Retch Sweeney and I were taking a lunch break from pheasant hunting, our backs propped against fence posts on the edge of a stubble field. Suddenly, Retch's  sandwich slipped from his fingers. Then he lunged forward onto his belly and began frantically slapping the ground with both hands. Had we purchased the sack lunches anyplace other than Greasy Gert's Gas 'n' Grub, I might not have been so alarmed. 
   'Quick, tell me!" I yelled at him.       
   "Was it the ham-on-rye or the egg salad?"
   Retch got slowly to his feet.  'Dang! Missed him!"
   "Who?" I said, wondering about the possible hallucinogenic effects of egg salad.
   "A grasshopper," he said, picking up the sandwich and dusting it off.  "Biggest dang grasshopper I've ever seen.  The brookies up at the beaver pond wouldn't have been able to resist him."
  "Oh," I said. " A grasshopper ."
  "Yeah. Hoppers are probably the best brookie bait there is. Too bad they're so hard to catch. You'd think somebody would invent a machine for catching them."  A grasshopper-catching machine! The mere mention of such a contraption drew me back into the mists of time.
   "Oh, no!" Retch groaned. "I hate it when you get drawn back into the mists of time. I'm gonna take a nap."
   The mists cleared. I was a boy again, running, lunging, and careening about our back pasture with Crazy Eddie Muldoon. The old woodsman Rancid Crabtree hunkered in the shade, shouting orders. 
  "Thar's a big'un landed on thet weed behind ya," Rancid yelled at me.  "Gol-dang! You missed him. You got to be quick if yer gonna catch hoppers. Listen to what Ah'm tellin' ya now, or we's gonna be too late to do any fishin'. How many's you caught?"
   "Six altogether ," Crazy Eddie said. "But that's counting two that sneaked out of the jar when we were putting another one in."
   "What we gonna do with three measly grasshoppers?" Rancid yelped. "You fellas jist ain't quick enough."
  I held up the quart jar and peered in at the four measly grasshoppers. They stared back, their eyes filled with accusation.
  "You'd think there'd be an easier way to catch hoppers," I said.  Crazy Eddie looked at me.
   "Say, I've got an idea!"
   "Forget it," I said. Already that summer I'd had too many narrow escapes as the result of Eddie's ideas.
   "But this is a great idea," he cried. "We can build a grasshopper trap!"
   Rancid dismissed the idea with a wave of his hand.  "Wouldn't work. Ain't no way you could make a trap small enough to clamp on to a hopper's foot."
   "Not that kind of trap," Eddie said. He then went on to explain his idea to Rancid and me. It was dumb, probably the dumbest idea Eddie had ever had, and maybe even dangerous, if the completed contraption bore any resemblance to Crazy Eddie's other inventions. I was thankful that for once a mature adult was on hand to point out the risk and stupidity of such an idea.
    "Sounds good to me," Rancid said. "Let's go over to maw place and build it."
   Rancid's place, occupying a ragged clearing in the woods at the foot of Big Sandy Mountain, consisted of a pine-slab shack with a rusty stovepipe askew on the roof and various big-game skulls, antlers, and moldering hides decorating the exterior walls. It was not unattractive. A bullet hole in a window had been preserved as a memento of the time an off hand shot had been fired from inside the shack at a bobcat prowling among the junk cars in the yard, the sneaky beast no doubt intent on stealing one of the wrecks. Contributing to the overall aesthetic effect, ghosts of slain skunks haunted the air of the Crabtree estate, effluvial evidence of the owner's vocation of trapping. The odor of skunk, however, seemed but a gentle wafting fragrance to anyone working in close proximity to Rancid, a situation in which I soon found myself.  I struggled to hold in place a final piece of the grasshopper trap while the sweating old woodsman hovered above me, stretching and twisting strands of baling wire.
   "Whew!" I gasped.
   "Gettin'tard?"
   "Nope. Wheweee! How much longer?"
   "Jist about got her done.  Thar!" Rancid stepped back, snapped his suspenders, and proudly surveyed the grasshopper trap. "Now ain't thet purty!"
   "Super neat!" cried Crazy Eddie.