It was strangely quiet. The tops of the pines reached above us nearly one hundred feet into the air. As we walked further into the forest, I immediately spotted flashes of red coloration. Several Catocala moths flew between the bases of the pine trees. They displayed their aposematic coloration and then disappeared once more as they alighted upon a neighboring tree, shielding their red hind wings with their mottled forewings that resembled the texture of the pine bark.
We all relished in the calm serenity of the pine forest as we began to walk across the bed of needles upon the ground. Although we were alone, we spoke quietly.
“This is cool,” Dirty commented in a near whisper. “It’s all peaceful and quiet.”
“We should have came here sooner,” Kmart Cowboy mentioned. “It’s really nice up here.”
“I should have brought my net,” I added, watching the Catocala moths continuing to flee from our penetration into the woods.
“I could have shit behind that tree over there,” Fire Crotch said, shattering the moment of serenity.
Several minutes passed and then we heard the chatter of squirrels from up above us in the branches of the pines. Kmart Cowboy secured a steel ball bearing inside his wrist rocket, while I reached for my handcrafted slingshot in my back pocket. Before I could find an appropriate projectile on the ground to launch from my slingshot, Kmart Cowboy had fired off a round at a squirrel in a nearby tree. The squirrel instinctively climbed higher into the pine and rested atop a branch, protecting itself from any objects being slung at it from below. Kmart Cowboy and I bombarded the creature to no avail. It clung to the branch and did not move.
After we eventually gave up on the treed squirrel, Kmart Cowboy and I tracked other game but experienced the same disappointing outcome. Each squirrel that we attacked displayed similar behavior. The ones that would not outright escape by jumping between the high branches just simply clung onto a thick limb to protect themselves. We quickly grew weary of the hunt and retired near the perimeter of the pine forest. The four of us sat down on the ground near some scruffy bushes to rest for a while before making the hike back to our camp.
“Do any of you guys have wet dreams?” Fire Crotch abruptly asked us, once we all began to relax on the ground.
I was alarmed by the intrusiveness of his question. “What the fu—”
“Why the hell do you want to know about that?” Dirty interjected.
“I don’t know… I was just wondering.”
“Oh, come on, guys,” Kmart Cowboy said. “You know you all have wet dreams. If you don’t then that means you’re playing with yourself too much!”
“Dude, that’s not my thing,” I asserted.
“Yeah,” Dirty halfheartedly agreed, looking somewhat ashamed of himself.
“Whatever!”
“So you have those kind of dreams?” Fire Crotch asked Kmart Cowboy.
“All the time, dude!” Kmart Cowboy replied. “I had this really weird one the other night. I was dreaming about having sex with a whole bunch of different girls. Girls from school and everything. After each time I had sex with them, I would take a lock of their pubes to keep.”
“A what?” I asked.
“Their pubes,” Kmart Cowboy repeated.
“What kind of sick shit—”
“Do you know how you tell what color a girl’s pubic hair is?” Dirty interrupted.
“How?” Fire Crotch inquired.
“Look at their eyebrows,” Dirty stated. “A girl’s pubes are the same color as their eyebrows.”
“That’s bullshit,” I said.
“It’s true for me!” Kmart Cowboy claimed.
“Me too,” Dirty stated.
“Well not me,” Fire Crotch reported.
“What, you got black pubes or something?” Dirty asked Fire Crotch.
“No, he doesn’t!” Kmart Cowboy said. “He has fire red pubes just like what’s on his head. He’s a fire crotch!”
“How would you know what color his pubes are?” I asked Kmart Cowboy. “Did you keep a lock of his pubes after you gave him a butt slushy last night?”
“Look at his eyebrows,” Kmart Cowboy replied. “You got fire pubes too! You’re a fire crotch just like he is!”
“Nah-uh, look!” Fire Crotch exclaimed. He stood up and quickly dropped his pants again, exposing his genital region to us once more. A patch of fluorescent-colored pubic hair could be seen poking through the central region of his groin.
I looked away, again appalled by Fire Crotch’s boundless behavior. “Dude, I don’t wanna see any of your god damn junk!”
“What the fuck?” Dirty cried out, staring at Fire Crotch’s man minge.
“Does that shit glow in the dark?” Kmart Cowboy asked, laughing.
Fire Crotch pulled up his pants and sat back down upon the ground. “I told you guys.”
“I guess that rule only applies to girls,” Dirty said, “because he don’t have bright orange eyebrows.”
“Man, you guys are all fucked up,” I said, while gesturing to the different individuals whom were seated around me in a semi-circle. “You all sat around and smoked horse shit out of a barky the other night, you have dreams about collecting pubic hair, and you freely expose yourself while taking a shit out on the trail and then you want us to see your sausage! You guys are freaking me out, man. I can’t deal with this shit. I mean, dropping a load inside someone’s sleeping bag is one thing. But at least I did it in private. You just squirted out fecal matter in front of everyone. Well… that was pretty funny too but what I’m saying is—” My monologue was interrupted by a large pinecone falling to the ground in the center of our seated circle. I looked at the fallen cone and then immediately tilted my head upward. There were no pine branches immediately above us. “What the hell…”
“Where did that come from?” Kmart Cowboy asked.
“That was weird,” Fire Crotch added.
Another pinecone fell to the ground near us, this one having a much different trajectory than the first. I followed the path of where it came from with my eyes and witnessed two persons huddling behind the row of scruffy bushes near where we sat. A third pinecone fell and I could clearly determine from where I was sitting that the two persons were lobbing the objects over in our direction. Kmart Cowboy and Fire Crotch had their backs toward the bushes and they did not see the two strangers hiding in the foliage. They became scared and stood to their feet. As soon as a fourth pinecone found its way over to our circle, both Kmart Cowboy and Fire Crotch bolted off in different directions, screaming.
“Where are they going?” Dirty asked me.
“Dude, there’s two assholes hiding behind those bushes,” I told my friend. “Get yourself something and let’s jump ‘em.”
Dirty and I looked along the ground and quickly located some sizeable pieces of dead wood that could be used as clubs. We grasped the weapons and proceeded into the bushes, ready to pounce upon whoever had disturbed our secluded discussion. Motioning toward each other without speaking, Dirty and I neared the two individuals who were crouched in the