I'm beginning to worry about Christopher Columbus. As you may have noticed in recent years, Columbus has slipped badly in the Discoverers-of-America popularity polls.

First, it was the Vikings, or so they say. A good 300 years before Columbus arrived in the New World, Norsemen Eric the Red and his son, Leif Ericson, came to Nova Scotia in Canada. When this news got out, Columbus' standing as a great explorer began to slip.

Now it's the Chinese. Some people in California say that Chinese explorers came to the west coast of North America nearly 100 years before Columbus landed on Hispaniola. I don't recall what kind of archaeological evidence those Californians have found-maybe fossilized egg rolls-but the scientists are convinced that Chinese were here by the early 15th Century. With this revelation, Columbus' stature takes another hit.

Before this sort of thing gets completely out of hand, maybe we should cobble up some history of our own. How about this:

In October 1491, Christopher Columbus and Eric the Rouge (a descendant of Eric the Red) got into an all-night poker game at Gibraltar. The cards weren't falling Eric's way-he was down to his last krone-when Columbus called and raised.

I'll see you with this," Eric said, and tossed a piece of paper on the table.

"What's this?" asked Chris. "It's a deed to North America," Eric explained.

"What's North America?"

"It's a whole new continent, far to the west. My ancestors discovered it two or three centuries ago."

"How come I've never heard of any North America?" Columbus queried, palming a couple of aces off the bottom of the deck.

"We've kept it pretty hushed up," said Eric. "But it's a jumping place. What you got, Chris?"

Columbus turned over four aces, which beat Eric's three deuces. Columbus pocketed the piece of paper and the rest of the story is pretty much the way we've always heard it.

You're thinking, what about the Chinese? Well, it isn't widely known, but Columbus hired a Chinese navigator on the Santa Maria for his first voyage to the New World.

Maybe it didn't happen exactly that way. But my version puts Columbus back in the running, if not as a world explorer, at least as a shrewd poker player.

The swirl of fall buzzards reminds me of a trip I made this spring when hordes of March buzzards spurred me to go over to Blairs Creek to visit my favorite old buzzard of all, Zeke Dooley. He and his wife Perletta are a good excuse for a trip to Shannon County.

I arrived at Zeke's old cabin, half afraid he had passed on, being over a hundred years old. But the thread of chimney smoke greeted me and the sound of my wheels crossing the creek brought the hounds out to circle the car and bay their best. This brought Zeke's wife out from behind the clothesline, where she was hanging up the old man's overalls.

Obviously, Zeke was still home.

ZEKE: Well sir, I had about give you up. I told Perletta, "I believe that writer boy got too puny to winter and has died out on us."

MITCH: I'm just glad to see you two have made it through the winter.

ZEKE: Well I about have to you know, there's always a new generation of youngun's needin' to know how to plant corn and make a crop of it.

PERLETTA: I figured him to go any day, and Ezekel's just afeard no one will know how to set mash to workin' or be able to cook it off after he passes.

ZEKE: Well now, Mother, it's an art form and I don't want my great grandkids to think everbody has to work for the government to get by.

PERLETTA: Zeke'l has took to writin' his memories.

MITCH: I'm sorry Perletta? PERLETTA: I am too.

MITCH: No, I mean I don't think I heard you right. Did you say memories?

ZEKE: That's right. I aim to write down my recollections of how I managed, agin' all odds, to make a livin' in this wolfish country for over a hunderd years as a Ozark farmer.

MITCH: You want to pass on farming tips to the next generation?

PERLETTA: He wants to pass on his recipe for Dooley's double-twisted, bottled-in-the-barn cold and chill cure.

MITCH: A book on how to make moonshine, Zeke? In the year 2004?

ZEKE: Don't reckon you'd know a good literary agent, would you?

MITCH: Zeke, they still arrest people for doing what you want to tell people how to do. You'll have strangers who read your book going to jail.

PERLETTA: See, Ezek'l? I told him he'd ought to keep it in the family.

ZEKE: I can see it as a movie. "Old farmer rejects bureaucracy of modern agriculture, to benefit mankind with cold remedy." Maybe a big shoot out at the end on the farmer's porch.

MITCH: Perletta, how long has he been this way?

PERLETTA: Sixty years that I know of for the contentious part, I'm not but 80, so I've missed some.

MITCH: Zeke, you're a hundred and four and you're imagining a shoot out with bureaucracy?

ZEKE: Kind of romantic, ain't it? Guns a'blazin, still a'blowin sky high, pieces of varmints a'rainin down!

PERLETTA: Well, I guess that's the way he'll go.