The PH, although terrified of elephants, was truly strange for buffalo. He looked at me, madness shining in his eyes, and hissed:
“Shoot one.”
“What?”
“Shoot one.”
“Not a chance.” (This is not what I actually said. Gray’s will not print what I actually said.)
Eventually, the herd drifted away, we sneaked off the kopje, and I am here to write about it.
I had listened to my inner coward, that voice that says “This is friggin’ nuts, and I’m not doing it.”
Another inner-voice example. I once got in a conversation with a fellow of about 30 who had graduated college and then gotten into the sublimely perilous sport of mountain climbing. He was very good at it, and fell in with perhaps a dozen other highly accomplished alpinists. They climbed all the time, and made all the really dangerous ascents. Then, one day, as he put it:
“I looked around, and every one of my climbing friends had been killed. Every one! I decided it was time to do something else.”
And that was just what he did.
Dave Petzal hopes that if he croaks in the wilderness, he can come up with Last Words to match those of General Thomas Jackson, CSA, who said: “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees.”
