A Missed Call of Nature

I reckon every man who's ever walked God’s green earth has heard the solemn summons known as the call of nature, and when it comes a-knocking, a body better answer promptly, lest he find himself in a fix more public than a camp-meeting sermon.

But there’s a slyer, sneakier cousin to that call, a half-hearted whisper that slips out unbidden and leaves a man standing there looking guilty as a dog that just stole the Sunday ham. Folks with fancy educations call it flatulence, but down along the Carson River we say a feller’s let one loose. And if the call of nature is the full invitation to the privy, then this here is nothing but a missed call—short, sharp, and leaving the recipient wondering who hung up first.

Now, there was a time when old Judge Thaddeus B. Calloway, the most dignified man in the Comstock and twice as full of wind as the Nevada in flood season, got hisself tangled up in one of these missed calls during the annual Fourth of July picnic. The Judge had just risen to deliver a speech about liberty and the Constitution when the culprit escaped him with a report like a small cannon.

The ladies gasped, the children giggled, and the Judge, red as a boiled beet, tried to blame it on a distant lunch whistle. But the wind blew the wrong way, and the evidence floated over the potato salad, leaving no argument.

He stood there sputtering about “atmospheric disturbances” while the whole place knew nature had dialed his number by mistake and hung up before he could say hello.

I asked the Judge, private-like, whether he considered that interruption a proper call or merely a missed one. He glared at me over his spectacles and declared that any gentleman worth his salt answers the real summons with dignity and leaves the false alarms to the lower orders.

Yet I noticed he kept a sharp lookout for empty corners thereafter, and whenever a suspicious noise arose in company he would cough violently and point at the nearest dog.

Truth is, a missed call of that sort is the most democratic thing in creation—it visits the high and the low without regard to bank account or church membership, and it never waits for an introduction. You can dress it up in Latin or pretend it was the floorboards, but the air still carries the message, and every nose in the room is forced to take the call whether it wants to or not.

So next time you feel that urgent ring from down below, answer it properly and head for the woods or the outhouse like a man of sense. But if the line goes dead before you can pick up—well, tip your hat to the mystery, blame the nearest animal, and remember that even nature sometimes dials the wrong number and leaves a man holding nothing but the echo.