Back to the U.S.S.R.
               Copyright (C) 1987-1995 Ted Holden


             Prologue (A Redneck's Prayer)

             Barney Johnson set out to be
             the nemesis of the KGB.
             Through sorcery, he lost his ass,
             and many a lonely year did pass;
             he wandered the earth alone.

             His solitary peregrinations
             through troubled lands and alien nations
             led him at last to a shelter crude,
             a man of great wisdom, sagacious, shrewd,

             who through erudition and mystical art,
             using dogs tails, bats wings and a chicken's heart,
             incantations and chemistry,
             ended the curse, set the poor redneck free.

             "I'll return to the land... to my farm" thought he,
             "But somehow, someday, Lord grant me,
             satisfaction, and what might be
             vengeance upon that wretched shaman...
             to shoot the moon at the KGB...
             in the name of the Father, Son, Holy Ghost...

                           AMEN."





Boris was one of the smart little brown bears commonly seen
with the Moscow Circus, who had defected while on a tour of
Chicago and taken up residence in the woods around Flint
Michigan.  As our tale begins, Boris is seen attempting to
adjust to a peculiar set of dietary problems resulting primarily
from his being the only bear in the forest.



"Erf!, too much sugar in girl-scout cookies", thought Boris,
"bear have to filch onions to kill taste.  Redneck keep drobavik
loaded with rock salt, dangerous;  maybe bear be lucky and him
be asleep..."



Aside from communism, nothing in the world got old Barney
Johnson any madder than members of the natural order
disrespecting his garden plots.  "Son of a bitch!!!"  shreiked
Barney, "God-dammed bear's in mah onions again..."  Barney
pulled his trusty Ruger 12 guage over and under down from the
wall, loaded both chambers with his rock-salt hand-loads, ran
out onto the porch, and took deadly aim...



BLAM!!!  BLAMM!!!!!!



"Take that, you theivin varmint!!!"  



YIiiii!!!!,  Erf!   Erf!,  Erf!!...



Actually, Boris had been poised in a kind of a sprinter-start
position while filching the onions and had gotten a pretty good
start before the first shot;  he had cought only a couple of
stray pieces of rock salt in his back side.  The little brown
bear ambled liesurely along the nature trail through the park
area.



This time, the forest rangers had used a metal sign so that
Boris couldn't claw it to pieces and they had nailed it to one
of the biggest oak trees in the park so that he couldn't pull it
up.  The sign read:



                Please Do Not Feed the Bear
              By Order of the Forest Service



"And this is supposed to be free country!" thought Boris, "Son
of a bitch!  Maybe if bear pee on tree every day for next year,
tree die!"  Boris suited action to the thought and then, tired
from what had been an over-strenuous morning, Boris stretched
out across the trail and fell off into a mid-morning ursine nap.
 



In dreams, Boris was not a 400 lb. Russian brown bear at all,
but as fine a 1500 lb. silvertip grizzly as ever you might see. 
A grizzly bear gets respect.  In dreams, there were no scruffy
looking twelve and thirteen-year-old girl scouts making Boris do
circus stunts for girl scout cookies.  In fact, Boris was seated
on a throne every bit as splendid as that of Ivan IV (Grozniy)
in the center of a forest glade, surrounded by
twenty-two-year-old show girls from Vegas who were feeding him
smoked salmon and caviar, stroking his fine silver and brown
fur, and scratching him behind the ears.  The sign on the tree
read:



              Do Not Neglect to Feed the Bear
         By Order of U.S. Dept. of the Interior



A representative of Paramount Pictures was drawing up a
contract for a new film featuring <BEAR and Schwarzenegger>, and
John T. Nerdheim, the head forest ranger for the park, looking
deathly thin and scraggly, was chained to a smaller oak tree on
the far side of the clearing.  The sign on the tree read:



             Do Not Feed the Forest Ranger
                 By Order of the Bear



"Please, Mr. Bear", the ranger cried, "a few scraps from your
table...  I havent eaten in days..."  



