Daily Smile

[{"type":"text","text":"Now let's all watch a giant turtle take a nap on a sponge..."}]

Smile 9 8 23

Cowboy State Daily is Wyoming’s largest newspaper with Wyoming’s most experienced journalists. 

<title>Daily Smile: Friday, September 8, 2023 | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Now let's all watch a giant turtle take a nap on a sponge...

Daily Smile: Friday, September 8, 2023

 Now let's all watch a giant turtle take a nap on a sponge...

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily's business and tourism reporter, Renée Jean

Renée Jean

Wyoming Life

On a hot July afternoon at Frontier Park, two brothers sit side by side sharing a drink and decades of memories.

The Brewster brothers, John and Bill, are among Cheyenne Frontier Days longest-serving volunteers, starting in 1962 and 1959 — if you don’t count the years when they helped their dad, who was Indian Chairman at the time, 

“You remember dad on those Indian trips?” Bill asks with a chuckle.

“That doesn’t count,” John says, shaking his head. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"“When was that? ’51 to?” Bill says."}]

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"“It was ’50 to ’52,” John replies."}]

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Or maybe it was until 1953, Bill suggests."}]

They decide John has volunteered 64 years, while Bill has 70 years in all. That’s 134 years between them — longer than Cheyenne Frontier Days has been around.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"They laugh, as if at an inside joke. "}]

The math all done, time has a way of blurring together, the Brewster brothers told Cowboy State Daily with a laugh and a shrug. 

It’s been a time that’s full of story and family. 

“Do you remember when those cowboys from the ranch used to come by?” Bill asked John. “They were all World War I veterans. They’d come by and drink a little whiskey and smoke cigarettes in the living room, and some of them still rolled their own. You know just being around cow people is … I’ve been a cowboy all my life.“

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"“Me, not so much,” John interjected."}]

“That’s OK,” Bill said with a chuckle. “I’ve got a picture of you on a horse. Saw it the other day.”

It’s proof, if nothing else, that John belongs the same way Bill belongs, in Cheyenne Frontier Days' unofficial pop-up city of volunteers, doing all the unsung jobs that keep this historic event rolling smoothly along.

For all the flashy cowboys, arena lights and concerts, it’s volunteers like the Brewster brothers who have become the real soul of Cheyenne Frontier Days, and not just for the work they do. It’s the stories they carry inside their heads. 

They are a living archive of ranch hands, rodeo legends, and family moments that range from World War I cowboys to Indian trips with the likes of Princess Blue Water. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Fighting Custer"}]

“I’ve got to tell the story about Dad bringing the Indians down,” John said with a chuckle.

Bill nodded his head to say, “Yes, please do,” and his eyes had a twinkle.

“Dad was Indian Sheriff, and they used to bring the Indians down in open trucks from Pine Ridge,” John said.

“They were just bobtail cattle trucks,” Bill added with a laugh.

“There were two who would ride with my father in a car,” John said. “They were Princess Blue Water, Rose Ecoffey and Joseph High Eagle. He was the last surviving combatant in the Custer massacre. He was 15 when he fought Custer.”

High Eagle would often try, in a mixture of sign language and Oglala Sioux, to tell the Brewster brothers’ dad about the fight.

“Rosie’s in the middle,” John said. “And Dad’s driving.”

“No, no,” Bill said. “I’m sitting right behind High Eagle, and she’s sitting right next to me in the back seat. And he starts in with sign language, and maybe Oglala too, talking about the Custer massacre, trying to tell my dad about it.”

Except, he claims that the Indians just had arrows, which the Brewster brothers believe to be false.

“They had rifles better than we had,” Bill said. “They had all Winchesters and we had our Henrys. We had single shots.”

The conversation at the time was making their dad uncomfortable, John recalled. 

“Dad kind of gave this look, like, ‘Really?’ ” John said with a chuckle. “And Rose said, ‘You’re safe. He likes you.’”

Ecoffey was an amazing woman, Bill added. “She was blind in one eye,” he said.

John and Bill have both personally heard her tell the story of how she came to slap the Prince of Wales. 

Blue Water was 7 years old, according to family legends, and told Queen Victoria her people would bow to no one.

