"Overheard"

Outdoor people and experiences generate some of the fondest stories, one-liners, anecdotes and yarns around. Since I happen to be thinking back on some as I enjoy my coffee on this quiet morning before everyone wakes up, I thought I’d share some with you.


Judge

Some years back, a quail hunting party was making its way through the broomsedge while a black-and-white short-haired pointer bounded and scoured the ground for scents up ahead. Three men, decked out in canvas brush pants and blaze orange vests, carried their .20 gauges in the ready position. They were spaced out in a line about ten yards apart from one another, behind the dog. Just between them and the dog, their host, a seasoned and jovial lawyer, trudged along, slapping the elaeagnus occasionally with his walking stick, yelling, “Come on, Judge! Hunt ‘em up, Judge! Let’s go, now, Judge!”

As they hunted the edge of a food plot, one of the men asked their host about the dog. His face broke out in a contented, boyish grin; then he explained, “Besides my family, my greatest loves have always been the practice of law and quail hunting. Even though I have enjoyed my practice, I got so tired of being bossed around by judges my whole career that I promised myself a long time ago that I was going to get myself a bird dog and name him Judge. Now, any time I go home or take him hunting, I’m finally able to tell a Judge what to do!” He burst out in laughter and added, with gusto, ‘Sit down, Judge! Be quiet, Judge!’”

Not Today

Two or three years ago, my wife and I were preparing to run some errands when I informed her that one of our stops would be at a hunting buddy’s house to leave him a ticket to a turkey banquet. My buddy is always up to something and, somehow, it seems like he’s always just returned from an intriguing hunting destination. Hence, he usually has a doozie of a story to tell or is neck-deep in an intricate project every time we see him.

But apparently this day, my wife was short on patience. Moments before we left the house, she said, “Before we go over there, let me make it clear: No, I do not want to have lunch with him; no, I do not want to hear about his latest trip to kill sheep on Kilimanjaro; no, I do not want to watch him clean his shotguns; no, I do not want to help him build a barn. I’m telling you – it doesn’t matter what he says, the answer is no. Not today.”

Look, Daddy!

When my son was about three years old, he began accompanying me on turkey scouting trips. One particular trip stands out more than others. After we’d been on a sandy trail for a few minutes, we encountered a large hog wallow. As we stepped around it, something long and curved with brown-and-white stripes running down the length of it caught my son’s eye. He stopped to pick it up and inspect it. A moment later, his face lit up.

“Look, Daddy!” he exclaimed. “I found a feather!”

“You sure did,” I said. “You’ve found yourself a nice wing feather. Good job, son.”

I tucked it into one of the holes in the top of his hat and he wore it there for the rest of the day. He stroked it and studied it the whole way home while he asked a seemingly endless stream of questions about turkeys. I’m not saying I planted that feather right in the middle of a trail I knew we’d be walking down, but I sure was happy that it sparked a prideful interest in wild turkeys in my son.

Good Thing You Quit

A couple of years ago, a friend of mine and his wife were expecting their third child at the end of March. As you can imagine, my friend was virtually MIA for months after the baby arrived. When I finally saw him, he relayed to me the following story of a conversation he’d had with another of our hunting buddies a few weeks before the birth.

“When are you guys due?”

“End of March.”

“Wow. Good thing you don’t turkey hunt.”

“No, no; I love turkey hunting.”

“Oh. Well, good thing you quit turkey hunting, then.”



(c) Roger Guilian 2011

"Optimism"

If you’re one of those driven people whose definition of success relies strictly upon results, then hunting may not be for you. After all, 4:30 a.m. comes awfully early, twenty-eight degrees is awfully cold and the pre-dawn woods are awfully dark, especially when there is no guarantee of success at the end of the day. So if you will categorize as failures a morning in the duck blind when nothing but pouldeau and water turkeys fly over your decoy spread, or a morning in a deer stand when nothing but an armadillo and a few squirrels sidle by within range, then hang that scent-free camouflage coat back on the rack, and instead, join one of those steak-of-the-month clubs.

