"Fontenot, Calcasieu and a Revelation"

My grandmother, God rest her soul, was a pistol. Standing barely five feet tall, and weighing but a hair over a hundred pounds, she was without a doubt one of the sharpest, most fiercely independent and toughest persons I’ve ever known. And when I say tough, I mean tough; she could make a car salesman cry.

For the better part of two decades, Grandma took care of things back home while my grandfather served with the Air Force fighting two wars and, later, training to fight the Cold War. With virtually no help from anyone, she raised my mother and her sister into fine young ladies, moving them all over the country at the Air Force’s whim. By the time my grandma was my age, she’d bought and sold more homes and cars than I ever will, and infinitely more shrewdly than I can ever hope to as well.

So while nothing should surprise me about my grandmother’s capabilities and individuality, I was nonetheless taken aback a few months ago when the cover of an issue of Louisiana Sportsman which bore the words, “Rough-Weather Calcasieu Tactics” caught my mother’s eye.

“Oh, your grandma loved fishing Calcasieu,” she offered wistfully.

I must admit that at first I had some difficulty imagining my fiery and diminutive grandmother – who always kept an immaculate home and an even neater appearance – baiting a hook on a sultry west Louisiana day under a long-billed cap, with fish guts and mud under her fingernails.

“Oh, yeah, Grandma loved fishing,” allowed my mother, noticing my face as I processed what she’d told me.

It was 1955 or 1956. My mom was 10 or 11 and my aunt was a couple years older than that. They called Lake Charles home then; my grandfather navigated B-47s for the Strategic Air Command out of Lake Charles Air Force Base (later renamed in honor of Claire Chennault, of Flying Tigers fame).

As a captain, Grandpa was a member of the Lake Charles AFB Officers’ Club. The O-Club was always a very social place (to put it mildly), and, like any good officer and wife, Grandpa and Grandma spent a lot of time there. Over time, they befriended one of the bartenders, a Cajun named Fontenot. Somehow during the course of their interactions, the topic of fishing arose, and Fontenot allowed as how he had a pirogue and would be happy to take them fishing any time.

My grandparents would make the drive from the base out to Fontenot’s every few weekends or so when the fishing was good, and the three would go after speckled trout in and along the bayous off Calcasieu River and Lake Charles. Fontenot called my grandfather “Hebert” – a good-natured variation of his actual name, Herbert, and, according to my mother, my grandfather called Fontenot a damned fine fisherman.

Apparently, Grandma was quite the patient fisher and could sit there all day if she had to. She didn’t mind the alligators and the bugs and the heat – Grandpa would buy Punk skeeter coils from the New Moon Drive-In for their trips – and my mother recalls that she was quite matter-of-fact about baiting her own hook. Grandpa, on the other hand, liked the boating, the fish-cleaning and the macho stuff, but wasn’t all that patient a fisher himself.

So there they sat every few Saturdays, in Fontenot’s pirogue, learning how to catch the speckled trout of Calcasieu, at a time shortly before “Sportsman’s Paradise” graced the State’s license plates, when mostly only locals fished those waters. Grandma in her blouse and shorts, Grandpa in his khaki pants and white undershirt, a few Falstaffs sitting in the pirogue between them.

Every so often when I was a little boy, my grandmother would fish with me off a dock over a bayou near my childhood home in the Florida Panhandle. It was as low-tech as low-tech gets, what with the cut up hot dogs we used for bait. A mess of pinfish and the occasional catfish made for an exciting afternoon. Thinking back on those times all these many years later while my mother stood in my living room and described my grandmother’s love of fishing Calcasieu, it really made a lot of sense to me after all. Naturally, I wanted to hear more.

“I was only 10 or 11 at the time, so I don’t remember much today,” my mother offered. “It sounds weird, but I can vividly recall how a single drip of sweat would bead right on the end of her nose when she hung sheets on the clothes line in our back yard; she would have that same bead of sweat on her nose each time she and Grandpa came back from fishing. And I remember the trout were great eating. But mostly, I remember what a revelation it was to see how much my persnickety mother got into her fishing back then.”

A revelation indeed.



