The first crisp days of Autumn always remind me that it is time once again for hunting season: backpack hunting season, that is. Of course, by “hunting” I don’t just mean going to the store and buying a new backpack–that would be like celebrating the arrival of your elk tag with a trip to the local butcher shop–but instead actually hunting and trapping your very own wild backpack–or, at least, a feral one, since the focus of a backpack hunt is usually none other than bacpackus domesticus, also known as “that backpack I just bought you last year.”
Don’t think for a minute though that feral backpack hunting is any less difficult than stalking and catching one that has been born and raised in the wild; oftentimes, due to the feral backpack’s familiarity with houses and household routines, a feral backpack will be the more elusive of the two. Take, for example, the hunter’s first step: studying the backpack’s habits and preferences in order to get a sense of the most likely location for their prey’s lair. In the case of a wild backpack you will usually be able to find a witness/child who can tell you the answers to questions such as “Where did you last see it?”; “Did it come home from school with you?” and “Did you take it on your last sleepover?”; the feral backpack, however–knowing that a successful answer to any one of these questions will most likely result in its eventual capture–will have made sure to have surrounded its movements in a haze of murky obfuscation, like a squid departing in a puff of ink, so that the most you can expect to get out of any potential witnesses will be an uncertain, “Um, maybe…I guess.”
Not that the lack of good eyewitness reports will deter the serious hunter, but it will mean that they will now have to tediously check all the places backpacks have been known to congregate, including underneath the front seat of the car, in a little brother’s room, trampled into a muddy heap next to the swing set, under the bed, and sometimes, in a brilliant piece of reverse psychology, hanging on the hook where they belong.
Of course, once you locate the backpack’s lair you still have to somehow entice it out into the open–another thing that is more difficult with a canny feral backpack than with its wild cousin. Some people believe that this is because some backpacks–most likely the ones owned by children who constantly practice “catch and release” style backpack ownership–have been “caught” so many times they now know every single one of the hunter’s tricks. In fact, sometimes a feral backpack will have become so wise that the only way to recapture it is through the thoroughly unsportsmanlike practice of setting out live bait–usually a new backpack purchased especially for this reason. (The thinking is that when the feral backpack sees the new one it will attempt to bring the domesticated one into its harem, much like mustangs of the open range.)
A slightly less reviled form of “baiting” is to put out a three-week old half-eaten sandwich. While backpacks do not actually consume sandwiches (they live on completed homework assignments and signed permission slips), they are naturally curious creatures whose inquisitiveness will compel them to investigate and hoard the sandwich. (There have been documented case where scientists have found backpacks floating off the coast of Greenland that contained over 400 half-eaten sandwiches, some of them even being liverwurst–a substance that no child has willingly put on their sandwich in the last 75 years.)
Of course, a good backpack hunter also knows that no backpack will stay caught forever; you can no more own a backpack than you can own the Earth. They are, instead, merely borrowed from our children. Or from Staples. Depends on where you shop.