January 19, 2024 • 20 mins
Brent's talking about cold fronts this week and one of the stories involves explosives. If you listened to the episode when Brent was battling beavers you know that he loves a good explosion. Well, this time he and his brother are fighting Old Man Winter. It's "Cold Fronts" this week on MeatEater's This Country Life podcast.
Connect with Brent and MeatEater
MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube
Shop Bear Grease Merch
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Welcome to this Country Life. I'm your host, Brent Riggs
from coon hunting to trot lining and just general country living.
I want you to stay a while as I share
my stories and the country skills that will help you
beat the system. This Country Life is proudly presented as
part of Meat Eaters Podcast Network, bringing you the best
(00:25):
outdoor podcast the airways have to offer. All right, friends,
pull you up a chair or drop that tailgate. I
think I got a thing or two to teach me.
Cold fronts, Good night, nurse. It's cold and Arkansas folks
a lot colder than we're used to and it's all
(00:48):
because of a big old cold front. And normally we
look forward to them because they usually ramps up the
hunting this time of year, but these major ones they
do just the opposite most of the time. We're gonna
talk about coal from us today, but first I'm going
to tell you a story. This story is called Dynamite,
(01:14):
Ice and Rice. I know more dynamite. I don't want
you to think that my life was just full of
stories and incidents that involved explosives, but there were a few,
and it wasn't limited to dealing with beaver dams. And
flooded timber. Not this time anyway. This was all due
to a major coal front and duck hunting right after
(01:37):
the turn of the century. The most recent one. My
brother Tim and I were prepping for a group of
hunters from the East Coast. A large percentage of our
clients hailed from up and down the Eastern seaboard, and
they always seemed to travel in herds. Now, other than
a few exceptions, if we got one of those rascals,
we got a whole passl of them. Not a problem.
(01:59):
Tim and I would try. I had a limited number
of hunters booking at the same time, to about eight,
and we would split them up and hunt four to
a guide for safety, and it's easier to hide a
smaller number of folks in the woods, which is where
we did the largest portion of our hunting. After all.
That's why folks travel to Arkansas to duck hunt. They
(02:20):
want to experience what it's like to have large groups
of ducks falling into the timber and hovering above the decoys.
It's one of my favorite things, but seeing others see
it for the first time is probably my most favorite
of ault. It's one of those if you know you know, moments,
and it has to be experienced in the flesh. Pictures,
(02:41):
stories and even films don't do it justice. Feeling the
air generated from the thump of beaten wings here, and
chattering and quacking of drakes and hens as they jockey
for position to land during the final approach, the splashing
of feathered bodies as they turn graceful flight into what
resembles amateur night at the dim Anglicien Derby for the
(03:01):
final few feet of descent to the surface of knee
deep water. That's the ticket, man, that's the show. That's
what you pay your money for. That's what you see
in your dreams when you lay down at night anticipating
the next morning's hunt. It plays over and over in
your head, and like that, one good golf shot out
(03:22):
of a thousand bad ones keeps a golfer coming back
to the tea box. The thought of having a chance
to witness a spectacle such as I just described is
what keeps a duck hunter spending his hard earned money
to travel halfway across the country and the off chance
that they might see it again or for the first time. Now,
(03:45):
the group we had coming would see none of that,
not even close, but they would see something just as incredible,
record lows, the product of a blast of Arctic air,
ice and snow. The can we talk about down here
forever and folks up north would probably call a Tuesday
(04:07):
was forecasted to hit a couple days before they arrived.
In Arkansas and South Arkansas anyway, any mention of snow
and ice was anticipated as eagerly as Christmas. Any ice
on the road meant school would be closed and the
whole state was shut down with a quarter inch of
ice or sleep. Literally, I ain't kidding. As a youngin
(04:28):
I'd go to bed with snow and ice forecasted for
the following day, having already made my plans on what
I was going to be hunting the next day, tracking rabbits, quail, deer,
whatever was in season or close to being in season
was on the agenda. Then I'd wake up to find
that the weather man had missed it. Once again, I
(04:50):
waited for the bus and the cold matter than a
mashed cat hating school and the weather man. But this time, however,
he nailed it. Temperatures in the twenties and several inches
of snow locked up the flooded woods, and Timber. Now
we told our clients about how everything was locking up,
but they wanted to come anyway, So Tim and I
(05:12):
scrambled to find a solution. Now we had an eighty
acre rice field at least next to forty acres of
woods that bordered the world famous by Meat of Wildlife
management area we called by a Meat of the Public
Shooting Grounds or the Scatters, among other local names. But
if hunters could get out to the main bow where
there was some current, they would keep the ducks moving
(05:34):
in and out instead of just sitting in there like
it was a sanctuary. There would be plenty of people
trying to get to those coveted open spots, so the
competition in there would be fierce, but it would work
to our advantage if we could just get some open water.
The evening our hunters arrived, we scouted the rice field,
which was fifteen minutes away from the camp. Now, ice
(05:56):
was already a quarter of an inch thick, and the
temperature wouldn't get close to thirty two for the next
few days. We drove a four wheeler out in the
ice and in the water in front of the skid
blind we had brushed up in the middle of the field.