“She told us they had been introduced at the court of Queen Victoria, and she said, 'I only bow to the president,’” John said. “And Edward the Eighth was standing there and he laughed.”

Ecoffey had thought he was laughing at her in that moment.

“So she slapped him, and he laughed all the harder,” John said. “And she said, ‘When we got back to the hotel, let me tell you what my father did to me!' She got into trouble for that.”

Ecoffey frequently visited the Brewster family whenever she was in town.

“She and my mother were great friends,” Bill said, wrapping one finger around another. “They were close. They’d come to the house and they’d bring a couple cartons of cigarettes and sit around the garden to smoke. They’d all be in costume.”

Bill still has a photo of Princess Blue Water sitting in the garden with other members of the tribe such as Charlie Red Cloud, Frank Afraid of Horse and Levi Sitting Hawk.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"It’s A Family Tradition"}]

Stories like that might not show up in a rodeo program, but they’re part of the living memory Cheyenne Frontier Days’ longtime volunteers have built around the event in the process of volunteering year-in, year-out.

For people like the Brewster brothers, Cheyenne Frontier Days isn’t just another event on the calendar. It’s the main event.

Pulling on a pair of cowboy boots and slapping on a cowboy hat to help run the rodeo in Cheyenne was simply what you did in the summer when you lived in Cheyenne — for generations running.

“It’s just part of life,” John said. “It’s part of summer. As far back as I remember, our mother was a member of a ranch family and our grandfather was on the Frontier Days parade in the '20s, so it’s family here, it really is.”

“Our dad rode a caisson in the arena here with the Black Horse Battery,” Bill said. “That was a wagon behind the horses and attached to that was a cannon.”

Over the years, the Brewster brothers have quietly done just about every job a volunteer can do. Bill started out driving parade wagons and later shifted to the carriage ranks, then worked around the chutes, and even recited the Cowboys’ Prayer on the last Saturday of Frontier Days.

“That’s on the final Saturday,” John said. “The rodeo stops. They read all the names of the volunteers, cowboys, anybody involved with ranching that has passed away, and then they recite the Cowboys’ Prayer, and Bill would do that.”

“I’m only the fifth guy who ever did it,” Bill added. “Well, there’ve been a couple in between. I’m not going to be doing it this year, I’ll do it again next year.”

John spent time doing the “car count” in the early 1960s, tallying up license plates by state so the announcer could tell the crowd how many people had come from which state. Then he moved into parades and contract acts, helping juggle wagons, floats, queens, VIPs and the Grand Entry. 

These days, he hammers out the entire parade lineup, and he’s the guy behind the 10-gauge blank cannon that booms to officially start the parade.

Between them, they’ve stitched together a lifetime of jobs that rarely make headlines, but are still essential to keeping the Daddy of ‘em All on track. To them, it’s just another summer in Cheyenne, but it means the world to an event that’s celebrating 130 years of rodeo. 

John and Bill Brewster 20260721 131233 7 23 26

<title>The Brewster Brothers: 134 Years Of Cheyenne Frontier Days In Two Cowboy Hats | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Cheyenne Frontier Days has 2,700 volunteers, many of them multigenerational. Among them are the Brewster brothers, who have 134 years of volunteering between them. "Our grandfather was on the Frontier Days parade in the '20s, so it’s family here.”

The Brewster Brothers: 134 Years Of Cheyenne Frontier Days In Two Cowboy Hats

Welsch mug

Jeff Welsch

Outdoors

A few hundred yards downstream, after 70 miles of twists and turns and memories and restoration of a base human spirit, a white pickup truck appeared beyond the vertical lip of a canyon wall on river right and disappeared swiftly behind another tower of rock on the left.

Almost in unison, 22 hearts — one for each first-time floater on the revered emerald gem that is central Idaho’s Middle Fork of the Salmon River, including and especially mine — sank.

The truck harkened an inevitability we all understood and accepted, but still dreaded as this jarring reality loomed ever larger each day.

We were plying the last stretch of the crown jewel of America’s wild rivers and, in my case, closing the book on an elusive spiritual pursuit 40 years in the making.