"Gosudar Medvyedz" to you, turkey!" replied Boris.



"Yes, Lord Bear..." replied the ranger.



Boris ordered a servant to throw the ranger a bone and the
ranger began to gnaw the bone, much to the amusement of tzar
Boris and his court.



It thus happened, that when girl scout troop 67 found Boris, he
was snoring and woofing and smiling a kind of a far-away, happy
smile, the picture of contentment.



"Look at him, smilin and thinkin bout how he ate up poor ol
Miss Ainsley, the Lout!!", said Sally, "I'll bet a good swift
kick will fix that!"



WHUMP!!!!



"WHUFFF!?!?"  Boris turned a flip in the air before he landed.



"You villian!" shrieked little Sue-Ann Johnson, "You ate up
poor old Miss Ainsley and we find you lying here smiling about
it.  It'll be a cold day in hell before you get any more girl
scout cookies to eat!"



"Whoof??"



"Screw the girl scout cookies." said Janie ' "I'm gonna buy the
old redneck 50 lbs of rock salt an show him all of the little
nerds hidin places!"



"Mercy!" shrieked Boris.  "Bear not eat scout mistress...
scout mistress give bear cookies then go off into forest after
mushrooms.  Bear risk life stealing onions to kill sugar taste
then take nap... scout mistress still gone?"



"He SMELLS like onions sure enough, WHEW!" said Janie, tossing
the bear a pack of Wrigley's spearmint.  "We've been lookin all
morning and we ain't seen hide nor hair o' Miss Ainsley, an
we're afraid to go much deeper into the forest."



"Girl scouts go home." replied the bear.  "Bear see if can
figure what happen to scout mistress."



The girl scouts departed, and Boris set off along the trail
into the deep part of the forest, and then the trail into the
REALLY deep part of the forest, following Miss Ainsley's scent. 
At length he came upon a mushroom patch, signs of a struggle,
and three sets of tracks and scents going off into the dark
interior of the forest;  only one track, obviously, was the
scout mistress'.  "Uh-oh!" thought Boris, "trouble... bear not
like direction this taking...".



The little bear steeled his nerves.  Several really bad
collections of villians lived in the interior of the forest, and
even the FBI didn't care to venture there.  The sense of danger
was palpable.  There was an almost overwhelming instinct to turn
back, to flee and, then again, there was the picture of Janie
Mitchell buying 50 lbs of rock salt for Barney Johnson.  The
bear continued.  He reached the interior of the forest around 9
o-clock that evening, and climbed a mossy ridge overlooking the
single trail which cut through.  There was a half moon
overlooking the clearing below, and Boris could see a row of
little cottages, trailers, and a couple of somewhat larger
buildings.  The bear sniffed and trembled involuntarily;  he
knew he would have to get a closer look.



Boris crept to the near end of the little business district
where a bulletin board of sorts hung from a battered sign post. 
A poster thumb-tacked into the board read:  



             "Week of June 17-23, Kidnapping Contest,
                    Prizes to be Announced".



Boris crept behind the first trailer and began eavesdropping:
"You call yourselves criminals!!!" shreiked the voice from the
inside, "those ass-hole simian-liberation-army creeps come back
with the nation's top newspaperman's daughter and you bring me a
school-teacher out in the woods lookin for mushrooms???!!! 
Mother of God!, what's it gonna take..."  



"Jeesh, we're sorry, Boss, we thought she was somebody else..."



Boris listened a while, then sneaked over behind the next
building:  "Listen, I know we gotta keep up the image an' at
least produce somethin, but there just aint no reason we can't
combine business with the fun an games...  da heroin business
ain't gonna last forever, an nobody in our generation seems to
know nothin at all about da newer kinda merchandise;  dat's real
bad... aint nobody gonna stay in business very long dat way.  I
wants youse guys to kidnap two o dem scientists from dat white
bildin on da west side o da big fort.  Dem's scientists workin
on psychiatric warfare projeks, an dat means mind alterin
chemicals, and dat means big bucks, an I don wanna hear no
excuses or anudder word about it!  Get packin!!!"