You see, the only certainty about hunting is its inherent uncertainty. All too often, the only things we carry out of the woods are the guns and gear we toted in and, hopefully, a few memories. I don’t know the percentages, but I can attest that an overwhelming number of treks into the woods end with the pick-up truck bed’s being as empty as it was when it pulled up to the gate before the hunt.

Therefore, a healthy – if not unrealistic – amount of optimism is crucial in order to make it through a several-month-long season with your mental health intact. Each hunter has his or her own particular way of seeing the bright side in order to press on, only so much of which is based on actual fact or science.

Take, for instance, any number of times you and a friend have been driving up to deer camp on a Friday afternoon. How many times has he gazed out the window at a cow pasture blurring by and offered, “The cows are up on their feet. That’s a good sign.”? Forget the fact that cows have hooves and not feet; your friend’s observation is fueled by unadulterated optimism: because one random herd of cattle happens to be up and feeding, therefore all the deer will be up and feeding, too. That’s good stuff. Hit the gas.

Then there are cold fronts. I, personally, can find nothing wrong with cold fronts. They usher in seasonal temperatures which are conducive to building a fire, they push ducks southward (a real plus if you’re a Southern duck hunter) and they give deer hunters ample room for optimism. Any time a cold front is bearing down on us, I am fond of saying things like, “Now’s the time to be in the woods. The deer are going to be up and moving in advance of this front.” And inevitably, once the front has passed and the winds have died down, I’ll follow that up with, “Anybody who’s in the woods today is going to kill deer. They’ve been laid up waiting on this front to pass through and should be moving all day.”

Now, I don’t know whether deer movement and feeding times are really affected by cold fronts and other weather phenomena. All I know is that on occasion, I have seen deer up and moving about on either side of a cold front. The thing that enables me to extrapolate my mere hypothesis into immutable fact without the first shred of proof and in flagrant violation of all known scientific protocol, is, in a word, optimism.

When it comes to the glass being half-full, turkey hunters epitomize the ideal. In fact, there may exist no more optimistic lot than turkey hunters (or masochistic, for that matter). If we turkey hunters weren’t the-glass-is-half-full kind of folks, we wouldn’t be capable of getting out of bed long before sunup for forty-five mornings in a row just to pursue what is unquestionably the toughest and most formidable quarry in the woods. Separate and apart from the sheer difficulty of hunting wild turkeys, the hunter is prone to get frostbitten when the season opens and snake bitten by the time it closes; he’s likely to log a hundred-or-so miles on his snake boots; and runs a real risk of realizing zero return on his investment by season’s end. Were we able to bottle and sell a turkey hunter’s optimism, we’d be able to cure depression around the globe by lunch time.

Duck hunting is a little different than turkey hunting. With turkey hunting, you know the gobblers are out there: you’ve seen their tracks; you’ve found their droppings; you can hear them gobble. Coaxing one into gun range, however, is quite another matter, or, as lawyers put it, the ultimate issue. Duck hunters, on the other hand, don’t always know whether they’ll have ducks or not. If you don’t get enough rain, you won’t see any ducks. Too much rain, and the ducks will be so spread out you may not see any. And if there’s a freeze, the ducks will be one or two states south of you by the time you buckle your waders.

One thing this proud turkey hunter will readily admit is that duck hunters work harder than anyone else in the woods or on the water. I’ve been duck hunting enough to not only have gained immense respect for die-hard duck hunters, but to know that I’d have a hard time getting through an entire season under the best of conditions; I cannot imagine slogging my way through a bad season. Like turkey hunters, duck hunters insist on hunting every day, rain or shine, good or bad, feast or famine. The level of optimism required of duck hunters must be extraordinary to get them through seventy-something days in the duck blind.

A grueling duck season, a frustrating spring in the turkey woods and a shutout in the deer stand can dishearten the upbeat, and positively grind to a pulp the pessimistic. Like strong camp house coffee and plastic-wrapped pastries, our optimism keeps us going, especially in times when the ledger shows far more red ink than black.