An odyssey that began six days earlier with a backcountry flight into a dirt airstrip was now a few half-hearted oar strokes from takeout at busy Cache Bar, after a left turn and one more mighty rapid on the Main Salmon River.

Silence engulfed us, save for the ever-fainter roar of the last of the Middle Fork’s 100-plus rapids, the chirp of chukars pecking at bugs on a boulder-strewn shore, and the goodbye echoes of wind whispering off canyon walls that towered above us like granite cathedrals.

Our bearded and tanned trip leader Murph, no stranger to this moment and its emotional swings, swiveled his head toward the four other yellow rafts and read our collective minds like a seasoned therapist.

“Welcome,” he announced, “to the most depressing place on Earth.”

Murph himself was wrestling with those emotions, as he’d conceded he would when he first gripped his oars at the Indian Creek launch site in the heart of America’s largest contiguous wilderness area.

He pirouetted his raft 180 degrees and pointed it upstream, putting the growing vehicle traffic out of sight if not out of mind, and we all followed suit. We gazed one final time up the waters we’d covered, contemplating a landscape unmatched in the Lower 48 states.

Even the group’s six 11-to-14-year-old kids, who’d spent the morning playfully smacking the water’s surface with paddles and gleefully celebrating drenching descents through rapids with foreboding names such as Devil’s Tooth and Foreplay and House of Rocks, solemnly rested those same paddles across their knees.

No heart was at once more melancholy and yet full as the one belonging to the second-oldest member of the expedition.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Mine."}]

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Unaltered For Millennia"}]

The Middle Fork of the Salmon is born at the confluence of gin-clear Marsh and Bear Valley creeks on the eastern edge of the Sawtooth Mountains. The river carves a serpentine chasm through the craggy Idaho Batholith and, climactically, Impassable Canyon, the third deepest gorge in North America.

Its waters plunge an average of 30 feet per mile, producing nearly continuous rapids over its 104 miles.

Its flow, unaltered for millennia, is regulated purely and solely by Mother Nature — no dams, no agricultural pumps, no diversions, no community water systems, no wastewater effluent, no rip-rap and no spans save for a handful of suspension bridges for foot and equine trail traffic.

The trout fishing is world-class, the hot springs restorative, the rapids exhilarating as well as 

 with one notable and intensely personal exception 

To safeguard the Middle Fork’s fragile integrity, a scant seven launches per day are allowed between commercial and private trips. The odds of the average citizen winning the Middle Fork lottery are about 1 in 55, with 20,000 applicants vying for roughly 350 slots each year.

President Jimmy Carter wasn’t encumbered by such long odds in August 1978 when he floated the Middle Fork, along the way instilling in his wife, Roslyn, a passion for fly-fishing. Two years later he would sign the Central Idaho Wilderness Act into law, the name soon to change to Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness.

“I think if I had to pick out the three or four best days of my life in politics, it was the time I spent going down the Salmon River by raft two summers ago. This was a delightful trip,” Carter said at the 1980 signing. “The River of No Return, encompassing the Middle Fork of the Salmon River, is indeed one of our nation’s treasures.”

Even the Colorado River of the Grand Canyon, for all its aura and remoteness, is bookended by dams, its flows dictated by the demands and whims of far-flung water users.

The Middle Fork is as pure as the driven snows that blanket its upper reaches and feed it, along with the dozens of creeks that sustain and nurture it.

The mere utterance of the words “Middle Fork” move riverkeepers worldwide to genuflect.

A Middle Fork descent became a vision quest for me a few years after Carter’s visit, when as a 20-something Idaho journalist and budding river enthusiast I was struck by the local reverence for it.

Grown man-card-carrying, beef-eating Idaho men admitted to weeping at the sight of those same anti-climactic trucks and boat trailers.

While awaiting my turn, I rafted and kayaked many of the West’s great whitewater rivers — Idaho’s Main Salmon, Lower Salmon, South Fork of the Payette, South Fork of the Boise, and even the impossibly elusive Selway with its single launch per day; Oregon’s Rogue, Deschutes, McKenzie and Illinois; the Alberton Gorge section on Montana’s Clark Fork; and my splashy introduction to rafting at age 22 in Lunch Counter and the Big Kahuna rapids on Wyoming’s Snake — measuring each against a vision of the Middle Fork adventure certain to come.

