My friend, Slats

When my buddy Slats went hunting, his dad most always gave him one shell. It was still depression time and Slats' dad said one shell was enough for one deer. Walt Senior had once been a full-time hunter, shooting meat for crews building the railroad. He had an ancient looking single shot rifle with a bore you could stick your finger in.

Sunday's paper said, "Charles Walter "Walt" Radel Jr. died last Thursday at the age of 78. I never called him Walt because on the day we met in the mountains he told me everybody called him "Slats." He was the only boy in the Hog Heaven country during the early forties, besides me, who liked to hunt, and the way it turned out he was the only one near my age I ever hunted with during grade and high school.

We had some great hunts, and we also came close to dying after being caught in a terrible blizzard miles from the ranch house. That story was related in this column some years ago.

In the beginning, probably about 1940, we only had one big rifle, his dad's model 99.300 Savage; but I backed him up with a single shot .22 I got for Christmas in '41. Slats was a member of the Salish-Kootenai Confederation through his mother who was a descendant of the famous McDonald family. Because of this, he could hunt whenever he wanted to and it did not take too long after our meeting for us to decide that if he could hunt out of season then so could I, and that's the way it was until Slats went to the South Pacific with the Marines in 1945.

I recall two times when Slats was hunting and that one shell thing caused some trouble. Don't get me wrong. He could drive nails at a hundred yards with that rifle . . . . but!

Slats was riding his horse across the open sidehill between his ranch and the Flathead Mine where I lived when a coyote broke cover. He bailed off and took a running shot with his ione bullet.i Maybe it was the wind, or possible faulty ammunition but the coyote was only wounded. Later while explaining the bite marks on one arm and both hands, Slats told me he got those from choking the coyote with his shoelace.

The other time when one bullet didn't do the job was up on the mountains northwest of Lake Mary Ronan. Slats and I were hunting together but split up to cover both sides of a ridge. About an hour after parting I heard a shot and figured we had meat in the pan. It took me some time to find the place because Slats had followed deer over a side ridge. When I got there Slats was sitting astride a huge old whitetail buck. One of his pant legs was ripped and my partner seemed to be exhausted. He said, "I sure wished you'd have been here about 20 minutes ago. I knocked this buck down but had to get on his back and finish him off with my knife while hanging onto his horns and riding him down hill."

We had to stay at a boarding house to attend high school in Kalispell. I guess Slats was a senior and I was a sophomore when a bunch of us were going home for lunch. A lot of wet snow had fallen for reasons I can't recall, everybody started throwing snowballs at me . . . an innocent person. When they finally stopped picking on me, I discretely walked behind the other guys a little ways . . . molding and packing the world's finest snowball. Nearing our house I wound up and threw that thing with all my might and it hit Slats in the back of the head.

Down he went . . flat. At first I thought he was just pretending but it soon was clear he was partially unconscious. Was hovering over him, checking his pulse and worried sick. I was also considering the fact that Slats could probably outrun me on one leg, and was nothing but about six feet of solid muscle. He soon came around and asked what happened. I said, "Holly Eastlund hit you with a packed snowball."

"How could Holly hit me when we were walking side by side?" he demanded.

"Well then, it must have been me. I didn't mean to hurt you." Slats sat up and said he wasn't mad at me. In fact he grinned a little.

I remember when he came home from boot camp, a very sharp looking Marine, and we talked about going hunting again when the war was over, but lives change. I talked to Slats a couple of times in the last 60 years but we didn't talk about war. Slats was in Saipan, Iwo Jima, and Guam. I can only imagine what kind of a hunter he was . . . when he had more than one bullet.

G. George Ostrom is the news director for KOFI Radio and a Flathead Publishing Group columnist.