Boris watched the two gangsters drive off on the dirt road and
then noticed, floating in a faint breeze from a pole attached to
the next building, the most hated symbol in all of creation: 
the hammer and sickle of the International Communist Party.  

"Goofy rotten bastards!" thought the little bear, "forest ranger
only try to starve bear, these lunatics try to starve whole
world...", 



The little bear began to growl and snarl, and whuf
involuntarily, staring at the flag, until a couple of red-dragon
Tong members walked out of the trailer off to the far corner of
the clearing and one of them cried:  "Look at the goofy bear,
sitting there snarling at that asshole commie flag, can you
believe that??  They say bear steaks are good, go get a rifle!!"



Boris didn't wait.  He high-tailed it over the ridge and back
through a couple of hundred yards of underbrush through which he
figured neither humans or dogs might follow him very easily, and
then off into the high country behind the dirt road and the
clearing into far areas.  At length, he crossed one too many
hillcrests at top speed and tumbled headlong down a ravine into
the open backdoor of the humble abode of, you guessed it, Barney
T. Johnson, where a hand of stud poker was in progress.  Boris
lay collapsed in a heap on the kitchen floor.  Several cousins,
nephews, and acquaintences of Barney's look on in amazement.



"Stakes here are a mite high fer a bear." said Barney's cousin
Hubert.  



"If'n ya needs onions that bad, I'll give you a couple
handfuls", said Barney.





"Communists and hoodlums kidnap schoolmarm!!!!" said the bear,
"Rednecks help bear rescue??"



"Say WHAT!?" queeried Barney.



"What the little varmint's tryin to tell ya" said Barney's
nephew Jerry, "is that the commies an razboyniki done gone an
kidnapped Miss Ainsley!! "



"Son of a Bitch!" shrieked Barney, "Time's a wastin!"  Rifles
and other instruments of destruction, much of it stockpiled
after the Korean conflict, came out from cases on the far wall,
and a motley posse took up the trail.  What might have seemed an
overly complex situation actually evolved into a fairly routine
application of marine tactics.  A monstrous diversion was
created on the far-side of gangster-haven using dynamite and
incindiaries.  Miss Ainsley was taken from an otherwise empty
trailer by a Johnson nephew, much gunfire was exchanged between
gangsters and rednecks, with the gangsters getting by far the
worst of it, and communists running out the door of the trailer
with the red flag were heaved one by one into an adjacent dipsy
dumpster by a pair of brown furry arms.



The little bear slammed the lid down on the dumpster, latched
it, urinated on it, and then pushed it over the edge of the
ravine on which it had been perched.



"You really hate them assholes, don'cha?" querried Barney
Johnson, as the poker game recommenced, Boris and Miss Ainsley
now joining in.  Boris whoofed and nodded affirmation, and
munched on an onion from a plate of onions which had been placed
in front of him.  Barney continued: "Truth is, I can't work up a
whole lotta emotion over your run-o-the-mill communist anymore, 
but there's ONE particular communist I'd some kinda like to get 
my hands on..."



Barney produced a recent copy of Soviet Life.  On page 57 was
an article concerning a farming district in Soviet Central Asia
in which it hadn't rained in two and a half years, and a
desperation effort by an agricultural agency which, having tried
everything else to no avail, was attempting to use the services
of a notorious Mongolian shaman to produce rain.



"You ever hear bout this gentleman?", queeried Barney.  The
little bear stared at the picture of Teb-Tengri Houlihan, and
snarled, an utterly vicious look in his eyes.



"Bad character..." replied the little bear, "use bears and
other innocents for experiments.  Redneck want revenge on
shaman, bear help."



The bear spent the next three months teaching Barney Johnson
enough Russian to survive in the CCCP, and one chilly morning in
late September, the internationally acclaimed animal trainer,
Barney T. Johnson, and one of his trained bears, were off on an
Aeroflot flight for a tour of the mother land.



