GATHERERS ARRIVING DAILY

(Montrose) The airport, no sooner back to normal with the last of the out-of-towndeer and elk hunters vamoosing, is now inundated with another nightmare  anthropological group. This year the annual migration of rifle totters is accentuated by the presence of more than 100,000 gatherers.

The gatherers, the secondary component to the ancient order of humankind, have long been linked to hunters, making up a precedent to agrarian sects, Sumerian brew masters and the more sophisticated Puritan-Abolitionist-Yankee Insurance Linkage Conspiracy.

The gatherers, a rough, hungry looking pack of beggars, wasted no time in their struggle to feed themselves and their shabby offspring. Roots, berries, small trees and shrubs fell before the mighty onslaught. Later in the afternoon the barbaric hordes confiscated parking bunkers, lights, road signs, county commissioners and even bits of asphalt before moving on to high country redoubts along the Uncompahgre Plateau, rainy Dry Creek and the painfully crooked Straights of Colonese Guinea.

“Frankly we’re happy to have these folks around this time of the year,” quipped Melvin Toolini, executive director of the Chief Colorow Soil Conservation District. “Not only do they haul out a lot of debris but they keep the hunters in check.”

Gatherers, associated with hunters since before Freud, are quieter and usually far more sober than the average orange-clad meat seeker. They travel in small bands (often without a decent bass player), shadowed by teeming ox carts crammed full of everything from discolored banana peels to rusty snuff cans to impartial elk droppings to soggy balls of string to curious Spam tins to discarded passages of the United States Constitution.

“We observed one hunched-over gatherer attempting to digest the Bill of Rights just the other afternoon on Simms Mesa,” said Toolini, “but the federals happened by, and with the aid of complacency, succeeded, in driving the madman off into the dark Forest of Illiteracy.

For the uninitiated, the Constitution and Bill of Rights are very dangerous documents that, falling into the wrong hands, could threaten our way of life here in Corporate America. Recreational application of this kind of propaganda usually leads to heroin use.

The gatherers are expected to remain in the region until everything is gathered. Then they will move to the Confront Range where their massive warehouses are located.

– Kashmir Horseshoe