Fond memories of scouting
It was the summer of 1990 and my Den had finally graduated from mere Tiger Cubs to Bobcats, thus joining the ranks of the true Cub Scouts and affording us the privilege of attending the Pack's summer campout. This wasn't a mere
We all listened to the Den leaders as they told us that we'd be learning to use compasses, maps, and how to make ice cream using rock salt and a tin can. Needless to say we were all very excited. We all met in the elementary school parking lot, and eagerly polished our newly issued Official Scouting equipment (this consisting only of a collapsible tin cup and a whistle we were supposed to blow if we got lost). The older boys huddled together in their respective dens whispering to each other while the jeeps were being packed and the drivers scrutinized maps with obscure trails only Scouts and lunatics would consider taking,. The Cub Master's eldest son, a honest to god boy scout and therefore the omniscient made mortal, scuttled from Den to Den, and when he left they all chuckled and smirked at our little group. Obviously a good sign.
He eventually drifted our way and struck up a conversation. With much theatrics he described how he was going to lead us through the forest to be "blooded" under the new moon on the last night of camp. This was clearly the wrong turn of phrase since half of my Den started crying. He quickly calmed us and said all we'd have to do is kill a mysterious and elusive creature called a "Snark". This lifted our spirits considerably as it was obviously preferable to being blooded, whatever that was.
Over the next week we were taught basic camp care and navigation by our Den leaders during the day, and we were fed stories about homicidal lunatics and Snarks by the other scouts at night. With every passing night we steeled ourselves for that fateful hunt. From what we learned the Snark was a ferocious predator with a gigantic bone-crushing jaw filled with razor sharp teeth. The Snark was obviously a fearsome creature since it hunted mountain lions (a very real predator we were often warned about by everyone from the Cub Master to the Rangers). It would be a dreadful, awful, harrowing ordeal, and some of us might not make it. But there was also glory to be had! once we feasted on the roasted meat of a Snark we would be blood brothers! A bond that transcended death itself!
The day before our last night we were given free reign within the campgrounds, and we pestered our Boy Scout Huntsmaster to tell us what preparations we should make for the hunt. However he had some of his own merit badges to earn, and he told us to wait for dusk. Around noon he almost cut his leg off with an axe. Blood everywhere, torn muscle, shattered bone. It was a horrible injury that required tourniquets, a makeshift stretcher, and half the Pack's grown ups to drag his crippled ass down the mountain, but my Den had bigger worries: He never told us how to hunt down a Snark.
It was a given that we were going to continue with the hunt regardless, and we began to make the preparations we deemed necessary. Near the outhouses we stockpiled "borrowed" tools and some weapons we had surreptitiously jury-rigged under the noses of our remaining watchers, and we planned for our escape in the dark of night.
It was all too easy. That night at the stockpile we snapped the glow sticks, armed ourselves with clubs, crude fire-hardened spears, and the few knives we had managed to swipe, lit up the toilet paper torches, and, aided by our whistles, we sprinted screeching into the dead of night like a band of murderous goblins.
Against all odds we actually killed something that night. The torches went out pretty quickly, but someone caught some movement in the eerie light from the glow sticks, and we ran the damned thing down into the shrubs. We were roaring. The animal was shrieking in pain and terror. Now I grimace when I think about what we did to that poor creature. Of course at the time it was a glorious battle! GLORIOUS I TELL YOU! GLORIOUS. By the time the ten of us were done stabbing and clubbing the creature to death it was utterly unrecognizable. It was probably a huge raccoon, a gigantic badger, maybe a small fawn, God only knows what that bloody mess could have been before we got to it. But we were totally convinced we had killed a Snark.
When the remaining Pack leaders found us we were hiking back to the campgrounds. They said we looked like feral children. We had drawn war markings across our faces with blood (a ritual deemed a suitable substitute for actually eating any of that crumpled mess of flesh), and that was on top of the gore splattered clothing and the very fact we were elbow deep in blood and gristle. We told them all about the Snark hunt, and they told us that Snarks weren't actually real. We were sure surprised as hell. We were supposed to hike out of camp several hundred yards or so, and then someone wearing a mask was supposed to jump out from behind a tree and yell at us. Personally, I'm still not too sure what they were planning since I question the wisdom of getting a group of kids all jazzed up to kill something and then giving them a human target, but that's probably just me.
Punishment was swift, and being screamed at by an irate Park Ranger until he loses his voice and starts hacking up blood is not fun. Odd thing about that Den, though. Through the next five years we were the tightest group in the Pack, probably in all of Cub Scouts. Given, we really should not have been left in the same group. Any certification dealing with fire, knives, archery, or marksmanship was snapped up instantly and we were horrible influences on each other. We were the most demented group of pyros and knife-wielding hellchildren to have ever been assembled (and it was a long, long time before they let us get those knives). But we were blood brothers, and that was something no one else in the Pack could say, especially considering our Cub Master subsequently slapped down a pack-wide ban on any talk of Snark hunting in the future.