A Drone Of My Own

Although I well know that scenarios of the following sort happen to no one else on the planet besides me, attempt, if you will, to wrap your thinker around this…

It’s been a long day, having left middle Georgia before first light and driving nearly 300 miles round trip back to my driveway—in which sits a car I’ve never before seen. Hmm…

It’s a small vehicle, shaped and sized rather like a Buster Brown shoebox. Strangely enough, it rests at the very end of the lane next to the carport, its front bumper 2 or 3 feet from a 6-foot wooden fence.

Roughly the same distance on the other side of that fence is a 128-lb. American bulldog. 

Who desperately wants to eat the shoebox.

We’re on the horns of a very pretty dilemma here. These days, you just never know. As I said of strangers to my 80-year-old mom on the day we picked up her M&P Bodyguard and CC permit, “When I grew up we trusted everybody; now it’s hard to trust anybody.”

Along about then, as I park quite a ways back and exit, a shoebox door slowly opens, a little feller eases stiffly out, and this is EXACTLY what he says: “I need to get my drone.”

Go ahead and admit it: your portfolio does not include that posting.

To make the story short enough to fit this magazine, seems he was flying his drone (his what???), and it kinda got a mind of its own and crash-landed in one of my oak trees. The same one the bulldog is attempting to leap over to nail the four-door shoebox. To his credit, the little guy thought retreat the better part of valor when it came to opening the gate between shoebox and oak. Chalk one argument up for my four-legged pal.

Moving forward a few months, I thought about that drone this week.

As far as I know, it’s still in the top of that oak. It couldn’t be flown out—don’t EVEN ask me why—its owner couldn’t be forced  at gunpoint to enter the backyard, and Yours Sincerely ain’t no way, no how gonna shinny up no tree to fetch down no thingamajig that had no business up there in the first place!

Besides, I want a brand-spanking new one! Customized…

I’m thinking a UAV—which is Unmanned Aerial Vehicle for the technological unsavvy—with IED. You may have heard of Improvised (in my front yard, away from the neighbors and the dog) Explosive Devices…

Also, I’ll need real-time recording and transmitting camera, possibly an AR—that’s ArmaLite Rifle, not assault rifle, and always has been, you liberal media nincompoops—plus the proverbial cherry on top: sound!

But not just any sound. I want a regular ol’ 1980s boom-box-blastin’ Klaxon horn! (WWII movie… German HQ infiltrated by the enemy… AAAAOOOOOGAH! That kind of horn.)

Uses? Glad you asked.

We’re in the deer woods, UAV hovering silently overhead. I scratch one itch and the Warning Squirrel Party Line switchboard lights up like the Fourth of July.

Amidst all the chucking, chattering and squealing, one push of a button silences everything. After, of course, the bomb blast that took out the tops of 47 trees rolls away…

Or in the peanut field stand, watchful eye in the sky displaying what looks like an Old West deer drive. Vacuuming up nuts. No real candidates for the .30-06 Surprise yet—but then the oinking starts.

The Model 70 in hand holds four rounds. The AR aloft? You don’t want to know. Here, piggy piggy…

Since whitetails have about as much use for hogs as I do, the tan herd turns up its collective nose and heads to the other end of the field… just before the aerial .50-cal. opens up, splattering uncivilized pork in all directions. (I have an extremely low tolerance for ANYTHING that comes between me and a buck!)

Which brings us to the guy who likes to crawl under the fence…

I’m really fond of the word improvised. Means I can put pretty much anything I want into the mix. And when one has tried in vain for two years to get an answer to the question, “What part of FENCE don’t you understand?” all options are open…

Took a while to find his crossing spot. It was an old doe that gave him away; she came past me trotting stiff-legged, tail at half-mast, now and then glancing backward. There was something back there, all right, but it was neither gaining on her nor of her own kind.

He was smart enough not to intrude TOO far; but not smart enough to brush out boot tracks…

Now the way I figger it, just because a Device is Improvised doesn’t mean it has to be Explosive. It can be, well, just Improvised.

So I did…

Deep inside the treeline, it’s as black as a bear down a well at 5:30 in the morning. That means the UAV is in SM—Stealth Mode, dummy— completely blacked out.

 But the eye in the sky don’t lie, and the camera catches him skittering under the bottom strand of barbed wire 30 minutes later, just at gray day.

Not yet. Let’s let him get all perched and comfy in the stand of gallberries 20 yards off the buck’s scrape line. There now. Ready?

The Klaxon likely woke up all of south Georgia and most of north Florida, but at least one can roll over and go back to snoozing. But it’s going to take a mite longer to get 2 gallons of pink paint and other assorted stains out of those camo coveralls…