I
put on my cammies and cinched the Velcro fasteners on my thermal
equilibrium vibrant soled all season hunting boots. I looked forward
to the day’s hunt with eager anticipation of the thrill of victory
when sighting a prime animal with vast left right and center balanced
rack. The supply situation was grim though. In spite of making a trek
to a grocery early last night, visitors had depleted the stock.
Nothing was left for me this morning besides a little orange juice
and a quarter-liter of Sky vodka.
This
Christmas my beau got me what I really wanted; a new .30-06 cal
barrel for my drone Tom. Tom is an A-Hawk flier with the standard
three extensible leg tripod , range finder, gps. Night vision and
100x scope. He has a good A.I. wit and sense of humor that has
brought me through some fairly difficult moments encountering the
beast on the hunt.
Tom has brought me to appreciate
the joy-sticks of couch huntin controlling the flight path stalking
to take down deer in a distant forest, a moose in the hills or even a
lone wolf skulking about trying to hide somewhere in the fringe lands
of the U.S.A.
This morning I was ready to hunt
on the Wyoming open country in quest of taking down a raging, wild
antelope that can run nearly as fast as a fossil fuel injected SUV if
the driver’s stoned on too much California gold, I ran low on
Dorritos and had to think quickly to substitute cheese puffs wand had
to put Tom on automatic to fly over the parched grassy hills looking
for those white tailed threat targets solo; just machina a animal. I
knew Tom could handle that.
I
quietly flopped down onto a specially designed hunting sofa in my
living room where I had a good view on a big screen of Tom’s live
eye-stalk vision of the field more or less a thousand miles away. Tom
found a clump of quarry browsing rare, endangered prairie grass
half-mile from a highway and with the silent electric fuel cell
powered flight engines was able to close in to a hill just a few feet
higher in elevation at a distance of fewer than 400 yards.
Hovering briefly holding three
feet over the ground I ordered Tom to extend and level his three legs
anchor them firmly in the ground with talon hooks. I have a
subroutine for accurate target sight acquisition that calculates
trajectory from all the data such as wind speed and distance,
elevation to target and so forth needed to make a good kill shot, and
it relieves me of all that brain work that makes couch-huntin less
than a visceral, primitive, manly pursuit. Thus with one of the
animal threat vectors in the cross-hairs and the .30 caliber barrel
and Teflon coated intelligent bullets putting the picture of hurt in
the present I toggled the joystick to firing position sending the
RSVP for dinner the next week to the global warmin production unit
downrange. It fell over.
I
was glad that the hunt had reached its climax. After that stressful
and challenging morning in the field I could only think of having a
beer and chips. The work never ends though so I had Tom’s friend
the rental hover drone company fly over to extract the antelope
carcass and remove it to a local butcher for packaging and shipment
to my freezer. With the long hunting day over I recalled Tom to
rail-hanger so he could return to the city by the Bay cleaned,
polished, lubed and ready for his next field adventure.
