Remember a few decades ago when hunting scents and attractants were all the rage? Everybody was using them, and suddenly everybody and his brother was a biochemist. Everyone from college professors to ignorant rednecks got into the bottled-scent business. Everywhere one looked; there was yet another purveyor of odoriferous attraction or camouflage with a product guaranteed to improve your chances of taking game.

On the ignorant redneck side of the coin, my buddy Cletus Monroe was quick to jump on this bandwagon and become a would-be scent tycoon, an entrepreneur of smell, if you will.

Like all get-rich-quick schemes, this one seemed really easy. As in most, however, there were drawbacks. And, like many of his fellow odor vendors, Clete lost not only his shirt, but his britches and jongjohns as well.

I patiently listened to him lament and reminisce about the experience not long ago.

“You know, Hoss, I think maybe it was the name of my business that ruined it,” he mused. “It was just too long, weren’t it?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I replied. “I always thought ‘Slosh This on and Stink Like Somethin’ Good’ actually had a nice little ring to it.”

“You did? Well, how come you reckon it didn’t work out like I planned?”

I spared the boy my real opinion and muttered something about bad luck and that’s the way the ball bounces sometime, but, truth is, he was doomed from the beginning. He got off to a really bad start.

You see, when a man with Clete’s reputation and vocabulary walks into a bank and asks for $50,000 to buy urine and anal musk he’s sort of handicapped right up front. Perhaps if he had been one of those college professors instead of who he was, he would have actually used the words “urine” and “anal” when applying for his loan.

Another problem was the fact that his manufactured products were simply too good. The sweet corn scent he made attracted corn borers and earworms as well as deer, and his fresh pine cover scent brought on Japanese beetle epidemics, rather inconvenient occurrences for a user trying to sit still in a deer stand.

My old friend also had a tough time keeping his formulas separate and his labels straight. He once sold 5000 bottles of skunk essence cover scent that had somehow gotten mixed in with a batch of fresh doe-in-heat lure. The resulting skunkin heat concoction was more than male skunks (and 5000 well-lathered hunters) could stand.

Then there were the field-testing problems. Most glaring was the one that arose when Clete accidentally spilled an entire bottle of undiluted bear-estrus liquid inside the pocket of his hunting coveralls. He was five miles from his truck at the time and smack dab in the middle of the Cohutta Wilderness, way back in the north Georgia mountains. I forget who came out of the woods worse shaken by that incident, Mr. Monroe or the big boar bear that made the pass at him. It’s really not wise to trifle with a he-bear’s affection, even inadvertently.

Most of all, though, old Clete just wasn’t a salesman. Once, at a big outdoor trade show, he had all his wares on display, enthusiastically demonstrating all of his concoctions to any passerby who would stop long enough for a listen and a sniff. In an effort to show off the non-toxic, non-irritating qualities of his human scent eliminator, he had been spraying it directly into his face with no ill effects. He was making a great impression until the last demo, during which he picked up the pump sprayer full of fox urine by mistake.

“Yeah, dadgummit, I remember that,” he said. “I screamed and clawed at my eyes so bad I never sold another bottle of anything the rest of that weekend. You gotta admit, though, that fox wee-wee sure was a good all-purpose cover scent, weren’t it?”

“Yep,” I agreed. “It had a lot of uses alright. Like that time Jo Nell mistook that unmarked bottle for liquid coffee sweetener. By the way, you see much of Jo Nell these days?”

Clete gave a loud groan and fingered the four-inch scar on the back of his head.

“Not much,” he avowed. “Not since she took up with that taxidermist who sewed this up for me. Hey, how ‘bout let’s change the subject and talk fishin’ for awhile.”

(Email Bob Kornegay at cletus@windstream.net)