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

confines of the creek. After throttling down for a split second, I decided our best chance was to run up the trunk and sail over the treetop like Evel Knievel. So I gunned the motor.
    We hit the trunk, and our boat went airborne, bouncing about three times across the limbs. It came to rest nestled in the limbs, still upright, at about a twenty-five-degree angle. We were two-thirds the way up the tree, leaving Al and me suspended twenty feet in the air above the water—the motor still running.
    To get down, we selectively shot limbs off the tree, allowing the boat to slide down far enough so we could pull it back into the creek. I just fired up the motor again, and we were on our way. Big Al reached in his coat and took a swig of whiskey. We continued along, feeling no pain.
    On another occasion, when I was trying to save time, I decided to run my aluminum boat up on the bank instead of going through the trouble of pulling it up to the boat ramp, backing the truck and trailer into the water, and loading the boat the usual way. Unfortunately, hidden behind a wall of reeds on the shore was a stump that I hit at full speed, head-on, throwing my passenger in the front of the boat over the stump and out onto the bank.
    When the guy was thrown, his legs, which had been under the small front deck of the prow, slid under the deck and hit it with enough force to pop out the rivets that were holding the deck to the side of the boat. His momentum just peeled the deckforward. That probably saved him from breaking his legs. But it ripped the skin off his shins, and his legs immediately turned purple and puffed up. His injuries were severe but didn’t incapacitate him. I was thrown from the back of the fourteen-foot boat to the completely crumpled front, breaking a finger. He sailed over the stump, hit the ground, and bounced twice. I was shook up from the collision, and he was pretty addled. When he got up, he took off running toward the lake, dove in, and started swimming away from shore. When he was several yards away, he grabbed on to a tree.

    Hidden behind a wall of reeds on the shore was a stump that I hit at full speed.

    I could see he was confused, so I hollered, “What are you doing?”
    “I’m trying to get away from that bad thing on the bank!” he replied.
    There were a lot of other unforgettable incidents. Once, Silas and I took several men on a guided hunt. I had already taken a bigger boat with some of the hunters to the blind. Si was loading the rest of the men into a smaller, twelve-foot boat. When the four men, whom Si estimated weighed at least 250 pounds each, stepped into the boat, it sank deeper into the water—alarmingly deep! The five men in that overloaded boat pushed it down to the point where the water almost overlapped the sides. But Si perseveredand was almost to the blind when (maybe he was traveling a little too fast) the front of the boat dipped and started under.
    Si knew the water was not deep in front of the blind and had the presence of mind to grab all the shotguns as the boat completely submerged, dumping everyone into the water. The four guests, who had no idea how deep the water was, thought they were in danger of drowning in their heavy hunting clothes and started floundering and flailing at the water.
    Me and the other hunters in the blind realized they weren’t in danger and started shouting, “Stand up! Stand up!” Si, holding their saved shotguns, stood neck-deep in water watching them.
    Each of the Benelli and Browning shotguns I have owned has ended up at the bottom of a lake multiple times. Each of the shotguns lost during my wild years was recovered, except one that was flipped out of the boat by a limb. Sometimes, I had to resort to buying a wet suit to recover guns from icy, murky waters. Remarkably, the first shotgun I ever owned somehow survived the madness. I worked as a roughneck for a while, following my father into the offshore drilling business. I gave every one of my checks to my parents because I thought that’s what I was supposed to do. But with my last check, I asked Pa if I could buy a new shotgun. I purchased a 1962 Browning Sweet 16 shotgun for $150 and still have it today; sometimes I even shoot with it.
    During my outlaw years, much of our duck hunting tookplace at Moss Lake, where we had a blind halfway up a remarkable cypress tree that stood on the edge of a circle of water surrounded by other cypresses. My brothers Tommy and Jimmy Frank discovered