Hunting with the Curmudgeon: A Prequel. Or, Strange Days, Here We Come

[Note: This is Dr. Mingo talking. This post was written entirely by myself and not A.C. Since I forgot the password to post it myself, I had A.C.’s editor (his dog) copy and paste word for word. If the WordPress server says this post was written by A.C. it’s fake news!]

I take a little artistic license here in writing this but honestly the description is not far off from true events.  I have honestly never seen before or could have imagined the events described herein.

Hunting with the Curmudgeon is an experience. On our first hunt many years ago, we were in the Rocky Mountains to hunt Elk and Mule Deer.  It was a colder than normal winter and we opted to rent a small cabin near our hunting unit.  The first morning, at the butt crack of dawn, my alarm goes off.  My heart instantly started pounding and the blood was coursing through my body.  The excitement of the first morning of opening day was upon us.  I jumped out bed, hit the deck and looked over to where AC was sleeping.

“AC.  Let’s go.  The sun’ll be in a up in a couple hours.  We got to get out in the field!”

“Eeoooowwmaaathhhppt!” is all I heard.

Over the next five minutes I heard a string of grunts, grumbles, and other sounds that surely have meaning but predate language.  These noises slowly built in to a crescendo spewing forth from the mass of bed linens that hid the Curmudgeon.  Without warning it jumped out of bed and landed on its feet.  Butt naked I might add. (Authors Note:  I didn’t get that piece of information about the Curmudgeons choice of nocturnal wardrobe until…well…it was too late. I think it is part of his hunting ritual.) It just stood, there a primate in all its glory or as Charlton Heston put it, a “Goddamn Dirty Ape!”  It uttered one word, loud enough to be heard across camp.

“KAAAAAWWWW—FFFEEEEEEEE!!!!”

Jesus Christ! Standing there was a deranged Ben Gunn with a seriously bad attitude screaming “Coffee”.  I immediately grabbed my backpack, rushed outside, and with the skill of a combat medic under fire, swiftly assembled my camp cook stove, and perched the coffee pot on the burner in record time.  Muffled screams came forth from the cabin for the next five minutes repeating that all too familiar word.

While the coffee pot perked away, this gave me some time to hypothesize what may be going on inside the head of AC and what biochemical reactions were taking place.  I imagine it is something like this.  I have found that AC mostly runs on coffee, more specifically caffeine which explains his penchant for Death Wish Coffee.  Throughout the day the AC maintains a BCC (blood caffeine content) of about 0.15.  This is normal operating level.  In the evening the BCC drops to about 0.08. When this happens and dependent the presence of high end bourbon, it enters sleep mode. In the morning when the BCC drops too low, say about 0.03 to 0.05, two rogue neurons fire off deep within the reptile brain.  These binary switches allow a speech center to formulate one and only one, 2-syllable word.  Can you guess what that word is?

I rushed inside and handed AC a cup of the blackest night.  He went at his first cup about the way my dog eats food.  It doesn’t matter if the coffee burns his tongue.  Who cares?  The nerves in his tongue haven’t even turned on yet.  AC with his first cup of the day coffee is like Gollum crouching in the corner of the room clutching his “Precious.”

To paint a more metaphorical picture of AC’s relationship with coffee, I think Deatklok says it best: