind of wildlife on the planet. Next, I got myself a WiFi-ready speaker with a tiny 20W amp. I fixed the speaker in a wedge formed by two tree trunks at the edge of the clearing and I was ready ta roll.

If the IHunt app doesn’t fool a whitetail, I go to Phase:2 – doe’s pee. Yeah, the urine of a doe in heat. You get it in any hunting store and the best I found is a brand named just that – Doe in heat. It comes in a tiny $15 bottle and it is real doe’s pee. I sprinkle a few drops on a rag and tie the rag to a low slung branch as close to my tree stand as possible. Doe’s pee has a very pungent stench and if I’m lucky with the wind direction, it won’t be long before a horny buck pays a reccy visit.

————————————-

The first time I set eyes on Zorba was just after I had fixed the SpyPoint cameras this August, with still two weeks to go for the season ta begin. Zorba was magnificent, his ten-point antlers rising above his head majestically, like a crown. During those fifteen days, as I watched him come and go, he usually appeared well after midnight. He came and went with heavy deliberate steps and when he entered the clearing, the first thing he did was ta raise his head and sniff at the air imperiously. Then he made his way toward the apple piles and the does and lesser bucks kinda scattered and let him have his fill first.

I named him Zorba because he seemed ta have that gruff, rugged Anthony Quinn persona. One time, he ambled right up to the camera and sitting in my basement 50kms away, I watched as he raised his nostrils ta sniff at it. I had fixed the SpyPoint just above his reach, on a sturdy branch and after a moment of sniffing he lost interest and began sniffing the butts of the does who had gathered there, sending them scurrying this way and that, in blushing embarrassment.

In two weeks, Zorba wasn’t going ta stop at just sniffing butts – he would be looking to put his richard in some serious pussy. That is when I’d get him……

—————————————-

You want ta know what happened to Zorba, don’t you? So, watch this space for Part-6.

“Hunting is not a sport. A sport is when both sides know it is just a game.”

– Jim Corbett (1875-1955) British hunter, tracker, author of ‘Man-eaters of Kumaon‘

If you want ta start hunting like a pro, listen very carefully….

Here is how it goes down here in Canada. First, you get yourself a hunting license . It is around a hundred bucks (or like any American will say, a Benjamin); you attend a one-day course on hunting regulations and firearms safety and then at the end of the day, you have to pass a written test on everything you learned.

But don’t worry, you’ll pass – the system is rigged to see that you pass. The “Departement du Faune et Parcs” of Quebec needs your membership for its financial survival and the gun manufacturers need your order.

The classroom and the test are a farcical pantomime. It’s like when a company hires its external auditors who sign a contract to audit the very same company that is paying them to audit their books. In the end of the audit, the auditor certifies that the client’s books are up and up and there has been no embezzlement or any other malfeasance during the fiscal year.

Same thing ………… a rigged system, making laws to break laws. 

When I settled in the west there was one thing I learnt very quickly – it is not that the system in the west is less corrupt and more law abiding than in developing nations like India, my country of birth. The law in the west is stretched to bring inside its umbrella of legality all those things that other nations would consider illegal.

One glaring example is the US President, who has been positioned safely ensconced far above the law, by the American legal system. The American Pres cannot be prosecuted for any reason whatsoever, a fact amply proven through a recent Supreme Court order in a series of open and shut cases against Donald Trump that would have sent an ordinary American to jail faster than the speed of light. Trump can commit fraud, embezzle, lie, deceive and cheat – stuff that he has already shown ample propensity for – and it’s all legal.

Likewise, you want to buy a gun in Canada? Just go through a process that is in fact nothing more than a sham and a Canadian hunting licence – a piece of plastic that looks like a debit card – will arrive in the mail within 10 days. It is permanent and you don’t ever have to renew it, unless you turn out to be a schmuck and break the hunting laws down the road.

