Tales from I. E. Pender

"As remembered by Earlene Hill".

When I was a young man around nineteen, my older brother, Jim and I decided to take a tour of this wonderful country. We walked and hitch-hiked through a small portion of it. Enjoyin every moment good or bad. This one time, while we were in Wyoming, we were walkin, seemed like we had walked forever that day. We were both tired and hungry. See'in as how we didn't have any money and there were no cafe's around we decided it would be a good idea to stop for the night and go to sleep. We walked a little ways further trying to find the perfect spot. Finally we saw a hay stack in the nearby field. So why not stop there. Good a place as any. Jim concured with that idea and we headed for the haystack. It didn't take us long to settle down and fall to sleep. After about an hour of sleeping, Jim woke me up suddenly yellin he was in pain, felt like he was on fire all over. Well we lit a match and saw the haystack was covered in fire ants. Between his jumpin and my swatin we managed to get all the ants off of him. We both decide it was time to leave. Since we hadn't had any dinner ourselves we figured it only fittin to deprive them of theirs. We high tailed it out of there and headed on up the road. We finally found a another place to lay our heads for the night. Not nearly as soft but a lot less chewin going on...