Country Misadventures: Country Misadventures

By Tracy Heath

Now including the BONUS story, "A Redneck Romance"!

Now enjoy more comical tales in this combination set of Tracy Heath’s first two books, Bum Steer and Bedoggled.

Tracy Heath recounts some of her most treasured and entertaining stories from her childhood in the Eastern Oregon desert. You will be taken to a pleasant wasteland where pheasants stroll through the neighborhood, and sagebrush and barbed wire fences are silhouetted in the vibrant, setting sun.

She tells about being bullied by a steer:
“Since he wasn't a pet we promptly named him 'Reddy.' It had a nice ring to it and had next to nothing to do with the fact that his eyes glowed red.”

Experience the face-palm moments of becoming a dog owner:
“Considering his klutzy habits and ill-mannered behavior, [Bowser’s] knowledge of the indoors was limited. But his understanding of life in general was lacking, so we should have seen something coming.”

And get ready for hard-core fishing, folks, because fishing’s not for wimps:
“Dripping piteously, the fishers reached the foot of the trail and took a minute to gaze up the steep, switchbacked path, the shadows already growing long around them. Crying seemed a viable option….”

Get a kick out of these escapades and several other comical stories in Tracy’s take on country life. You will find the stories intriguing and original. As you chuckle your way through them, these country anecdotes may bring back a few humorous memories from your own childhood.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tracy Heath
• Release date: Feb 18, 2013
• ISBN: 9781497793453

Book preview

Bum Steer

Introduction

Chapter One – Chickens Wanted—Dead or Alive

Chapter Two – Bum Steer

Chapter Three – Up and Down Again—Country Style

Chapter Four – The Give and Take of Cats

Chapter Five – Taking the Joy out of the Ride

Bedoggled

Introduction

Chapter One – Bedoggled

Chapter Two – Hook, Line, and Shiver

Chapter Three – Dusk on the Homestead

Chapter Four – Out of Left Field

Chapter Five – Terrors of the East

Bonus Story

A Redneck Romance

Bum Steer

Introduction

Anyone who has ever grown up has a few tales to tell. For me, it's just been in the recent months that I started reliving some of my good old country days. Now that I reside in the city and have small fry of my own, vivid childhood memories have been flooding my mind. As I've waded through the memory banks, several unique escapades floated to the top. The result is this collection of humorous happenings from my youth.

Have you ever seen a cat that sits like a human? Or had a steer run you out of the pasture and almost through the barbed wire fence? What about unusual automobile incidents? You might have some memories of your first time driving a vehicle. Well, so do I. And at ten years of age, it didn't turn out pretty.

All of the stories are based on fact. I might have taken a little creative license here and there but not enough to ruin the raw humor of my formative years. These anecdotes will provide you with a peep into the life of a young country girl as she lived through the quirks and perks of growing up in the Eastern Oregon desert.

Chickens Wanted—Dead or Alive

I grew up on what I call a farmlette. We owned 1.2 acres in Eastern Oregon where grass and greenery were intrusions on the desert. Jackrabbits and pheasants strolled through the neighborhood, and it wasn't uncommon for our dogs to come home tinged by a bit of skunk. And by a bit I mean a good dousing.

Our acreage couldn't be called a real farm since we rarely had more than one of any species. Sure crazy cows, lame horses, goofy dogs and cats meandered on and off our property, but at any given time our land was still a farmlette.

A farm has to be overrun with animals to qualify for farmship. The closest we ever got was the fateful day we decided to get chickens. I must clarify. I begged and pleaded and promised exorbitant amounts of slave work to my parents if only they would let us have chickens. Chickens! Those cute little clumps of feathers! That's what our dreary lives were missing.

We had a friend who owned a few chickens and let them feed off the land. Each night they'd line up pretty-as-you-please in front of the hen house, hand her an egg apiece, and tuck themselves in for the night. One was even trained to bar the door and hang the Do Not Disturb sign. These were what I called chickens. And I figured we needed some.

Not being pushovers, my parents carefully weighed the potential cost, maintenance, and hassle of becoming chicken owners and figured if a couple of my brothers and I divvied up the responsibility it could work. So we placed an order with the local feed store for assorted chicks. First wrong move—well, besides the fact of entertaining this whole chicken farming idea in the first place. It wasn't until quite a while later that we learned the true meaning of assorted.

Uncontainable excitement took over the day we got the call that our chicks were in. My brothers, Ken and Steve, and I each picked our own breed: Barred Plymouth Rocks, Araucanas, and Australorps, respectively. Rick, being the eldest, had wisely disowned the chicken business and probably all of its associates, too.

