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So last night was the final class of our required biannual emergency first responder refresher course.  These days I am privileged to be answering calls with the Emergicare division of our local Township Fire Department, but the only refresher that fit my schedule was the one up in New Auburn, with my old Population 485 crew.  So it’s been fun.  A goofball reunion of sorts.

My good friend, neighbor, and butcher, Bob the One-Eyed Beagle was in fine form last night.  He informed me that yesterday someone came by the meat market with a bunch of books and asked him to sign each one of’em.  He got a big kick out of that.  Then he told the story of how he hauled an old defunct TV to the recycling center the other day.  He says he stopped at the cafe and one of the regulars asked him why he had a TV in the back of his pickup.  “I told him I was trying to get the Outdoor Channel!” said Beagle.

In the process of researching the history of my hometown (New Auburn, Wisconsin) (now Population: 562) (urban sprawl!) for the book Population 485, I discovered that the town’s founder David Cartwright had written a bestselling book in 1875.  I tracked down an actual copy of the book, but it took some doing.  This morning a reader sent me a Tweet with a link showing me that along with everything else in the world the book has now been scanned into Google and you can read it here.

Here’s a portion of how I described the book in Population 485:

I have never seen any photographs of Cartwright, but the title page of Western Wild Animals is faced by an engraving tagged with the caption, “David’s Return to Camp.”  He wears a white beard and a flat cap, and he is striding down a wooded trail, a rifle in his right hand and a dead deer balanced over his left shoulder.  In short, he looks like a forbidding version of the Quaker Oats man.  A selection from the preface seems a continuation of the furrow in his brow:

He is…not a professional book maker, and he knows that it is only by practice that there comes any great degree of perfection in any art or trade.  What he gives you, he puts upon the basis of an experience of forty years, and gives it with that assurance that he believes should come of practical knowledge, as opposed to any hypothetical and visionary trash.

No dancing ‘round the campfire with patchouli and rain sticks, then.  All well and good.  But here’s where my ears really pricked:

Since the author of this book claims for himself an incompetency to the task of putting it into shape, and the more exact wording of its pages, and has placed that part of the work into the hands of another, it is due to him to say that…

Just a cotton-pickin’ minute.  Back to the title page.  Western Wild Animals, etc, and etc.  By David W. Cartwright.  In much smaller print: Written by Mary F. Bailey.  Turns out David W. had a ghostwriter.

Thanks to nanaze for the note.

Cats are totally into my books…as sleep aids.

This is Thistle:

This is Boggs:

Thanks to their owners for sending these photos.

I can see it from my hotel window.  Can’t see all of it, or a name on it.  But it’s one of ours.  Flying out here to Virginia, especially during the layover in St. Louis, I was surrounded by servicepeople in cammies.  A corporeal reminder of what others give while we are off shopping, as it were.

Will be shooting the breeze with paramedics, EMTs, first responders and firefighters tonight.  Home, sweet home, no matter where yer at.  Tip of the cap to my NAAFD crew, and to the Emergicare bunch.  Home soon, pager back on.