Shatner Rules

bring?” He suggested ham. And for some reason, my mind leapt to wild boar! I didn’t want a piece of meat in a can you had to open with a key. I wanted a slab of meat on the hoof you had to kill with an arrow!
    I must admit, for some reason Thanksgiving and danger sometimes go hand-in-hand with me. In recent years, my family has been witness to William Shatner’s Thanksgiving Blastoff. And no, “blastoff” is not something having to do with bowel abnormalities. It refers to my fondness for deep-fried turkey.
    Deep-fried turkey is the most delicious turkey I’ve ever tasted. The oil sears the skin, so the oil doesn’t go into the meat. Amazing! The only problem is, the specific gravity of a turkey and the amount of oil you should have for the boiling period is never carefully calculated.
    You don’t want to have too little oil, because any turkey above the oil line won’t cook. You’ve got to completely immerse the twenty-pound turkey in boiling oil, heated by an open propane flame below. So you don’t want too much oil. Do you see the potential problem?
    Every year I could be seen sprinting, in my shorts and sandals, away from a plume of flame, a trail of liquid fire leading to our house, my fork in one hand, oven mitt in the other.
    Elizabeth eventually destroyed my deep fryer. She didn’t sell it. She didn’t donate it. She didn’t leave it out on the curb—she destroyed it. She decided that William Shatner’s Thanksgiving Blastoff would never again claim another victim with its fiery deliciousness.
    So in 1969, in the fine tradition of Shatner Thanksgiving danger, I chose to hunt and kill a wild boar for the Francis family and their guests. I grabbed my bow and arrow, hired a guide, and took off to San Clemente. I noticed my guide had a .45 strapped to his side, explaining, “If things get really bad, I’ll use the gun.”
    My guide, the expert, had a gun, and I had a bow and arrow. It then occurred to me:
What the hell am I thinking?
    Perhaps it was a control issue? My marriage had crumbled, my job had ended, and my daughters were living somewhere else.
    Perhaps my desire to go out and hunt my own food was a primal urge to control my destiny, my survival. But once I got out to the island, I began to think that a safer way to act out my primitive man urges would be to rediscover fire or paint a picture of a horse on a cave wall.
    So I’m trudging, and slightly trembling, around the island, and before long a massive male boar emerges from the underbrush. A giant. I pull back the string on my compound bow, aim, and release the bolt. A direct hit!
    A hunting arrow works with three cutting blades, and your prey bleeds to death. You lodge an arrow into an animal, and then you don’t move. You sit down and wait for an hour, for nature to take its course, for the animal to bleed out.
    (NOTE: When hunting with a bow and arrow, bring a book. Or, if you have a sense of irony, a copy of
Vegetarian Times
.)
    Unfortunately, no one hipped my pig to the whole “fall and slowly die” thing.
    After the hit, he took off into the underbrush, my arrow in his massive flank. My guide ran after the beast. I stood there for a second, surprised, not sure what to do. It was then that I noted an entire pack of wild boar had emerged from the bushes, some even bigger than the one I hit. The guy with the .45 was gone, and I ran after him as fast as I could.
    The guide came running back to me and said, “The pig went through this hole.” There was a very neat—and small—tunnel in the underbrush.
    He said, “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’m going to go around this brush. I’ll go around and get to the other side; you go in and flush him out.”
    Before I could say, “Maybe I could borrow that .45 for my flushing,” he was gone.
    And I was crawling through the densest thicket, being pricked and poked, breathing in earthy air, my bow and arrow over my shoulder. Even if the pig did come charging after me, there would be no way to arm the bow and use it.
    I was a sitting duck for a wounded pig and my goose would soon be cooked, or something like that.
    Luckily, it turned out the beast had just made it out of the tunnel of brush, collapsed, and died. All my apprehension and terror was quickly replaced with the joy of the kill.
    We field dressed the pig right then and there. I gave the guide a share of the meat, and headed back to Los Angeles. I dropped the kill off with Al Francis, and the wonderful and warm