Slim Randles

You get them flu shots ever’ fall? I try not to, but Doc has this year nurse that’s not only stouter’n a streetsweeper, but fleet of foot as well. This year’s Windy, a-course. So, yeah, I prit-nearly allus get one a-them shots each fall. But I been workin’ on a way to either speed me…

Have you been counting the minutes until election day when your neighbors can remove all those campaign signs from their lawns for another two years? Yes, these are mid-term elections, just as serious as the presidential election yet to come two years from now, but not as interesting. Why not? Because the great candidate Vermin…

It’s the music of the Western mountains, and this is the only time we get to hear it. It has a hollow sound, as though a flute were a foot thick and 12-feet long, and it is the lonely call of the bull elk. It starts in early September and by October becomes more of…

Hi there, Pard. Yep, it’s me, Alphonse Wilson, the one they call Windy. But this ain’t pertickler a good day for ol’ Windy. Fact-a-matter is, if I was to study how to do that depression stuff? This’d be a good day to start. Ya see, it’s what’s called an annual-versary of a sad time fer…

Packing people into the back country doesn’t sound really exciting, I know. And if it gets exciting, it’s undoubtedly because something went wrong. But we did have occasional chuckles during those eight summers. I stopped off at the backcountry ranger’s tent near Bullfrog Lake, in Kings Canyon National Park. He mostly checked fire permits and…

Looking around at all the yard signs and hearing politicians tell us on television what a lying crook their competition is, I have to admit I miss Guv Reeve. Guv had a real first name, but I sure don’t recall it now, because this was back in the 1960s and 1970s in the high desert…

“You know it used to was even hotter than it is right now, don’t you?” Windy looked up from his lunch. Oh boy, professorial mood. We’re gonna get it. “I used ta pack mules, a-course. Well, I packed ‘em ‘til the accident, anyway.” “Accident, Windy?” Dang it, Dud, you’ve done it now. “Nobody can say…

The Bahdziewicz clan trooped into the Mule Barn for lunch the other day, happily and noisily as only eight Americans totally in love with summer can do. The patriarch of the clan, Abraham Lincoln Bahdziewicz, led the way to a large round table and seated his wife, Sally, before pointing to which chairs the kids…

Doc didn’t expect any patients before 10 o’clock this morning, so he was up and coffee’d and gone by 6:30. Lewis Creek. The Lunker’s hole on Lewis Creek. The Lunker is a huge rainbow trout that everyone knows about and no one has caught. So far he has resisted flies, worms, salmon eggs, spinners, and…