The forest rangers' meeting which took place the following
Tuesday was not pleasant.  One of John Nerdheim's regional
supervisers was in town and in attendance...  highly unusual.  



"I don't care WHAT the hell you think the other problems
involve!" screamed the superviser.  "That bear was eighty
percent of our revenues.  You, my friend, are booked on a
nine-o-clock flight to Russia!!!"



"You gotta be kidding!!"



"No kidding, no shit!!  Get packing!!!"



"Day slovo!" (Give me the password!) shouted the border guard.



"U Lenina buil tretmetrnij stolb!!,"(Lenin had a 12" dick!) replied
Barney Johnson, a smile of accomplishment on his face.  The
guard waved Barney and the little bear through.



Barney and Boris had found their destination with relative
ease;  not so John T. Nerdheim, Forest Ranger.  The flight to
Moscow had been routine enough, but not speaking Russian had
created problems after that, and the small plane he ended up on
flew him to the tiny and isolated outpost of Ibult, in the far
reaches of Southern Siberia.  



"You're luckier than hell you found anybody here who speaks
English at all!" the clown was telling him.  "This is a circus
town, a training area for one of our big circuses in fact, and I
really hate to tell you this, but that flight comes in and out
of here about twice a year, if we're lucky...  You say you're
looking for a bear?  There's about thirty of em' over in that
tent.  You're going to need something to keep your time occupied
until that plane comes back, if it ever does, and we do need an
assistant with the bears about now.  Last fellow had the job got
a mite slow feeding em' and I'm afraid they got impatient and
ate im'."



A huge throng of people had gathered.  TV cameras were
everywhere, and the scene resembled nothing so much as that of a
huge rock concert.  Teb Tengri was in rare form;  chemical fires
blazed on the stage, lightning flashed in the sky, storm clouds
were everywhere, but still no rain.  It was as if God almighty
had decreed that no matter what else happened, it would never
rain in this region again.  Teb stopped to catch his breath,
drenched in perspiration.  



"You've forgotten something..." came an unexpected suggestion from
the crowd.  You've left out one ingredient!.



"And who the hell are you, and where are you from??", querried
the Shaman, eyes now on the newcomer, and on a brown bear which
stood next to him.  



"I'm from Michigan, ess-sha-ah, replied the stranger,
an' I've come to return somethin' o yours!"  and suiting actions
to words, Barney produced a 15 mm bolt from his jacket pocket
and hurled it onto the stage, where it clattered at the
horrified Shaman's feet.



"I'm gonna' show you somethin' you probably never thought you'd
see..." continued Barney Johnson:  "There's one key ingredient
to any rain ritual, and you've left it out!" and, again suiting
actions to words, Barney dropped his drawers and mooned the
shaman.  The audience went wild, and all in attendance noticed
that a light rain had begun.  Then the bear bent over and mooned
the shaman;  it began to rain somewhat harder.  And then the
entire audience got the idea and mooned the shaman, and it began
to rain like it hadn't rained since Noah.  Everybody was in a
delirium of happiness except for Teb-Tengri Houlihan.  



In the Soviet Union, when something works, which is rare
enough, they stick with it.  Since that day, whenever a
particular province has been in dire need of rain, Teb Tengri
Houlihan has been ordered to do his rain ritual on stage while
the audience moons him, and he thinks about Barney Johnson a lot
these days.



Barney and Boris toured the CCCP for several months, had dinner
with Michael Gorbachov, and returned to heros' welcomes at flint
Michigan.



"Ey, Malchik!!  Prineci vodu, skoryeh!!" (Hey BOY!  Bring me that
pail of water and make it snappy!" the big brown bear yelled at
John T. Nerdheim, and the forest ranger ran for the pail.  "The
pay ain't much..." the clown yelled after the ranger, "but the
food's a mite better than most of us get.  You get everything
the bears leave over!"


                            FINIS