Yet year after year, hope gave way to futility.

The lottery sneered at my every annual application. Speed dials in hopes of a rare cancellation were fruitless. Invitations from the friends who’d occasionally struck Middle Fork gold were always ill-timed.

And, of course, there were those all-consuming daily demands such as parenting and work.

Compromising my chances, for many years testosteronal stubbornness prohibited me from even considering one of the commercial trips, which I derided as for soft East and West Coast elitists.

Over time, I’d begun to concede in the twilight of my own serpentine journey that my dream would always be just that, and that any Middle Fork floats would be relegated to vicarious YouTube fantasies.

Then, for the Christmas of my 66th year, my wife, Sherry, herself once a river rat who’d said “yes” to our engagement on one Rogue River descent and “yes” to matrimony at the same remote lodge on the same day a year later, handed a laptop computer displaying an invoice to my son Matt, whose eyes knowingly widened.

“Do you think he’d like this?” she asked with an impish grin.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Matt nodded vigorously."}]

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"He nodded even more emphatically."}]

Matt handed me the computer and my eyes moistened as I saw the words: Middle Fork Adventures.

After 40 years, I’d finally won the Middle Fork lottery.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"No Outside World Access"}]

On July 15, after the short flight from Stanley to Indian Creek, I wandered down the launch ramp. For the first time, I dipped a sandal into the waters of a stream I’d touched only with my eyes from 30,000 feet.

“Holy waters,” I said to a guide I’d just met, and he nodded with a smile.

For the next six days, we would have no access to the outside world, save for the seven-person crew’s emergency satellite phone and a brief stop at a pastoral lodge and hunting camp called Loon Creek Ranch.

It is one of several guest ranches and busy airstrips grandfathered into “The Church”, a counter-intuitive concession nevertheless necessary to persuade politicians that this national treasure merited protections under The Wilderness Act of 1964.

At Loon Creek, Starlink made Apple Pay and thus the purchase of huckleberry ice cream possible in a tiny white “store” with mule-deer antlers above the door, across a yard from the horses and pack mules in a nearby corral.

Cell phones were otherwise of no use except for time, photos/video and satellite mapping until they inevitably died.

For the 22 of us, the dopamine urge to doom scroll on social media each morning left our fingertips with surprising ease the moment we took off from Stanley and banked across the flanks of the Sawtooths. Early pining for World Cup results also tapered quickly.

A lanky 14-year-old boy from Seattle, paddling alongside Matt in an inflatable kayak, or “ducky”, offered that his baseball team was in the state playoffs.

“But I’d rather be here,” he said, his parents beaming later when the sentiment was relayed to them.

Day after day, we navigated rapids, hiked to Sheepeater pictographs, soaked in hot springs, drank straight from cold springs, caught wild cutthroat trout, climbed to waterfalls, poked around abandoned cabins once inhabited by crusty hermits, admired bighorn sheep and bald eagles and mule deer, and sat contemplatively in the mist of a cool grotto surrounded by 500-foot walls.

And from dawn to dusk, in our rafts and on our hikes and at lunch stops and around the campfire, we engaged in a lost art.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"We talked."}]

An eclectic group from each corner of the country and varied walks of life converged and, for a week, we became family.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Entering The Cheese Grater"}]

On the penultimate day, just a few hundred yards from our final camp at Otter Bar, I plopped into a ducky for the final time and followed Matt into a Class III rapid called Cliffside that’s notorious for “munching” inflatable kayaks.

Its name comes from the bony cliff on the left known as “Cheese Grater Wall”. As fate would have it, the rapid is most challenging at the present and otherwise ideal flow of 2.5 feet; it’s easier to skirt at higher water in the spring and slows to a relative trickle later in the summer.

“I have seen more botched runs and wall crashes in this rapid than any other,” wrote Matt Leidecker in “Middle Fork of the Salmon River: A Comprehensive Guide”, as if he knew before I did that I would indeed one day float this river.

I deftly navigated the first wave, riding its crest like a cork, then instantly knew my fate was sealed when a side wave surged off Cheese Grater, pushed the nose of my ducky hard right, and left me helplessly parallel to another wave that upended me into the maelstrom.

