In my Walter Mitty-ish life as a columnist I have sold newspapers at high noon in a chicken costume (because of a lost Super Bowl bet), died a grizzly death on stage as a standup comic (big surprise), come in dead last in a raw onion-eating contest (thank goodness), become a nationally published cartoonist for a day (”;Bizarro,”; July 2006) and convinced the federal government to give me exclusive legal ownership of three words (Get Life On). But my latest incarnation may become my most exciting: Bounty Hunter.

That's right, Dog Chapman, this humor columnist is now a registered bounty hunter. But my quarry is not some guy whose picture is on the post office wall, it's anyone rich enough to buy an oceanfront house in Hawaii. I'm huntin' rich people, baby.

It came about when I saw a blurb in my colleague Carol Chang's Midweek column about a woman who wants to speed up the sale of a house by offering a $100,000 bounty to anyone who refers a successful buyer to her.

It sounded like a unique way to get people to look at a house in a bad real-estate market and a little bit on the not-so-legal side, so I called the seller, Linda Harris of Kailua, for a chat.

She assured me that offering a referral bounty was completely legit and she should know. Her husband is a professor of business at the University of Hawaii and she is an adjunct professor there.

“;A person can collect a bounty one time in a year,”; she told me. Any more than that and you are running afoul of real estate laws, she said.

Harris has watched the value of a large oceanfront house her family owns in Hauula dive like a booby with its butt on fire, from $2.3 million to $1.7 million. But they need to sell the place and figure offering a hundred-grand bounty might raise some interest. It certainly got mine. They are not only offering a $100,000 bounty on the Hauula house, but also for a 38-acre lot on the Big Island.

The question is, why not wait until the market comes back?

“;We're ready to retire,”; she said. “;We don't want to wait. We want financial freedom ... the reality is that when the economy is bad ... you just have to eat it.”;

The Hauula house is 20,000 square feet on a 35,000-square-foot lot bordered by a stream on one side and the ocean on the other. It has everything you'd expect in a house you and I can't afford ... a redwood great room with 20-foot-high ceilings, marble baths, spectacular views, attached cottage, etc.

But to qualify for the bounty you have to register with the Harrises (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)) so that they are protected from multiple parties claiming the bounty. Once registered, you are ready to beat the bushes looking for millionaires. As a newbie real-estate bounty hunter, I'm finding millionaires looking to buy houses kind of thin on the ground. But you never know. And being a bounty hunter can't be any more embarrassing than wearing a chicken costume in public, dying on stage or losing an onion-eating contest.