Hey, Dr.Rob
I was OA too! Made Brotherhood my second year and served as Chapter Chief one year. I got tapped out at Camp Karankawa in South Texas, in the summer, led blindfolded through the snake laden, mosquito infested wilderness for my night alone under the stars when I was a tender 14 years...but that's another story.
After all these gleaming success stories this is a bit embarrassing but what the heck...
A friend of mine, his Dad, my Dad and I decided we were going to "rough it" on a deer hunt when I was 18. We lived in North Alabama at that time and we were going to pack in on horseback along Cotaco Creek, waaaay back, and take nothing but water, coffee, powdered milk, bacon, eggs, flour, grease, iron skillet and, being the "he-men" we all were, we would just kill us some meat!
We hit the trail a little after daylight and kept a sharp eye for squirrels and such on the way in. We ate bacon and eggs for lunch. We went a bit further and found a likely spot and set up camp, hunted about the last 2 hours of daylight. We ate bacon and eggs for supper. Up before daylight next morning for the last of the bacon and eggs. Hunted all day and didn't see anything. Suppertime, after no lunch, and we realize we can't even make biscuits or pancakes with the flour and milk 'cause we ate all the dang eggs.
Up the next morning, hunted half a day, met at camp around noon, shot at a duck swimming down the river (it was a diver and probably best we couldn't hit it), drank the milk and went back hunting. That evening we drank the last of the coffee but we still had grease and water! Next morning we realized you can't do much with grease and water, hunted half a day, came to camp about noon, looked at the horses...nah, we couldn't (but we started to realize why the mountain men always had a pack mule!), really started to get irritated at the two blue jays that had been yelling at us for two days...wait a minute - two shots, two blue jays, cleaned 'em, rolled 'em in flour, fried 'em in grease and ATE 'EM!
Packed our stuff and headed home!
Mikey