Screw it, We’ll Catch a Marmot Ourselves

After our experience with the sneaky shepherd and Stas the psychotic, Yura and I decide that while the geologists are out in the mountains, we’ll catch a marmot ourselves.

Our plan of attack, after we spot one running into his burrow, to paraphrase Alice in Wonderland, is to “smoke the marmot out.” We start syphoning petrol out of the petrol tank into a bottle to find that one of the main tanks is empty, having been full the night before. It’s a very real possibility that a certain psychotic pseudo Geologist junkie by the name of Stas syphoned out petrol while we were sleeping. We curse and decide to use some of the fuel in the emergency canisters as we’re suffering a lack of meat emergency.

“I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” Yura casually pours in some petrol, lights a cigarette and throws in the match. Meanwhile, I’m standing over one of the other burrows with a big rock to greet the fleeing marmot.

Several minutes pass and no marmot emerges. Either the smoke killed him in his tunnels, never reached him or he escaped out of one of the other forty something burrows within a ten metre radius.

Our hunt is unsuccessful, we’re outsmarted by the pesky marmot and we return to a lunch of canned corn and tuna.

Sitting defeated, the unsuccessful hunters eat corn in silence trying to forget about the fact that their manhood has been challenged and their thirst for marmot blood has not been quenched.