RoustWriter: Blog

This week with Arlene and Jeff:

...Just as the sun was beginning to lighten the eastern sky, she heard a sound. Still not seeing anything, she drew the slingshot back halfway while scanning the weeds and undergrowth around her in the faint golden light of the approaching morning.

After a couple of moments of staring at where she thought she had heard a sound, she suddenly realized that she was staring at a pheasant that had appeared almost like magic not ten feet in front of her. With years of playing with their “toys” as they prepared for the yearly contests, she slowly stood, even as she drew back and fired, all in one many-times practiced motion. The pheasant’s head didn’t exactly leave its body, but the effect was quite similar. The bird fell over without so much as a squawk.

Dessie almost ran over to pick the bird up, but reason took over. I haven’t heard any of the other pheasants make any noise. It would be better if they never knew what happened to this one.

Step by quiet step, she eased over, picked the bird up and just as quietly, made her way for the next hundred yards. She was so tense all the way that she had to fight an impulse to giggle.

Finally, she was far enough away from the area that she felt she could walk normally without startling the remainder of the flock. When she arrived back at the campsite, the sun was just beginning to peek over the mountain...

Have a goodun;

Roust

This week with Arlene and Jeff:

...“Honey, as long as the teacher is a good shot and really wants to impart his knowledge to his students, he or she will be a good instructor. Unfortunately, far too many people who teach want to maintain a higher level of knowledge and ability than their students. They want to stay a little bit better than the people they teach – no matter how talented the student may be. Some instructors are jealous of the ‘tricks’ they have learned over the years that make them just a little bit better than other shooters. The same is true for almost any subject. I’ve listened to you as you taught your sister-wives to fire their Glocks, and some of the earlier wives the basics of firing a pulse rifle. You try your best to show them every way possible to become a better shot.

“I’m not the only one who has noticed, either. The Sergeant told me that you had a ‘talent’ for the rifle, and you could also teach. This is Sergeant Higgins we are talking about. From him, that’s high praise indeed. His having to leave for a few weeks was just too good an opportunity to pass up. I’m sorry that I stressed you so much, but I wanted you pissed off a bit so you would ‘show me,’ and wind up doing a better job of teaching your sister-wives and Adrienné than the Sergeant or I ever could.”

“Jeff, if you’re bullshitting me…”

“I’m not, and you know it.” Jeff hesitated for a second before going on, “He left you his outlines, so what were the booklets that you were preparing?”

“You know what they were. I had to develop new outlines because I don’t teach the same way the Sergeant does.”

“Exactly,” Jeff said with the look that always pissed Diana off...

Have a goodun;

Roust

This week with Arlene and Jeff:

...Frustrated that she could do nothing for her husband, she got out his fishing gear and removed his lure before rigging the line with a float, weight and hook. With the folding shovel, she dug around near the water until she found something that she first thought was a small snake. She had almost whacked it with the shovel before deciding it was just an energetic worm. She didn’t know what it was called here, but back home, it would have been called a wiggler. All she was sure of was it looked like a worm, wiggled like crazy and was roughly six inches long.

With her little forked stick, she held it down while threading the hook through it the way her husband had taught her. That really pissed the thing off, and it was wiggling like crazy when she set the depth with the float and cast the line out about fifteen feet from the bank. She had just wedged her husband’s rod between two rocks and had picked up her own rod and reel to bait it when Phillip’s reel began to sing.

With her dip net stuck between her legs, she worked the small fish in, then slipped the net under it. Another rainbow, but he only weighed a pound or so. No matter, he went on the stringer that she had tied to a sturdy bush at the water’s edge. She rebaited her husband’s rig using a grub this time before setting her rig up with another wiggler, then put it out twenty feet or so up the shore. It took another half-hour to catch another fish, and this one was a perch probably weighing less than a pound.

Both she and her husband loved the taste of perch, and he had taught her how to skin the fish instead of having to scale it. Since her knife didn’t have a scaler on the back, she would skin the fish after filleting it, but that would be tomorrow.

After she had both fish on the stringer, she propped both rigs against a nearby bush and walked the few steps back to their campsite, where she stood looking down at her husband...

Have a goodun;

Roust

This week with Arlene and Jeff:

...The others had been gone less than a minute when Arlene and Ann, following their Jeff finder, walked in. Two teams in their interceptors had been on a joint patrol of the inner planets. Even at speeds up to a half light between planets, the mission had taken twelve hours, much of the time spent, of course, searching for electronic and gravitational anomalies that might indicate an intelligent species spying on Earth.

“Who was with you?” Jeff asked after thoroughly kissing each wife, and the two having gotten hugs from Kayla.

“Maxwell and Cotton,” Ann answered. “Other than travel time, we spent a large part of our day in a careful electronic search of the inner planets of the solar system with Maxwell and Cotton assisting in their own interceptor. We would have been here an hour ago, but Cotton found a gravitational anomaly whose output was just above what our computer considered the norm. I had almost decided that it was just Venus and its weird atmosphere, but Cotton convinced me we should investigate anyway.

“As you are aware, Venus is… uh, different. It has volcanoes, and its volcanoes seem to have volcanoes,” she said, exaggerating only slightly. And then there are the seemingly ever-present sulfuric acid clouds while you steadily bake at 800 degrees F in more than 800 mile-per-hour carbon dioxide winds. I didn’t want to go down into that even with our shields protecting our interceptors. However, we did manage to do several low-level passes over the area, and if there are aliens in that boiling cauldron of the liquid rock of that massive volcano that the emissions were coming from, I would hate to meet them. Anyway we marked the location on our maps, and we’ll keep an eye on the gravity fluctuation there to see if it continues to exist. Otherwise, it was a very dull and repetitive day.”...

Have a goodun;

Roust

This week with Arlene and Jeff:

...Phillip, who was a couple of steps in front of Dessie, had kept his cool as he suddenly had nothing solid to stand on when the tons of earth bucked away from the superheated moisture in the ground and flowed almost like water toward the stream below. Desperately, he grabbed for a big limb of the tree that was standing on the edge. Unfortunately, much of the supporting ground had already been washed away by rains. His grip was good, but the tree was going down with him. As Dessie screamed, Phillip went over the embankment and out of sight.

“Phillip,” Dessie screamed again as she scrambled on her hands and knees to the edge while fighting not to go over herself as the ground continued to flow almost like water as it followed the tons of earth that had already gone over the edge.

Unseen by them, the larger craft headed for space. A moment later, there was a brilliant flash as the Paladin’s shields overloaded from multiple hits from Ship’s interceptors. The flash marking the demise of the Paladin ship in near space went unnoticed by the two humans struggling many miles below.

Another section broke off the trail, and Dessie was forced to jump clear or go over herself. Finally – it seemed like forever – the ground quit shaking, the rumble of falling hillside stopped and Dessie, still calling his name, cautiously made her way to where she had last seen her husband.

“Phillip,” she yelled. “Are you okay?”...

Have a goodun;

Roust