I once worked for a summer for a plumbing outfit in Fayetteville. When they found out I was a good, hard worker, they stopped renting a backhoe. I became a human backhoe, at thirty dollars a week.
I told my working buddies of my frog hunting trips. One could float a five mile stretch of one of the pretty rivers around there and pick up as many big, fat, bullfrogs as a family could eat in a while, in those days. The loud, deep bellow of a large bullfrog is seldom heard on the river nowadays. Then, you could hear a dozen at a time. There is no sound quite like it.
One very large guy wanted to go with me. He was not a nice person, big, tough and rowdy, a bully even. I finally agreed. We placed my truck on the War Eagle River, drove five miles upriver, and put in my boat. As we sat around, waiting for it to get dark, we were joined by an old timer. Sensing my partner was a true green horn, never having been out on the river at night, he proceeded to tell a string of snake horror tales. After a few, my partner walked to his truck and got two rolls of duct tape. He proceeded to wrap one roll around the left leg, up to his hip. Then he did the right leg. I was beginning to have misgivings about this expedition at all. But we were there, committed. When it got dark, we headed down river.
The thing about a river like this, in those days was, the old timer's stories were true. In the space of time that I see one moccasin on the Ouachita river, nowadays, I would see a hundred then. They are disappearing too. Too many people beating on their heads with a chunk. For every two frogs we saw, we saw one cottonmouth. After picking up a few frogs, and seeing several cottonmouths, (Those rivers were so clean, you needed no gig. Just ease up on them, keep the light in their eyes, look around to make sure he was not a target for a cottonmouth also, and pick it up.) my partner was shaking like a leaf. He had lost all his bluster. After another mile, he simply would not get out of the boat.
The thing about pulling over a shoal was, with an empty boat, it was no problem, and pulling over shoals took up about half the time, anyway. But with an extra 280 pounds inside, it was man killing work. Not too good on the boat bottom, either. We were nearing halfway, over two miles to a truck. I could balk, and hope he wanted to get home badly enough to come around, or I could pull him the rest of the way. I bowed up and did it. The only other noteworthy experience on the last leg was, we went through a giant, new hatch of Mayfly nymphs. They were so thick, you could not inhale without taking in one or two, and when we did get through them, the bottom of the boat was an inch deep in Mayflies.
The thing about the river at night was, it just does that to some people. I once had a big tough football coach in the front of my boat one night. I paddled the boat under a low hanging limb, and a roost of birds thundered out. He came totally unglued, ran to my end of the boat, jumped in my lap, and sunk the boat. Further down, a large beaver went against his naturally mild nature and just planted himself in the middle of a riffle, and made it plain he had no intentions of letting us pass. I had to get out of the boat and do battle with him with a paddle, while my partner hung in the back of the boat.
It took two people, and two trucks, to do this right. I became more selective in my partners, and they became hard to find. I had to hunt less. I have only been bitten once by a cottonmouth in all my frog hunting days. We rushed to the hospital, then I felt a bit silly because it never swelled up or turned blue. I was so embarrassed that I wanted to see a little blue or swelling when the doc came in. All I could figure was, he had just used up his venom on a previous victim.
Frog legs, properly cooked, are the best of wild eating. But they do move around in the skillet, if freshly cooked.
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