My brother-in-law, Dave, hunts pheasant and deer. A week before hunting season, a gigantic new store for outdoorsman opened, and Dave took me along for a quick shopping trip. The store looks like one of those giant rustic log hotels you see in the national parks. It is made out of immense peeled logs, 60 or 70 feet long, as thick around as one of the oddly, prissily clean, brand spanking new pick-up trucks in the parking lot. The building almost screams “Teddy Roosevelt Slept Here,” except for the fact that it was obviously built yesterday. The testosterone is still wet.

Massive, 12-point deer heads hang along either side of the main aisle, which leads to 40-foot-tall manmade mountain in the center of the gigantic store. Climbing the mountain is a mini Noah’s Ark of stuffed animals from raccoon to grizzly, from big-horned sheep to a giant sloth. It had everything except Bigfoot.

“Why is it that being stuffed and mounted is good enough for a grizzly, but not good enough for, say, grandpa?” I asked Dave. “I miss the old guy, but I’ve never visited his grave. Now I’m thinking, why did we spring for a stone when for the price of a mid-range coffin we could have had him stuffed and put in the TV room? I think he’d go as well with our dÇcor as any stuffed elk or mountain goat.” Dave said nothing. He has learned not to listen to me.