The Big Sandy Mountaineer -

It was a hot July much like this one and Bee Lucke was spending some vacation time at our cabin on Clear Creek. It was too hot to fish but it was not too hot to drink beer so Bee had consumed his share and then some as the week progressed.

Bee was planning a big feed for some of his friends on a Friday night during the week in question. He wanted to have a mulligan or spaghetti and meatballs or even steaks. Remember this was just the very beginning of people actually barbequing their meat outside in a barbeque that they had bought at the hardware store. So, for cooks like Bee, this was an exciting time just to be alive. Of course he had gotten a spit to go with his barbeque and before you know it, we had a barbeque at home and one at the cabin as well and if he could have figured a way to haul a barbeque to Glacier Park when we went on vacation he would have done that.

As I recall Bee was concentrating on barbequed spare ribs along with beef and pork roasts and of course steaks on the barbeque although he was not at all adverse to getting four of five chickens going round on round on his spit while he painted them with some of the most delicious sauces known to man.

So, Bee Lucke had a lot of cook. Unfortunately, his friends did not want any of those traditional foods. No, they wanted a Rocky Mountain Oyster fry.

That was easy for Bee to say no to because he did not know where to get any of the oysters that seemed very rare except around branding time.

He also did not know quite how to have an oyster fry and then there was the fact that he did not really like eating Rocky Mountain oysters at all.

It was sort of like steak and kidney pie. One start of stream fishing season in May my uncle Al decided to cook a steak and kidney pie for anyone coming by the cabin. I saw one of the Clear Creek cabin owners in Buttrey Foods that week stocking up for the weekend. I asked her if she and her husband were going to have some steak and kidney pie? She said that her husband was a professional man and since he knew all about the function of kidneys, they would not be eating any of them!

That was how Bee was with his oysters.

Fate was against him. One of his friends was a rancher and told Bee that he had a whole freezer full of Rocky Mountain Oysters and he would bring enough for an army if Bee would fry them up.

The dye was cast so to speak. Out came the oysters and Bee looked them over. It was very hot and we did not have room for them in our small refrigerator so Bee told the rancher to put them in a large bowl in the creek and they would stay nice a cool all day long and all night long too. Just like Bee's Budweiser which he kept in the creek too.

So the oysters went into the creek and a poker game went on and on until even the dogs conked out. Finally it was time for bed and everyone who was staying overnight got some sleep in a hot, hot night.

That Friday morning, Bee went down to more closely examine the Rocky Mountain Oysters which he did not care to admit, but he did not have an idea of how to fry them up. Imagine his surprise when there were no Rocky Mountain Oysters left in the large bowl at all. When asked about where they could have gone, Bee told his rancher friend that there had been a skunk nearby and He bet that the skunk and the little skunks had a Rocky Mountain Oyster feed while the poker game was going on.

Francis and Laened Black heard of our dilemma and invited all of us to their house where Francis was barbequing one of his famous roasts. Francis would buy a fifteen pound sirloin tip roast, cut off about five steaks and then barbeque the rest. It was wonderful and with Laened's potatoes and salad, well it was a meal to dream about.

After dinner we went back to the cabin and I whispered to Bee, "I think that no regular skunk got those oysters. I think that a two legged skunk named Bee got rid of them because he didn't want to cook them."

Bee looked at me, smiled and took a big sip of his suds!