(c) Roger Guilian 2011

"Can't Win For Losin'"

One of the cruelest things anyone can do is to give a lollipop to a child, but tell him he can’t lick it. In fact, a bank recently ran an ad campaign on TV in which bicycles, ice cream, toy trucks and even a pony are given to children, but the kiddies are told they’re not allowed to enjoy them. The point the bank and its clever advertising agency are trying to make is that it does no good – and, in fact, is actually worse – to give people something they want if they’re not going to be allowed to enjoy it.

A little-known fact is that this ad campaign was based in large part on my two most recently planned Arkansas duck trips.

A good friend of mine has a duck camp in east Arkansas. To say he has a duck camp in east Arkansas doesn’t do it justice. My friend’s camp is east of Stuttgart and west of Marianna, smack dab in the middle of the epicenter of Arkansas duck hunting. His impressive patchwork leasehold includes rice fields and flooded timber on and around East Lake, Big Cypress Creek and Peckerwood Lake.

A few years ago, I received an invitation to spend four days at my friend’s duck camp in early January. By all accounts, the hunting had been stellar prior to my arrival and, not having done any significant duck hunting in the past, I looked as forward to that trip as anything else I can remember in recent years. The experience did not disappoint.

I cannot, in good conscience, call myself a duck hunter, even though I have hunted ducks. Duck hunters are far too dedicated and work far too hard for an occasional and journeyman waterfowler like I to assume their moniker. But that trip turned me into a starry-eyed lover of duck hunting. During my four days in Arkansas, we hunted tupelo gum holes, sunken rice field levee blinds and flooded timber – the works. It was there that I was introduced to legendary Mississippi Flyway duck hunting, the ice-breaking capabilities of a shotgun stock, the whistling wings of a pre-dawn flight of teal, and, fortuitously, the extra-dry gin martini. I have tired of neither of them since.

For the better part of the following year, I eagerly awaited another invitation, but dared not ask for one. Then in September of that year, it came: I’d been slated to arrive in duck camp on January 6 to hunt for four days. During the ensuing three-and-a-half months, I was like an impatient kid waiting for Christmas to come. Until I received a phone call from my friend two days before I was to depart for Arkansas.

“I hate to tell you this, Rog, but the duck hunting here is dead. Everything’s frozen solid and has been for two weeks now. The other day, I drove my four-wheeler all the way across Peckerwood Lake. Anything that’s not frozen, like the rivers and creeks and stuff, is under eight feet of water from the flood. We don’t have any holes anymore and there’s no place to stand. The ducks have all gone to Louisiana. Last weekend, the duck plucker in Stuttgart cleaned twenty-four ducks – the entire weekend. Normally, they clean three hundred-a-day. Sorry, but I’m packing up my dog and my stuff and heading home. Maybe next year.”

I was pretty disappointed but I understood. There’s always next year, I thought. Well, apparently not. Next year was last month and, thanks to Mother Nature once again, I did not get to spend any of it hunting ducks in Arkansas.

Honestly, the thought of another duck trip having to be canceled never crossed my mind. To the extent that such a thought may have crossed my mind, I immediately would have dismissed it and chalked up the 2010 cancellation to a combination of freak weather phenomena.

But sometimes, as they say, the best laid plans of mice and men . . .

This time, a trip didn’t even get scheduled before it was called off. Instead of a phone call, an email announced the bad news. And unbelievably, instead of too much water, now there wasn’t enough water. The creeks and rivers were at their lowest in recent memory. Peckerwood Lake was at a fifty-year low; so low, in fact, that the water was even below the intake valves for the pumps that flood the rice fields. There was literally no water for the ducks. Again my friend was forced to scratch out what little duck hunting he could from sympathetic local farmers and cut his season short. And again, my return to his Arkansas duck blinds and cypress brakes would have to wait.

From solid ice, to too much water, to no water at all, I can’t win for losin’. I’m sure, given favorable conditions, an Arkansas encore is inevitable. But if I call you up to tag along next year and there’s something else you already had on the books for that weekend, don’t cancel your other plans until you hear me honk in your driveway.

I’d hate for you to feel like one of the kids in those commercials.

(c) Roger Guilian 2011