This is a not-so-serious tag to episode 3.10, one of my favorites, with mentions of episodes 3.03 (the one with the dinghy — that's dinghy, with an H) and 1.20 (the corpse on the cliff). Happy New Year!
A Walk in the Woods
Steve drove the Camaro toward the parking lot at the trailhead.
"I'm surprised. I never thought you'd go hiking with me again," he told his partner.
Danny Williams thought about his unfortunate outdoor adventures with Steve McGarrett. First they'd gone hiking and found a corpse, ending up with Steve breaking his arm. Then they went fishing and had their boat hijacked by someone they rescued, narrowly avoiding becoming man sushi for a shark. And most recently, they went camping with Grace's Aloha Girls troop, where Danny was shot by a man Steve rescued, Steve was beaten up and Danny's precious daughter was put in danger along with a dozen of her young friends.
"Our trouble magnetism is escalating," Danny grumbled. As much as he complained about Steve attracting trouble, it was a hundred times worse when Grace was put in the line of fire.
"Ours?"
Danny had to admit, he'd never had a lot of luck with the great outdoors even before he met Steve. His childhood best friend had drowned and he had almost drowned in the ocean. He'd been kicked out of scouts after a prank went terribly wrong and left him with a four-inch gash on his head.
Navy SEAL Steve, on the other hand, had spent his adult years in the great outdoors tracking people in order to kill them or avoiding people who wanted to kill him.
When you put their combined outdoor karma together, it made for spectacularly screwed vacations.
"If I'm going to keep ending up in the jungle, I want to know how to survive," Danny said, answering Steve's first question and ignoring the second. "And I don't mean learning how to skin a wild boar with my teeth and fingernails."
Steve pouted.
"OK," Danny relented. "You can teach me that later. I want to know the things I expected you to teach to Grace's friends. To be honest, I hoped to learn survival skills along with them so I wouldn't have to abase myself before your magnificence and ask for lessons."
Steve snorted. "So, what do you want to know?"
"How not to get lost. How to tell which way is north. How to find water and what food is safe to eat. How to track a crazed diamond thief through the woods. I won't always have an Aloha girls troop leader to set me straight," Danny said. "Oh, and how to tell which spiders are poisonous," he added.
"That might take more than one lesson," Steve said, as he parked the Camaro. "But we can start with path finding. Not getting lost is the key to just about everything else."
Because it was midweek, the parking lot was almost empty, just four cars besides the Camaro. One white-haired but spry woman offloaded her backpack into the back seat, then climbed in. Danny and Steve shrugged into their small packs and started toward the trailhead. As they passed the woman's car, she started it — or tried to. The men heard the breathy wheeze of a failed ignition. The headlights flickered faintly.
Dead battery, Steve thought analytically.
We haven't even gotten out of the parking lot! Danny thought in aggravation.
"Excuse me," the woman called. "Could you boys give me a jump?"
The men exchanged a glance. Steve took a step toward the stranded motorist.
Danny frowned. "What did I say about rescuing people?" he demanded
"Yes, but she's an old lady," Steve said.
"She's your mother's age," Danny countered, reminding his partner that ex-CIA agent Doris McGarrett was a force to be reckoned with. "We talked about this," the detective reminded his friend.
"I remember."
"Like we agreed?"
"OK," Steve acquiesced after a moment.
He moved toward the woman. "Do you have jumper cables in the trunk?" he asked.
The woman's eyes tensed. Danny didn't wait to see more.
"Freeze, police!" he yelled, pulling his weapon from a conveniently placed pocket of the backpack.
Steve leaped away and took up a similar stance with his weapon. "Step away from the car," he ordered.
"What's going on?" the old woman asked in a quavering voice.
"What are you guys doing?" demanded a burly man, who was just leaving the trailhead with two of his buddies.
Danny shifted so he could cover them if they attacked and waved his badge. "This is police business. It doesn't concern you."
Steve tugged the woman by the back of her shirt and pushed her against the car so he could pat her down and handcuff her.
"I wasn't doing anything," the woman called. "I just asked for a jump start."
"This is for everyone's protection," Danny said firmly.
"I don't care if you are cops, you can't just manhandle an innocent woman," one of the other men growled.
"Innocent?" Steve asked. He took a peek into the woman's backpack, and then emptied it on the ground. Six hand grenades and an equal number of bricks of C4 tumbled out.
Wide-eyed, the hikers backed off instantly. The woman struggled, developing a deep voice and a decidedly manly vocabulary. "How did you know? How did you know?" he snarled. "I thought this was the perfect place to stash my explosives!"
Danny shook his head. "You asked the wrong guys for help," he explained.
After HPD arrived to take the eco-terrorist away, Steve said, "So, I suppose you'll never go anywhere with me again."
"No," Danny said thoughtfully. "I'm thinking we should do this more often."
"Really?" Steve was surprised, yet pleased.
"Yeah, if we stop being nice and keep our guns handy, we can probably clean up all the crime on Oahu just by taking a walk in the woods."