Read Online The Grasshopper Trap by Patrick F. McManus - Free Book Online Page B

limited space of a gun cabinet, breed and produce offspring. Just last summer I discovered a brand-new little Browning over/under 20-gauge shotgun in my gun cabinet. It was nestled right in between a 12-gauge Browning automatic and a 16-gauge Browning pump. I had no problem guessing what had happened. The gestation period of a new gun is exactly six months. I counted backward to the Christmas holidays, when the gun cabinet had been left unsupervised for a few days. Those rascals! No doubt they gave the Winchesters, Remingtons, and Marlins some ideas of their own. I thought about writing the Browning people to complain, but instead I’m raising the little 20-gauge just as if it were one of my own. The little devil has already gobbled up a case of shells, too.
    Here’s another example of outdoor phenomena that wives can’t understand. A while back I told Bun I needed another boat. She agreed to listen calmly to my reasonable explanation,
after I had pried her fingers from around my trachea.
    â€œIt’s this way,” I explained. “I have the big boat, right? Right. Then there’s the rubber boat, which I couldn’t do without. Sure, I have the two canoes, but I keep one only out of sentimental attachment. The other one is the work canoe. Of course, there’s the duck boat. The rowboat? That’s a toy for the kids. Now what I need is a simple little fishing boat—nothing fancy—that I can putter about the lakes in. Is that too much to ask? Here I work my fingers to the bones day after day trying to keep us afloat—uh, inapt metaphor there—financially secure, I meant to say, and you raise a fuss over my wanting a little ol’ fishing boat.”
    â€œOh, all right,” Bun said. “I guess you can have a little ol’ fishing boat if you want it. I do hope it comes with decent oarlocks. I hate the ones on the rowboat.”
    Oarlocks?
    A few days later I brought the new boat home. When I showed it to Bun, she ran back into the house to climb a few walls. (We have one of those new phones where by pushing single buttons you can dial the police, the fire department, or the divorce lawyer.)
    Eventually I managed to get her settled down long enough to explain the phenomenon to her. “Look,” I said patiently, “this sort of thing happens to an outdoorsman all the time. He goes down to the marina to buy a little ol’ fishing boat and finds about what he’s looking for, a twelve-foot aluminum job with a little fifteen-horse kicker for power. So he dickers with the salesman a bit and they finally work out a deal. He starts to haul the boat home, but discovers it’s grown to sixteen feet while he was dickering with the salesman. By the time he’s three blocks from the marina, the boat’s bigger
than his car. He has to speed all the way home before the boat grows so big he can’t tow it. That’s nearly what happened here.”
    â€œWill it get any bigger?” Bun asked, gnawing a young elm by the porch.
    â€œNope, that’s it. Twenty feet and three tons, with just enough room for two bass fishermen. It’s so fast it’s got an altimeter in it instead of a depth-finder.”
    â€œWell, if it makes you this happy, I suppose it’s worth it,” Bun said. “You are happy, aren’t you?”
    â€œOh, sure. But I still need a little ol’ fishing boat. Maybe I can pick one up …”
    Have you ever had anyone try to run you through with a gnawed-off elm? No, I suppose not.
    We now come to the problem of metamorphosis. (No, dummy, you can’t catch it from a handful of leaves.) Metamorphosis refers to the transformation of a tadpole into a frog, a caterpillar into a butterfly, that sort of thing. You don’t hear much about it because nobody can pronounce “metamorphosis.” Even though you don’t hear much about metamorphosis, there’s a lot of it around, especially at our