Next, armed with your hunting permit, you apply for a ‘Firearms Possession Licence’, renewable every five years. A week later another card will arrive, this one with your mugshot on it, that says that henceforth you are permitted to buy, carry and sell your ‘non-restricted’ firearm.

A non-restricted firearm can either be a single shot shotgun or a rifle – bolt action, pump action, breech loading, whatever, but single shot, ie: you have to manually reload after every shot. If you are as young as 12, for you to possess and fire a non-restricted firearm, Canadian law needs just the identity and email ID of your parent or legal guardian.

Then there’s the ‘restricted’ category of firearms – long barreled, heavy caliber handguns and semi-automatic rifles that you can keep on firing one shot at a time, fresh rounds falling into the chamber automatically one after the other every time you pull the trigger, until the magazine runs dry.

Most first-time licence holders don’t get to have a restricted firearm permit off the bat. You have to apply separately for it, with a convincing reason as to why you want to possess one. It’s easy. Sports shooting at a range can fall under the category of ‘convincing reasons’. I got my Glock that way.

There is a third category – ‘prohibited’ firearms. Those are handguns with short barrels, revolvers and pistols that can be easily concealed and are used solely for firing at close range (like killing other humans). Also under ‘prohibited’ are automatic weapons, military assault rifles and firearms that have been modified (like sawn-off shotguns).

I don’t have to tell you why these categories exist. Unlike our neighbors in the south, Canada lets you fool around with guns only for the purposes of hunting. That ‘right to bear arms and protect’ crap that you hear down south of the border is nothing but a pile of horseshit that has turned putrid, with flies buzzing around it.

In Canada, if you are driving with a gun in the car and the cops pull you over for some reason, here are the only ways that they may let you go if you….

• You have a valid and correct firearms license
• You are driving to or from a firing range or gun club.
• You are driving to or from a hunt. And have a valid hunting permit. If you are coming back from a hunt and have your kill on the back of your pickup truck, you have a ranger’s certification (token punched and attached to ear of a valid kill).

Oh yeah, it is very different down south of the border. Let me show you just how different through a real life example…….

Christmas 2014, a doting Nevada dad takes his 8-year old son to a gun show and gets him a cool 9mm Uzi Pro-1W1 assault rifle with a 36-round magazine and a hair trigger. Capable of firing 600 rounds per minute, it is a lethal weapon that is usually carried by members of special forces. That is 10 rounds every second. Try to count to ten in one second and you’ll see how fast that is.

And that is the kid’s Christmas present. 

Not even five minutes have passed since the kid removed the gift wrapper in the parking lot of the show and he is dead, flung five feet by a short burst, accidentally killed by his own little playful fingers.

The kid’s death has turned Daddy dear into a gun control advocate. Lots of good that will do to you now, moronic schmucko.

So now you have your hunting permit and your firearms permit and now you trot over to a gun retailer or outfitter.

Me, I didn’t have to buy my first gun, since I already had one – Dory, my trusty Lapua338 with the Nikon Monarch scope from my days at the SOAS. Dory is an all-in-one – lightweight, accurate at 5000 feet, the 8mm round leaping out of the muzzle at an astonishing mile per second, it can drop a half-ton moose in its tracks with one shot.

Gun owners are never satisfied with just one gun. This is as plain as Pythagoras’ theorem, trust me. You buy your first gun and you’ll get hooked. Soon you’re spending a better part of your savings on guns, rounds of different grains, scopes and accessories. My colleague, Michel, owns no less than six different scopes alone and has turned a large closet in his house into an armory. He has a Sako A7 .338, A Nosler M48 .306, a Mossberg Patriot .306 and has just struck a deal on his brother-in-law’s Ruger18004 Limited Edition.

Another thing – gun owners don’t just own guns, they brag about them – how they acquired them, what a great deal they got, how it was going to go away if they hadn’t bought it right there and then, how they got a whitetail at 500 yards with it and so on.

Me, I just have a gun rack along one wall of my walk-in closet. I too have some beauts and I’ve been carrying on and on about guns and you must be sicka listening. But before I change the topic, let me tell you how I got my Marlin. Last spring, my buddy Simon was going off on a bear hunt and said he had a place open in the package with the outfitters because his bro had dropped out. I had vacation time left.

Bears need a heavier caliber, if you don’t want them to keep coming at you even after you’ve put a round ‘em. You need something that’ll stop them dead in their tracks. I went off to Baron and got myself a Marlin .450 lever action. With bears, you got to go with lever action because with a charging black bear you won’t have the time to work your bolt.

If you’re nice to me, maybe I’ll tell you all about my first black bear kill some day. I am a right proper blabber-mouth.

Hold on a moment. There are other very interesting stuff you can go for, besides a rifle or a shotgun. In fact, for some of them, the hunting season is way longer, an advantage given to them because it is harder to get a kill with them, but that’s something I’ll come to later, if you’ll have some patience. 

Those others are bows and arrows and crossbows, but they are close-quarters stuff, accurate only within just 50-60 yards. Besides, the turn-around time (ie : reloading) takes too long and the whitetail may be gone by then. 

Never ever try to hunt black bear with crossbows or bows and arrows (though some folks do). With a maximum range of 60 yards, if you miss (the chances of which are very good), you will have no time to reload. A charging black bear covers 60 yards in three seconds. I mean, we all have to die some day, but being gradually crushed and mauled and mutilated, your skin torn of your back, your spinal chord severed with one twist, isn’t the way you’d like to go, is it?

Or if you’re up on a tree stand and a 500-lb black bear is tearing the bark out of the tree in rage, he might just starve and freeze you to death, if you’re hunting alone and don’t have cellphone coverage there. 

In hunting, there are many interesting ways to die and if you’re a schmuck, chances are that you’ll find one of ’em.

Then there are guns that fall under the category officially known as ‘Black Powder Firearm’. A black powder rifle is nothing but a modern version of the old musket that was in military use in the mid-18th to early 19th centuries, where you stuffed a measure of gunpowder in the barrel and then dropped a steel ball after it, pulled back the hammer over a sliver of flint, cocked it and fired. And then you cleaned the barrel with a long narrow brush and repeated the whole procedure for your next shot, the time lapse between shots around 3-5 minutes.

The white settlers in those days preferred those leather powder pouches to store their black powder. They gave them a sense of supremacy. And that is because in 19th century Mid-West America, the most popular powder pouch material was squaws’ tit, no kidding. Ask the Harold Robbins character, Nevada Smith, if you don’t believe me.

The black powder guns used today are nothing but a sleek fad. You can get one with a Zeiss scope and the powder comes in the form of neat little pellets, so you don’t get your hands dirty. So, instead of having to pour a measured quantity of gunpowder down the muzzle from a powder pouch like Daniel Boone used to do, you just stuff two little pellets down the muzzle and shove the round in. You fit a percussion cap (which is like a tiny explosive charge), under the hammer, cock the hammer and fire.

And spend the rest of the day cleaning your gun.

The feel of firing a black powder gun isn’t exactly the same as a regular rifle. If you are using those older black powder pellets, the gun will take two seconds to fire, after you’ve pulled the trigger. And when it does, it will look like the whole thing is exploding in your face. Flames will shoot out not only from the barrel but also right in front of your nose where the percussion cap explodes after being hit by the hammer.

So, hold steady after you’ve pulled the trigger and wait for the gun ta fire. Second, immediately after the flames, there’s an awful lot of smoke that the barrel discharges, which will block your view and leave you coughing and spluttering unless you take care ta hold your breath. If you have managed to just injure a whitetail, it’ll be gone before you are able to clearly see once again through the smoke and you won’t know which way it went. 

If you wish me to continue enlightening you, I am trying to imagine the next part, so hang on for Part-5…