Some Observations from the Hill
by H H "Hub" Brown

I remember when my brother Bob and I were little kids he always liked to copy what older fellows were doing. At school he would hear talk of some of the farm boys hunting skunks for their hides. A black skin would bring a quarter but a skin that was mostly white wouldn't be worth much more than a dime. But I don't think he even considered that, older boys were hunting skunks so we should be. I suppose our folks thought it would be a one-time thing so they offered no objections. 

 So we would light a kerosene lantern, call the dog, which was only a cow chasing animal and had no desire to be a hunter, and we'd start out. I don't know what we would have done if he had run onto one for probably he had no idea why we were out there. We never encountered one and so a few trips like that and we quit. 

 Here some time ago I asked Bob if that ever bothered him and he said no, but I would sometimes have trouble getting to sleep.

 I assumed that nothing bothered him. Here some years ago, some of the folks told me Bob had had a nervous break down. I said I always thought Bob didn't have any nerves. 

 But he was working on heavy machine repair in I.B.M. in Endicott and the man next to him in the same kind of work was one of these three martini lunchers and he would come back to work unable to stand up straight. He would come over in front of the machine Bob was working on and sit down with his head in his hands as if he were in deep concentration about his work. This bothered Bob and was what brought on his breakdown.

 After we had moved from the farm into town, some workmen were working on the sewer lines and some hairlike roots had found a tiny hole in a joint in the pipes and filled the pipe completely. Bob was watching one day and he still liked to appear older than he was. A stray dog had adopted us and he was there with us. One of the workmen in fun asked Bob, "Is your dog a hunter?"

 Bob, wanting to sound experienced, said, "I don't know, we've got to try him out."
 Among country folks this expression was used to mean to melt the fat of a hog into lard.

 The workman said, "Well he don't look to me like you'll get much lard out of him."
 Bob had no rejoinder for this and he kept quiet for a while. 
 Bob got to be a crack shot when he few up and had a bunch of trophies he'd won on the IBM skeet team.

 I remember one weekend, another kid and Bob and I were camping on the Basket Brook in the Catskills and we decided we weren't going to eat any breakfast until we shot something. We scared out a rabbit and he ran under a pine limb lying on the ground and when we looked there was a hole under the limb.

 We started on and a grouse flew out of a pine tree right over our heads. Bob had a light gun, a 20 gauge double and he held the butt of the Ithaca against his side and one-handedly killed the bird. Soon after that we got a rabbit, went back to camp, and had breakfast. Bob told me the last time he visited Basket Brook, which used to be a beautiful little trout stream, had been badly washed and didn't look anything like it used to.