(c) Roger Guilian 2009

"Nothing Quite So Honest"

Back in March, my friend Aaron and I spent a crisp, muted day hunting quail in east Alabama. As far as bird hunting weather is concerned, the day could not have been more perfect. Overcast and cool with nothing more brisk than the occasional light breeze. The ground was still wet from a recent cold front’s thunderstorms. Temperatures in the upper 30s and low 40s reassured us that no matter how tough the hunting got amongst the briars and the brambles, we’d be capable of going until the dogs gave out. A subtle understory of gray, opaque clouds compressed the scene into something close and intimate in the otherwise expansive pastures and pecan orchards where we were to spend our day behind the pointers.

The action got underway quickly as the dogs sniffed out a small covey within moments of being turned loose. Aaron and I lighted from our host’s old Kaiser Jeep, loaded our .20 gauges, and approached from behind the stiffened dogs.

Four shots, four quail. Not a bad way to start the day. While trouncing through the chest-high grass trying to discern where the last bird had gone down, a large-bodied buck deer exploded from its bed in the grass about thirty yards away and bounded to a nearby treeline for safety. Its boisterous appearance and thunderous escape were exhilarating to say the least. I watched transfixed as the buck crossed the large opening between our thicket and the treeline. We’d intruded on its bedding area. It’d lain there as still as a statue for as long as it could tolerate our human odors, the reports from our double guns, and the crescendo of our voices until its innate sense of self-preservation took over and compelled it to flee. I relished the simplicity of the moment.

“Dead in here. Dehhhhhd’nhere dehhhhd’nhere, Fudge. Dehhhhd,” urged our host and guide. A few pregnant moments later, Fudge burst out of what appeared to be an impenetrable thicket. Feathers streamed behind her as she bounded toward us through the thorns with the fourth quail clutched securely in her mouth. She shivered with exhilaration for a couple seconds after releasing the bird, and then tore off, nose held high, in search of another scent trail.

We enjoyed steady hunting and artistic dog work all day. After a quick lunch over the hood of the Jeep, we embarked on the afternoon’s pursuit.

“Yesterday’s rain oughta help them pick up the birds’ scent a little better,” observed our host as we strode up and down rolling hills covered with pecan orchards, while the dogs bounded and sprang ahead of us. “They been pointin’ pretty good here lately. Hayep! Hay-ep! Hay-ep, Bo! Hay-ep, Bo!”

With that, the beeps emanating from another of the pointers’ collars slowed to a short, repetitive staccato, signaling a point up ahead. Sure enough, we rounded a covert at the head of a drain alongside a pecan orchard and spied Bo, the brown-and-white shorthair, all locked up on a covey of quail.

He resembled precisely one of the subjects of the exquisite sporting art of Eldridge Hardie; one might have mistook Bo for an oil on canvas were it not for his trembling body and his searching eyes, which darted anxiously backwards to reassure himself of our approach. No good bird dog likes to feel as though its efforts are being wasted on the disinterested.

“Whoa now, Bo. Whoa now. Careful’nehhr. Caaaareful.”

For a moment as we approached the point from either side of the statuesque shorthair, our double guns held out in front of us in a quasi Port Arms, I had the feeling that we, too, were the subjects of a work of fine sporting art. For a few fleeting and selfish moments, all our worlds were neatly custom framed inside the fifteen or so feet that separated the dog and us from the quail burrowed desperately at the base of the thicket. No one spoke. Bo made hardly a sound. Behind us, Fudge honored the point with the grace and discretion of a seasoned professional.

As the scene slowed and our anticipation of the covey’s inevitable flush grew, I realized there is nothing quite so honest as the dog’s instinctual desire to seek out and point a covey of quail, or the quail’s instinctual desire to remain motionless at the base of a gallberry bush; or the report of .20 gauge high brass loads bursting with the swing of a fine American double; or the timeless aroma of fouling, gun oil and smoke emitted from breaking open the breach after connecting on a wild-flying solo; or the confidence and appreciation offered by the hefty bulge in your vest’s game pocket as it bounces off the small of your back with each step you take toward the next point; or my desire to pursue game fairly, and to enjoy the harvest for the pursuit of it alongside a good friend and good dogs under a Southern winter’s understated skies.

From such honesty comes perspective. It’s artistic and it’s sporting, yes, but it’s give and take; life and death. And that’s as honest as it gets.



(c) Roger Guilian 2009