What Strange Creatures
How we'll be seen in 1,000 years
October, 2005

This 110th-anniversary issue of America's oldest continuously published hunting and fishing magazine is already a collector's item. Centuries from now, archaeologists will discover copies carefully preserved in barbershops and beneath the short leg of hunting camp tables across the country. As they study the remains of our culture in these, the final days before our economic collapse and absorption into the Chinese empire as a rural province, what conclusions will they draw about early-21st-century American life? I'm glad you asked.

Our civilization was a mess. Careful excavation (of my house alone) will show that although men of this era possessed the theoretical ability to use sliding-drawer technology, most of us preferred to keep our outdoor gear and everyday clothing strewn randomly over the floor for easy viewing. Bowhunters preferred arrows of as many different length, weight, and fletching configurations as possible, perhaps as a testament to their skills. Guns were thought to shoot better if left uncleaned for years. And any kind of shotgun maintenance was particularly taboo, thought to bring generations of bad luck.

Approximately 75 percent of the U.S. economy depended on revenue generated by hunting gear. Each year, an average sportsman obtained two offroad vehicles, four firearms, three bows, and many times that number of knives and flashlights. These items should have provided years of service but for one surprising characteristic: Sportsmen insisted that they be made in camouflage patterns, so most were lost within hours of the initial purchase, often before the buyer even left the store. Like other great powers, then, the country ultimately collapsed from within. While focused on external threats from men in noncamouflage ski masks, the nation ignored the stupendous cash-sucking power of Realtree Hardwoods HD and Mossy Oak Break-Up at home. Some researchers will theorize that Seclusion Asphalt 4-F, a particularly effective pattern introduced in the culture's last days, might have been secretly developed and imported by our northern rival, the Molson Brewing Co.

There was a great and universal fear of catastrophic flooding. In all but the most mountainous areas, people maintained finely crafted fiberglass boats on wheeled trailers parked just outside their doors and kept in a constant state of readiness: gas tanks full, tangerine-flake finishes buffed to a high gloss, carbonated beverages iced. Boats were not camouflage, but Americans replaced them annually, even if their houses leaked and they were unemployed. They were stocked with salted emergency rations shaped as worms and lizards, their favorite foods, and outfitted with hatches to store water, which had to be continuously reoxygenated in order for people to metabolize it. The fear of deluge will baffle researchers until they come across fragments of the Star, a publication that predicted the future with unerring accuracy. It warned that all the world would be inundated should a temptress named Rosie O'Donnell rise to power.

The wealthiest members of society lived outside urban centers. This rural nobility demonstrated their status by affixing the preserved remains of bass and deer on the walls of their central gathering rooms. Singing electronic largemouths, while rare, were marks of exceptional status. Some excavations will show that when a man married outside his clan, it was the woman who determined whether and where these objects were displayed. In many such cases, the taxidermy was exhibited only in their dwelling's underground recesses.

We believed that whitetail deer and largemouth bass possessed supernatural powers. Shamans placed deer with especially large antlers in the halls adjacent to enormous temples, such as the ones that will be excavated at Springfield, Missouri, and Sidney, Nebraska