One morning a US Army Ranger friend of mine were camping on the Kings river. I got up at dawn and began normal morning routine prepping breakfast, coffee, and getting ready to fish. One hand working on coffee, other hand puffing morning cigarette, and BAM like lightning and thunder the sound was loud and continuous. As I looked up a feather hit me in the face, the sounds got louder and I spotted them - turkeys on the roost in the trees right above me. They were pissed! It was way too late to move so I just kept on making coffee although with a watchful eye on those turkeys. Jimmy rousted, we ate, laughed at those frikkin turkeys and we hit the water. The smallmouth were calling.

Morning fog hung on the Kings but in no way obscured my view. I could see everything under the clear water. We were ready. We had a special soft bait with us we called 'The Magic Worm'. If you could not catch a smallmouth with that worm it meant God himself had cursed you. I mean I burned it up! Fish after fish almost all smallmouth. Jimmy was a trekker though and his big thing was distance. So we hucked it through that river.

About two miles downstream we round a bend and the Kings serves up a mighty view. It looks like some kind of castle hanging on a bluff. Suspended over the Kings like some scene from Avatar. As I soak up the view and begin to eye the next stretch of river for smallmouth opportunities, a new even louder noise starts up. I mean it is so loud I think we are under direct assault. But I knew immediately what it was - .223 automatic fire. Sounds like loud rain except this time it is accompanied by an unfamiliar sound, a really loud ping. So it sounds like a machine gun being fired at a steel plate.

No sooner does the .223 fire stop and something louder starts in, who knows what it was, but it was steady semi-auto this time. Jimmy has outpaced me and is all the way at the next bend. He also stopped to look when the automatic cacophany began so I took the chance to wave for him to stop. When I catch up to him He smiles and passes me one of his Marlboro reds. Then he shows me a frikkin 18" smallmouth that was incredible when we ate it later. He tells me who is the sponsor of our gunpowder fueled morning accompaniment - anyone know who it is yet? Bill Wilson. IDPA Bill.

Over the years I got to know his son a little as he used to ride his 4 wheeler to the adjacent property where we camped. I also went up and had Bill check out a .45 to verify it's progeny and look at the range. Phew! Quite a range as those of you who know who Bill is can imagine. We camped on that property until sometime around 1998, around the time the Undertaker threw Mankind off of Hell in a Cell to plummet 16 feet through the announcer's table.