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Date Posted: 23:19:40 06/03/02 Mon
Author: Papa
Subject: That is absolutely true.
In reply to: Slapdip Thwang 's message, "Here is one short massive from Island of Malodora (littlebit southeast of Guadalcanal)" on 01:25:36 06/02/02 Sun

Thwang, those crabs remind me of the camel flies in Spain. Those big flat flies would get beneath your shirt and scuttle, flat and uncrushable, until they found a tender place to bite. I'll tell you how it was in Spain then.

In the morning we would go into the countryside to look at the bulls. The air was still cool and dew had laid the dust of the roads, the white Spanish dust which by midafternoon would hang in the air thick enough to choke an ox and bring him to his knees. But the camel flies did not get up early. The flies slept late in their tiny fly bedrooms in the manure piles.

The ranchos where they raised the fighting bulls were well outside town, up in the rolling country to the north where the mountains started rising from the plateau. Limestone outcrops broke the smooth sloping hillsides and the bulls grew strong from charging the limestone boulders, and also the stunted oaks that grew on in the ravines. The bulls were not smart. They charged the boulders and the trees and the crows and the camel flies, and sometimes they charged at nothing a man could see. But those bulls had heart. They were tough. They were muy fuerzo.

"Mira," the foreman would say as a bull lowered his horns and charged a butterfly. "Mira! Muy fuerzo! Ay, que tonto!" He would make a gesture like a man peeling a banana. "Muy fuerzo!" Meanwhile the bull, having missed the butterfly, would stagger off in a testosterone-induced daze to find something else to charge.

The foreman had once been a great picador until the day he mounted his horse from the wrong side and it kicked him headfirst through a board fence. Now his eyes rolled sideways as he talked, and his left shoulder was six inches higher than his right. When he walked the wooden joints in his knee clacked and squeaked. Many bull-fighters came to visit him at the rancho. They would travel a long ways to visit the famous picador and ask his opinion of this or that bull.

"Ay, muy fuerzo!" the foreman would say. "Que tonto!" And he would make the gesture of a man peeling a banana while his eyes rolled sideways in his head.

The fighters always agreed: "Sí, muy tonto!" He was much to famous to disagree with although no one remembered his name.

By noon the camel flies had kicked off their blankets and come out looking for breakfast. The flies had certain preferences which one could figure out through direct observation. First the flies went for any pale-skinned city dweller in sight. If such tender fare was unavailable or too well protected, they tried for a good-quality Spaniard of the countryside, and failing that, they went for a peasant. Only in direst need would the camel flies assault a horse, an ox, or a bull. The camel flies bit ferociously, and many children bled to death each year from camel fly bites. An infant left unprotected outside would be attacked and sucked dry in a matter of minutes.

So in the afternoon we would go up into the high mountains to escape the dreaded camel flies. There was good shooting on the high ridges in those days. We would hire a man from one of the villages to guide us. "Conejos?" he would ask in amazement. "You wants to choot, eh, rabbits?" No one else ever went to these mountains for the shooting. Everyone wanted to go after ibex or bear in the Pyrenees.

"Yes," we would assure him. "Rabbits. Where are the big rabbits, the ones with the trophy ears? Where are the 14-inchers?"

"QUE! You are maricón!" he would scream in disgust. But if we paid him plenty of American dollars he would take us into the high meadows where we always had fine shooting. You had to watch those rabbits, though. If you wounded one and it got into the high grass things could get dicey. Some of the big buck rabbits had two-inch incisors and could bite right through a denim shirt.

After the shooting we would sit under a pine tree and drink several bottles of the thick red Spanish wine and eat the fat Spanish onions and the dark bread we bought from the lady with the goiter. Sometimes after the third or fourth bottle we would try shooting at clouds or butterflies or the Spanish guide's hat. It was hard to tell when you hit a cloud. They did not show bullet holes well. And often the Spanish guide would assault us with a pine branch if we shot his hat. It was best to shoot butterflies. You seldom had any trouble with wounded ones. With the butterflies it was pretty much all or nothing.

Later, after the wine was gone and we could walk passably well again, we would drive back down the winding dirt road, and sometimes off the winding dirt road and through fields and various obstacles, until we were back in town. The camel flies would all be back in their tiny camel fly bedrooms reading magazines about exotic flesh or the latest insect novels. We staggered up the steep stairs to our hotel rooms and did likewise.

That was before the war. After the war no one wanted to chance the Fascists or the camel flies. The camel flies had won.

I hope someone can write Mr. Thwang a story that answers his question better than this one. I guess camel flies do not have as much in common with crabs as I thought.

Gott mit Uns
Papa

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