Happy, Happy, Happy: My Life and Legacy as the Duck Commander

thick land was sometimes nothing more than three steps and a kick!
    We never considered what we were doing as poaching on someone else’s land. We had our own code. We didn’t bother any equipment, crops, or anything on someone else’s farm. And I was always careful not to step on any young cotton or corn plants. But if it flew, grew wild, swam, or lived in trees, I figured that it belonged to whoever captured or gathered it. I might have even picked up a ripe watermelon (there were thousands of them out there) every once in a while—wouldn’t have wanted it to be overlooked and get overripe!
    I can still remember my first encounter with a game warden. I was squirrel-hunting out of season—my family had to eat—and Ihad a mess of them. It happened before I repented and was one of the reasons I needed to repent. When I squirrel-hunted, I carried a big, metal safety pin, and I sharpened its end so it would run through the squirrels’ legs right above the joint. If I saw a game warden, I’d drop the squirrels, close up the pin, and then take off running like the wind. On this occasion, I was wearing two pairs of old men’s argyle socks without any shoes and had my pant legs taped so they wouldn’t flop when I was running. I was trying to be as quiet as possible. I was sitting there shooting squirrels when I sensed that someone was watching me. I couldn’t see anybody and couldn’t hear anybody, but I just had a feeling come over me that I was being stalked in the woods.

    If it flew, grew wild, swam, or lived in trees, I figured that it belonged to whoever captured or gathered it.

    Suddenly I heard a stick break behind me, and I turned and saw a man standing there with a gun in his hand. He was wearing a wide-rimmed cowboy hat and identified himself as a game warden. He was standing about twenty yards from me. When I heard the stick break, I dropped the squirrels and they hit the ground.
    “Hold it, son,” he told me. “I’m a game warden.”
    “That’s what I thought,” I said.
    I was lean and mean and could run for miles. After the man identified himself as a game warden, I put it into high gear. Forthe first one hundred yards, he was running with me. But I was grinning and thinking, This guy doesn’t realize that he’s not in good enough shape to be running with me . He was wearing cowboy boots and wasn’t properly dressed to keep up with me. A buddy who had dropped me off earlier picked me up on the other side of the woods.
    When I was in high school, our basketball coach, Billy Wiggins, asked me if we were killing any squirrels. He said he wanted to go hunting with me, as long as we weren’t hunting on land that had been posted for no trespassing. “Of course not,” I told him. “You’ll be fine.”
    Coach Wiggins and I went hunting right after daylight one morning, and it wasn’t long before I heard a truck coming at a pretty good rate of speed. It was coming across a pecan orchard right toward us. The last two words Coach Wiggins heard were, “Run, Coach!” I took off running in the other direction.
    Moving to Dixie also introduced me to frog gigging. Some of the larger bullfrogs have legs bigger than chicken drumsticks and are delicious! We never ate frogs before moving to Dixie, but they were so abundant in the area that they eventually became part of our regular diet. In springtime, in less than an hour we could gather up a large enough bunch to make a meal, even for a family as big as ours. The slough behind our house was overrunwith frogs, as were many others just a short distance across the road.
    To catch them, we waited until dark and immobilized them by blinding them on the shoreline with a bright flashlight. One of us held the light and another used a long-handled, spring-loaded clamp, or “grab,” to “gig” the frog. Some people called the clamps gigs—but the actual sharp-pronged gigs were illegal. The trick was to hit the frog sharply on the back, thus springing the grab and causing it to clamp around the frog, then to lift it out of the water or off the ground quickly so it couldn’t use its powerful legs to leap free.
    During one particularly memorable frog gigging, we caught a tow sack full of the big ones, probably thirty or forty pounds of them—so many that cleaning them was going to be a chore and take a while. So we laid the sack on the floor by the door when we went into the kitchen for a snack before beginning—carelessly leaving the top only loosely