Our first lesson in chicken behavior swooped down on us almost as soon as we got the chicks home. We had settled the thirty little angels in their small, homey pen in none other than our dining room. We three business partners were overwrought with glee. The pleasant peeping reverberated through the house, rising and falling with the miniscule emotions of the wee birds.

Peep, peep, peeeeep, ROAR!

That last emission caused us all to lock eyes, concern passing between us. We rushed over to the pen to find a riot. The two-day-old chicks were already forming gangs! These little puff balls weren't the sweet saints we thought them to be but instead were cannibalistic evolutionists. One glance into the cage revealed survival of the fittest at its worst. One chick apparently had an injured toe and the rest of the flock decided to do away with it—the toe, the foot, the whole bird. Feeling rather sick to our stomachs, we watched as Mom fended off the felons and rescued the teeny victim. She relocated him in a separate box all to himself where he chirped and wailed day and night. Apparently in his mind, even being the lowliest of the pecking order was better than being alone. But there he remained until we moved the growing flock to the outdoors.

I use the terms he and him not because I knew it was a male, but because, looking back, I now know that there was an almost 77 percent chance he was a he. Of those thirty assorted chicks we ordered, twenty-three of them turned out to be roosters—cocky, stupid roosters. Can you imagine being woken up in the morning by twenty-three roosters? Adolescent cocks are the worst. Humans aren't the only ones who go through the voice cracking stage. Each rooster would yodel out a crow, get choked up somewhere in the middle, wheeze a few times, and try again. There was no sleeping through such racket. In fact, the apprehension of being awakened in such a fashion caused many wee hour nightmares.

But gradually, as time wore on and our nerves wound down, we began to appreciate the minority. The hens were turning out beautifully. They were the chickens I had been hoping for. Yes, maybe a little dirtier, uglier, and stupider than I anticipated, but at least they weren't bordering on raving madness like the roosters. Well, at least six of them weren't.

There was that one hen. She seemed to have experienced pre-hatching trauma. Or maybe she was the unfortunate my toe looks like a mealworm so let's everyone attack it magnet. Not sure. But she appeared to own only half a pea-brain.

Her unusual behavior popped up around the time we were able to distinguish between the males and females. She also happened to be Steve's chicken which made everything even more interesting. Steve, being four at the time, found all the antics of our pets very comical.

This particular hen of his proved to be the most entertaining of them all. The other hens strolled about in clumsy, jerky fashion but somehow pulled off the effect of awkward daintiness. This hen strutted. Swaggered. There were times we even thought she was break dancing. Usually it turned out to be that she'd just tipped over and was flailing to get back up.

Her crowning attribute, though, was her vocals. She'd hitch to a halt mid-strut. Mechanically, her neck would retract, her rear end would sink to the ground, her feathered body would inflate as she sucked in a humongous breath of air. Like a jack-in-the-box, she'd go off unexpectedly, leaping into the air, bellowing, Cockadoodledooooo!

Steve would always point at her and shout, Look at my funny rooster!

Mom would gently say, No, honey, it's not a....well, it's a....it is pretty funny, isn't it?

The straw that broke this chicken farmer's back though was the rooster that had it out for me. He was one of Ken's chickens and was quite a magnificent creature in all his Barred-Plymouth-Rock, black-and-white beauty. Most of the other cocks had already been turned into crock pot feasts which left him as the top dog in the poultry department.

We had taken to letting the chickens out to wander in the yard periodically. This didn't last long since the flower beds suffered major destruction, and the grass was always exploding with landmines. But during one of these roaming times, this head honcho rooster happened to notice a little toy watch I was carrying around. The watch band was shiny and caught a glint of sunlight. The rooster stopped dead in his tracks, completely absorbed in trying to figure out what phenomenon he'd just witnessed. Before I'd even really comprehended what was going on, he squawked and streaked over to me, barreling into my leg. I, needless to say, screeched and bolted. He followed. The game was on, and for me it was a losing battle.

From then on, every time it was my turn to feed the chickens, I carried a club. Not that I ever actually bludgeoned the rooster, but being armed made me feel like I had a radius of protection. What a joke. That rooster didn't care two clucks about my stick. As soon as I rounded the corner of our house and came into view of the chicken yard, he took a flying leap and bashed himself into the chicken wire, just itching to get his grubby little spurs on my person.

Sometimes it took me a full half an hour to work up