Down I went, gashing my shin on a submerged rock, before eventually emerging between waves long enough to claim a single hurried breath. Down I went again only to re-emerge moments later in time to gasp for another breath between waves and see I was in a headlong rush toward the Grater.

I raised my hands, briefly flashed on whether a ledge might suck me underneath the wall, pushed off and was summoned into the depths a final time. Upon my third emergence I managed two breaths and spied calmer water a few smaller waves ahead.

“Are you OK?” Murph shouted from his rescue raft, shifting from first responder back to boat captain. “Just stay calm.”

I nodded, and moments later another guide pulled me by my life jacket into the back of an oar raft, shaken but otherwise unbruised except for my shin and my ego.

“Welcome to the Salmon River Swim Team,” Taylor said with a grin once he knew I hadn’t inhaled a pint of Middle Fork Pale Ale. “It’s an exclusive club. We’ve all been there.”

My penance came that night in what guides call “booty beer.” I had to announce around the campfire what I did wrong (listened to the guides tee-hee), what I’d do different (not follow Matt tee-hee) and what I’d learned (people were legit scared when my yellow helmet twice vanished into the depths) before a rite of passage required me to guzzle a 12-ounce Pabst Blue Ribbon from toe to heel out of my river sandal.

It was, fittingly perhaps, the first time I’d ever flipped either a raft or so-called IK, giving me a kinship with this river unlike any other. The Middle Fork had taken something from me while at the same time giving something back.

The next morning, as we reached the confluence of the Middle Fork and Main Salmon, we grudgingly turned our rafts back toward the transition zone and what our culture curiously calls “the real world.”

“Thank you, Middle Fork!” Murph yelled one last time, looking over his shoulder up the canyon and saluting the restorative powers of the river and its wildness.

From the back of an oar boat, Matt and I watched an eagle talon a trout from the depths before we stood and held tight for a final bucking bronc ride through Class IV Cramer Creek Rapid.

As we sat back down on the tube, the ramp at Cache Bar and its throngs of milling people inching ever closer across a placid emerald gem, Matt turned and put his arm around my shoulder.

“Well,” he said, “you finally made it.”

Yes, I finally made it, and my heart, though still tinged with melancholy and a sense of loss that still has me off-balance as I write, was full at long last. 

Middle Fork rafts

<title>40 Years Later, Idaho's Middle Fork Of The Salmon Reveals Its Restorative Powers | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Forty years after first seeing the reverence for Idaho's Middle Fork of the Salmon River, the author finally gets his day on the crown jewel of America's wild rivers. Over six wild and wet days, it proved every bit as restorative as he'd dreamed.

40 Years Later, Idaho's Middle Fork Of The Salmon Reveals Its Restorative Powers

Kolby fedore

Kolby Fedore

Around Wyoming

[{"type":"text","text":"Some people collect souvenirs."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"Rick Bonander collected adventures."}]

The 74-year-old Casper businessman has spent a lifetime following whatever lay beyond the next ridge, whether that meant getting lost in the Montana mountains as a boy, building one of Wyoming's most successful pipe companies, or tracking elephants, lions and Marco Polo sheep across six continents.

[{"type":"text","text":"The adventures now surround him."}]

Bonander is difficult to miss. Tall and broad-shouldered with a barrel chest, bright blue eyes and a neatly trimmed white mustache, he greets visitors with an easy smile and the confidence of someone who's seen enough of the world to know that almost everything eventually becomes a good story.

He settles into a hand-carved chair as thousands of glass eyes stare back from every direction.

Outside his home's picture windows, Wyoming stretches toward the horizon.

Inside, a crocodile lounges across the stone floor on a wooden peg leg Bonander built after discovering the reptile had lost one of its own. A leopard crouches from an upper ledge. A rhinoceros stands nearby. Cape buffalo from Zimbabwe and antelope from Africa fill every corner.

[{"type":"text","text":"Elephant feet have become leather-covered stools. "}]

"My trophy room doesn't mean anything to anybody else," he said. "But to me, I could sit out here with a drink and just daydream about each and every animal and the hunt. Every one of them I can replay in my mind."

