Gnarly Dan goes trapping with Scurvy Al, the conclusion

He didn’t have to wait long. Scurvy Al greeted each loud SNAP with a quiet howl of delight as he pounced on the trap and its catch. The trap creaked as it was reset; however, an occasional snap followed by a pained cry was muttered as the trap tripped prematurely on Scurvy’s finger. If he had struck a match to better see his grisly work, a follow-up howl of pain could often be heard as the match burned Al’s fingers as it was going out! This scenario continued throughout the night as the supply of mice from underneath the cabin seemed endless!

With each new catch, Scurvy Al retreated to the table to line up the victims in a neat row, going from smallest to largest. As the take grew, the carcasses had to be rearranged to maintain the progression in size. In between snaps, Scurvy would add wood to the stove as needed, just to be sure the mice kept coming and to forestall Gnarly possibly awakening from cooling temperatures in the cabin.

As the first light of the false dawn began filtering in through the small window, Gnarly Dan sat up bleary-eyed and slid to the floor. A snap was heard as a mouse trap caught Gnarly on his big toe, followed by a surprised cry of pain. This immediately brought Gnarly to full alert, and he saw Scurvy sitting in the center of the floor in his long johns holding one final victim. Seeing Gnarly Dan awake, Scurvy maniacally announced, “I got 28! Never dreamed trappin’ was so much fun!”

After surveying the rows of carcasses on the table and seeing the still beaming, obviously proud Scurvy Al, Gnarly Dan had occasion to wonder about the sanity of his new-found trapping partner, with whom he was about to spend a month in an isolated cabin, but he wisely kept his thoughts to himself.

Scurvy Al loudly announced, “This is livin!’” and proceeded to crawl into his bunk for some badly needed sleep.

As I stated in the first installment of this story, I began writing the Gnarly Dan series as a break (read: stress reliever) during Board of Fisheries meetings I attended as a board member. I wrote a series of stories, loosely based on actual situations I had heard about from a few people. For instance, one story tells how Gnarly Dan went halibut fishing out of Homer with his resulting adventures with outboard propellors, shooting fish, and shallow water.

A gentleman from California was a regular participant at several of these board meetings as a representative from a sports fishing organization. He found out I was writing for this newspaper and started looking up my writing online. During an evening function at one of the meetings, he came up to me and asked when I would publish the collection of Gnarly Dan stories as a humor book. I hadn’t thought of that until he mentioned it, but I was flattered that he thought the stories would make a fun reading book.

More background: there really is a real Gnarly Dan. There also is a real Scurvy Al. Neither person is anything like how they are portrayed in the stories. They are both just regular guys who are both law abiding and model Alaskan citizens. Both are also good woodsmen with a lot of outdoor experience. Several of the story ideas came from Scurvy Al based on his working career and interactions with his co-workers. In fact, I still have a list of story ideas Scurvy Al gave me as possible topics for future stories if I ever get so inclined again.

After the suggestion of publishing a humor book was made, I went back and collected all the written Gnarly Dan stories in one computer file and was surprised at the length of the possible book. As I recall, the stories added up to dozens of pages of material, more then enough for a short book. I’ve toyed with the idea of writing a follow-up to the trapping story but haven’t done it yet. Maybe sometime in the future….

Some folks who know Gnarly Dan, but not by that name, and who read the stories, figured out who Gnarly Dan is in real life. Gnarly told me he took a lot of good-natured kidding about the antics in the stories, and luckily for me, he enjoyed the entire process. He even became a local celebrity of sorts.