Cheetahed

Message from Editor-in-chief Brandy Ramirez: San Angelo LIVE! wants to congratulate Kendal Hemphill for his outstanding writing accomplishments. Kendal has been a member of the Texas Outdoor Writers Association since 1997. Every year, the Association has the Excellence In Craft competition. Members send in their best published work in video, photography, and writing, and enter various categories. The entries are judged by a panel put together by Dr. Manuel Flores, at Texas A&M Kingsville. The conference last weekend was Kerrville, and Kendal won the Humor division and the Outdoor Column/Opinion division, which is the toughest one. Congratulations Kendal!

Now time to read more from Kendal Hemphill.

Astute, long-time readers may recall a story I reported on several years ago, about The Attack of the Killer Alligator. This alligator showed up over near Houston or someplace, near as I can remember. I could probably find the story and check on that, if I was inclined to do such research. I’m not.

A woman who lived in a suburban area called the local police when she discovered the alligator near a little creek behind her house. It was just lying there, not really killing anything at the moment, but the woman probably figured it was temporarily sated, after having eaten some children, or something.

By the time a cop showed up the gator had, uh, not moved. The woman showed him where it was, so he snuck up and got the drop on it, so to speak. He fired several shots into it with his service pistol, and it still didn’t move. The cop waited a while and then carefully went up and poked it with a stick, and found that it had turned into a concrete alligator.

Those of you who are smarter than mayonnaise have figured out that the alligator was concrete all along. It was unlikely to have ever killed anything, although it might have inflicted a hernia or two, since it weighed a few hundred pounds. But the whole story makes us wonder WHEN the failed Obama administration will require ALL concrete reptile statuary to be made of Styrofoam for safety.

But strange things do turn up in unexpected areas, as we all know, and I guess it’s better to be safe than sorry. It hasn’t been long since former Texas governor Rick Perry, before he was former governor Rick Perry, was jogging in an Austin park with his daughter’s dog, and was viciously attacked by a rabid mastodon.

Actually, it wasn’t rabid. It wasn’t even a mastodon, although I wouldn’t rule one of those out in Austin. There are all kinds of weird creatures living in Austin. The capitol city has become the liberal joke of the Lone Star State.

No, it was a coyote, and it seemed to have become urbanized from the way it acted. I called Rick Perry at the time, to ask him about it, and he told me it was growling and advancing toward him and the pup he had on a leash. He was afraid it was going to try to get the dog, and since it was his daughter’s puppy, he wasn’t about to let that happen. Those of you who have young daughters will understand, I’m sure.

So Rick O’Shay pulled out his little Ruger LCP .380 pistol, with a Crimson Trace laser sight attached, and popped the coyote between his beady eyes. “One shot, that’s all it took,” Rick told me. “I was surprised, but the little .380 did its job.”

Maybe Michael Law should buy a Ruger LCP .380, with a Crimson Trace laser sight, if he plans to keep hiking in the parks around Austin. I guess it depends, though, on whether Michael is a normal person. I don’t know him, so I can’t say. All I know is that Michael and his wife got a pretty good scare recently, when they took their dogs for a walk on the Turkey Creek Trail in Emma Long Metropolitan Park in Austin.

The Laws and their dogs (I guess you’d call them ‘Law Dogs’) were happily hiking along, minding their own business, when all of a sudden, without warning, they were attacked by a mountain lion. Or very nearly attacked. At least growled at. Or maybe not so much growled at as stared at. Or maybe not stared at, but, OK, what happened was they saw this mountain lion, about 20 feet off the trail. And then they ran away.

In the story in WideOpenSpaces.com, Michael is quoted as saying, “We both did a double take and slowly backed up and then ran for our lives. I think we ran 4 miles at a 7-minute pace. It was nuts.”

The Laws got hold of some Austin Parks Dept. rangers, who investigated and found the ‘mountain lion,’ right where the Laws had left it. Only it wasn’t a lion. It was a cheetah.

Well, not a REAL cheetah, in the sense of being real. It was a 3D archery target made from ethafoam to look like a cheetah. The Austin Archery Club is next to the park, and they use the area for their archery shoots sometimes.

Now, to be fair, those archery targets look pretty life-like, for good reason – they sell better that way. It’s a lot more fun to shoot at something that looks like a real animal than something that looks like a crack team of second-graders made it from paper mache in an art class taught by a football coach.

Now, to be unfair, as life-like as those targets are, they’re pretty easy to tell from real animals. Real animals move around and stuff. Targets rarely do that, unless it’s real windy.

So the next time you go to Austin, if you decide to go for a hike in a park, keep a weather eye out. You never know when you’re going to run into a mastodon. Or a governor with a pistol . . .

Kendal Hemphill is an outdoor humor columnist and public speaker who never jogs. Ever. Write to him at [email protected]