[{"type":"text","text":"For Bonander, the room isn't about what he killed."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"It's about where life took him."}]

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Adventure Calls"}]

[{"type":"text","text":"Bonander was raised to wander. "}]

Growing up in Bozeman, Montana, he spent weekends hunting, fishing and camping with his two younger brothers. He shot his first deer at 8 years old and, by 14, was hunting on his own.

One snowy afternoon, after following a wounded deer farther than he realized, he became hopelessly lost in the Montana backcountry. Darkness settled in. Panic followed.

Sit down. Think. Figure out where you are. 

He found his bearings and walked himself home, carrying a lesson that would stay with him for the rest of his life.

That same willingness to venture into the unknown has followed him since. 

After earning a construction engineering degree from Montana State University and serving as a military police dog handler at a nuclear missile site in Washington, Bonander moved to Casper.

[{"type":"text","text":"Five years later, he gambled on himself."}]

In 1982, armed with just $260 and a willingness to outwork everyone around him, he started Intermountain Pipe. Delivering casing to drilling rigs around the clock, he built what would become one of Wyoming's premier oilfield pipe companies.

His son now runs much of the business, but Bonander still comes to the office most days.

[{"type":"text","text":"Fifty years of experience, he says, is hard to replace."}]

Building a successful company satisfied the engineer in him, but it never quieted the explorer.

For years, he devoured books about Africa before finally deciding to take "just one" safari.

[{"type":"text","text":"\"I thought I'd get it out of my system,\" he said."}]

Instead, he was planning the next trip before the airplane carrying him home had even landed. He returned to Africa more than 30 times. 

Over three decades, Bonander has hunted in countries stretching from Zimbabwe and Botswana to Tajikistan, Australia, Argentina, Scotland, Croatia and New Zealand.

[{"type":"text","text":"What keeps drawing him back?"}]

"The adventure," he said. "Getting to see new people, new places, new things."

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Killer Elephant "}]

[{"type":"text","text":"Bonander never planned to hunt an elephant."}]

In 2002, he traveled to Zimbabwe hoping to pursue Cape buffalo and plains game when camp received word that a villager had been killed by a rogue bull elephant.

Years earlier, someone had tried to kill the animal with an AK-47. Instead, the bullets shattered its shoulder, destroyed much of its trunk and left it crippled. The elephant survived, but according to Bonander, it had become dangerously aggressive.

"It was missing a foot and a half of its trunk, and it was mean," Bonander said. "He wanted to kill people."

Zimbabwe wildlife officials asked whether Bonander wanted to help remove the elephant.

Trackers followed fresh prints through thick brush until they found the bull drinking from a sandy riverbed. Carrying a borrowed century-old .470 Nitro Express double rifle, Bonander eased to within about 35 yards.

[{"type":"text","text":"His first shot struck the elephant's shoulder."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"The bull spun."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"His second shot hit the opposite shoulder."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"The elephant staggered another 20 yards before collapsing."}]

For Bonander, it underscored something many Americans don't often see: in parts of Africa, hunting is also wildlife management. Dangerous animals, crop raiders and aging bulls are sometimes removed under government authority to protect both people and habitat.

[{"type":"text","text":"Nothing went to waste."}]

Villagers butchered the elephant where it fell, carrying the meat home to feed their families.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Accidental Giraffe "}]

By then, Bonander had hunted hippos, rhinoceroses, lions, elephants and more antelope species than he can easily count.

[{"type":"text","text":"One animal never interested him much."}]

The giraffe towering over his living room today wasn't his idea, he says, but his brother's.

"Mean old giraffes," as Bonander describes them, can become a problem too. As they age, dominant bulls sometimes attack and kill younger males competing for mates, making them candidates for wildlife management hunts.

[{"type":"text","text":"\"He talked me into it.\" "}]

The brothers stood shoulder to shoulder, counted to three and squeezed the triggers together.

[{"type":"text","text":"Later, they discovered their bullets had landed barely an inch apart."}]

Casper's Rick Bonander went to Africa once "to get it out of his system." Thirty-two trips later, the 74-year-old has tracked lions, hunted a man-killing elephant, took on a three-legged crocodile, and filled his home with memories from six continents.

Daily Smile: Friday, September 8, 2023

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