The Great Nauga Hunt — Robert James Warner

The Great Nauga Hunt has a curious history I worked for the Long Beach California Fire Department One day in a fire station I forget which one it was I overheard two firemen talking One fireman was telling the other one about a joke he had played on another fireman The joke the fireman said was telling this other fireman that naugahyde was the hide of an animal When I heard this I laughed to myself Who would believe that naugahyde was the skin of a real animal The fireman telling the story was convinced that the fireman he was playing the joke on did not know that naugahyde was a manmade plastic covering I didn t know the fireman who was supposed to believe that naugahyde was the skin of a real animal very well but I thought he was pulling the leg of the fireman who was trying to play the naugahyde joke on him Anyway I don t know who was kidding who but the utter absurdity of anyone believing that naugahyde was the skin of a real animal seemed so completely impossible that I shook my head in disbelief I laughed to myself whenever I thought of this incident I knew instantly that here was a story a story I wanted to tell but how would a writer write such a story How could you invent a character that would be so dumb as to not know that naugahyde was a plastic covering and not the hide of a real animal I didn t know As time went by my mind subconscious began to spit out scenes of a young man who was a hunter such as the ones we used to see in the Tarzan movies and the Jungle Jim stories An innocent gullible young man but a great hunter who belonged to one of those hunting clubs we used to see in movies about Africa of men sitting around in a room with the mounted heads of animals hanging on all of the room s walls usually Englishmen or Europeans Well I wasn t going to write about a bunch of English stuffed shirts I was going to write an American story about Americans even if they were stuffed shirts I ve had enough of insulti