9A/N: Yes! Two simply-silly, non-pairing-infested drabbles in a row!
This one's only very loosely based on the lyric in question, but somewhere in here there's a reference to another line from the same song, so it's all good.
"I always will remember
'Twas a year ago November
I went out to hunt some deer
On a morning bright and clear
I went and shot the maximum the game laws would allow:
Two game wardens, seven hunters, and a cow."
—"The Hunting Song" (Tom Lehrer; "Songs And More Songs By Tom Lehrer")
Survival Skills
For all the world, it sounded like there was a military skirmish going on inside the Kidney woods. Every other moment heard the crack of gunfire, with flocks of birds zooming screaming into the sky after every report. In light of this constant uninterrupted shooting, it should be no surprise to learn that there were, in fact, a whole platoon of Bean Scouts toting rifles in those woods...however, those same Scouts were also sprinting terrifiedly back to their cabins, their weapons forgotten on the forest floor, panic overwhelming even their natural attraction to dangerous objects. No, it wasn't the work of a troop of Beans that caused that constant gunfire...
"Wooooooooo hoo hoo hoooo!" hollered a very familiar bull moose, swinging his rifle around hard without ever relinquishing his hold on the trigger, causing a full arc of bulletholes to spring out of the trunk of a tree a few feet off. "THIS IS GREAT! I'VE NEVER FELT SO ALIVE!"
The little yellow slug beside the Scoutmaster threw himself fully onto the ground, clutching the Bean Scout rulebook over his head as though that would protect him from the constant rain of buckshot. "S-sir, CONTROL yourself!" he sputtered before quickly retracting his eye stalks back into his head, just in time for a fresh bullet to lodge in the ground right where his left eye had been splayed a moment before. "This hunting excursion has been nothing but a DISASTER! All the Beans have already run away—and what made you think it was a good idea to be anywhere NEAR heavy artillery ANYWAY?"
His frantic pleas fell on deaf ears as Scoutmaster Lumpus just continued skipping merrily through the forest, squeezing the trigger randomly to helter-skelter rains of bullets upon the poor defenseless undergrowth. Slinkman was certain that any moment now the Scoutmaster was going to cause a brushfire.
"PLEASE, sir!" he tried crying out again, scrambling to his feet. The Scoutmaster was already quite some distance off, and Slinkman had to hurry after him, though not so quickly that he'd be back in range of the moose's weapon. "Calm down! Come back to the cabin, and I'll make you some hot cocoa or something, and we can—"
"And give up my primitive masculine rituals, Slinkman? NO WAY!" Twirling his gun in an oddly graceful manner, Lumpus caught the barrel of the rifle in his right palm and swung the butt of the weapon backwards, cracking it against a low-hanging tree limb just behind him. The impact was so sharp, and the limb so thin, that it broke off and fell to the ground. "It was in my way," he explained to a baffled Slinkman, who was crouching behind a nearby rock. Then Lumpus stuck his tongue out of the corner of his mouth (as if this would help him improve his atrocious aim) and, to Slinkman's horror, the moose balanced the barrel of the rifle on his shoulder, the business end of the gun pointing into the woods behind him. "Now watch me sink this backward shot, Slinkman!"
Before the slug could protest, Lumpus squeezed the trigger with his thumb, and with a crack! the rifle went off again, jittering the Scoutmaster up and down with the weapon's recoil. And before the slug could try to protest again, there came a sound as if of a sharp pencil being driven into a pillow, followed by a blood-curdling scream of pain.
"Y'hear that, Slinky?" crowed Lumpus cheerfully, completely oblivious to the ashen complexion of his companion, or of the crashing of underbrush behind him. "I'll betcha ANYTHING I bagged a purebred Gurnsey cow with THAT one!"
Before anyone could explain the fallacies in the idea of finding a Gurnsey cow in the middle of a forest many miles from civilization, a thick, beefy fist clamped down on Lumpus's gangly neck and hoisted him roughly into the air, spinning him around until he was face-to-face with his attacker.
Or, rather, face-to-flared nostrils.
"Oh, er, hello, Commander Hoo-Ha," gulped Lumpus nervously, trying very hard to smile pleasantly despite the boiling rage contorted on the bison's face. "Heh heh, um, fancy meeting you here..."
Never once breaking eye contact with the moose, Hoo-Ha thrust his free hand down to his side and tore at something with a violent ripping noise. Then the hand shot right back up to Lumpus's level, and, though it took a while for the nervous moose's eyes to focus on it, he wheezed at what he saw.
It was a pair of pants. More specifically, it was the pair of army-green pants that Commander Hoo-Ha had been wearing up until a mere moment before. Even more specifically, it was a pair of army-green pants that had a thin, circular hole in the seat, flanked on all sides by microscopic specks of powder burn.
"The pants can come out of your salary," hissed Hoo-Ha dangerously as he flung the garments to the side, then, bringing his free hand back up, compacting the digits into one terrifying fist. "But as for the rest of it..."
Slinkman flinched, then finally had to dive for cover behind his rock again, which rocked tumultuously with the force of the severe punishment going on just ten feet away. The slug sighed. Well, when Nurse Leslie was done with him, that would certainly teach the moose not to go on any "hunting trips" ever again.
Or until the next week, whichever came first.