We were breaking up a large area of muddy open
water as we drove in circles and made it shine
(06:16):
like a diamond. Of ducks coming in with the coal
front and they were landing in it before we got
back out on the turn road. To leave open water
would be the key to our success and a struggle
to maintain the blind would hold five people safely and comfortably.
Now that meant we had to stagger our groups. But
(06:36):
we had a plan that Tim would take his four
hunters and get in there at daylight. The trailer we
had for hauling the four wheeler would serve two purposes.
Once we arrived, he unload the four wheeler, then hook
it to the trailer to haul our hunters and all
their plunder along the turn row out to the blind.
He didn't hook the trailer and make a loop through
the ice where we were going to put the decoys
(06:58):
while our clients got in the blind. Now, once he
had the hole opened up, he'd parked a four wheeler
behind the blind and start hunting. Ten would hunt from
the opening of shooting ires till around nine o'clock, and
then I'd have my crew there where we parked our trucks.
You're ready to swap out when he came out. It
was a good plan. The best part was I got
(07:19):
to sleep late. It had been a long season. My
Nokia fifty one to ten cell phone started buzzing before
seven o'clock. The message from ten was y'all come now,
all caps and with several exclamation marks. Well that wasn't
a good sign. It was barely shooting light outside and
my crew had just started getting up and moving around.
(07:42):
No doubt he's stuck or is having some kind of trouble,
I thought. So regardless, I needed to get them open,
get them moving with whatever had transpired at the rice field. Y'all,
get your stuff up and let's go. We got to
go right now. Something drong just now. If someone had
been hurt, he would have said that, so I knew
whatever the emergency was, it was hunting related and not
(08:02):
an issue of life and death. So like herding cats,
I finally got my folks and all their stuff in
my bronco and we took off. I'd messaged him a
couple of times to see if I needed to bring
anything other than what he knew was in my ride,
but he never answered. In my head, I'm thinking he's
(08:24):
elbow deep in cold ice and mud, and I figured
he couldn't answer. So about seven twenty when I pulled
up to the property and saw Tim with the trailer
loaded with all his hunters, making their way back toward
us along the levee. Immediately my mind raised as to
what we were going to do with these hunters. Now.
If he's driving back, he's obviously not stuck, so the
(08:45):
rice field must be frozen up beyond opening up. I figured, man,
they hadn't been there forty five minutes from the time
shooting ears opened up until now, and I had no
idea what we were going to do next. But Tim
must have a plan. Wouldn't have called me to come over.
We're sitting in the bronco and I turned to the
guys that were with me. I said, boys, I don't
(09:06):
know what's going on, but don't look like we're gonna
be hunting here today. Their disappointment was obvious, even though
they didn't say anything. But I was disappointed too. Now.
As they got closer, one of them said, look at
all those ducks. I looked out across that field, and
ducks were piloted into that rice field from every direction.
(09:29):
I looked back at the trailers. Tim got closer and
it was filled with mallard ducks and smiling duck hunters.
I started laughing. I said, y'all, get y'all, get your
stuff together. The B team is going in now. Tim
said it was an absolute dream. They couldn't spook the
ducks out of the field. All his hunters were wanting
(09:49):
to tell their buddies about what they'd done, but I
was in a hurry to get them out there. Who
knew how long this would last, and I wanted all
of them to have every opportunity to shoot ducks that
we could give them. So I got my boys loaded
up and we looked back at that rice field that
had a tordinata of ducks bombiting that muddy water. I
(10:09):
told Tim, y'all can wait here if you want. We're
gonna be back in a few minutes. He didn't wait,
but I wasn't wrong. Tim and his crew went back
to fix breakfast for all of us. It took us
longer to get ready at the camp and get there
than it did for us to shoot five limits of ducks.
Wave after wave of ducks being pushed into the area
(10:30):
where that coal front were falling into the decoys. It
was too cold to have my lab out there, so
I was picking up dead ducks and live ones were
still dropping in. As high as you could see a duck,
you could call at him, and immediately they locked up
and fell like a rock. Wings were pressed close to
their sides, and they sounded like a jet engine as
(10:51):
they gained speed, getting closer and closer. No circling, no, nothing,
straight down, like they were on a string. We were
back at the camp before Tim could get the biscuits done.
We'd shot ten limits of mallards tag team style. But
what about tomorrow? What were we going to do about tomorrow?
(11:12):
Most folks are judging their jobs by their last performance.
A duck guide has to sell himself on what he's
going to do next, and I had no clue what
we were going to do. That ice would be too
thick to break with the four wheeler. Tim had a plan, though.
He knew what we were going to do next, and
(11:33):
what we were going to do next was going to
be just as entertaining as what we had just done.
We planned to hunt after the sun came up the
next day. It would give us time to safely put
our plan into action. We had acquired two sticks of
(11:59):
tovekx tovax more or less replaced dynamite than that. It
was safer the store and handle back then you could
legally buy it. That's enough of that. That's not the
important part of the story. Anyway. Our plan was to
blow a hole in the ice that had become a
lot thicker through the night. Breaking it with a four
wheeler wasn't possible any longer. We could do doughnuts without
(12:21):
even trying. All ten of us were walking on the ice,
jumping up and down, trying to make a hole, slipping
and falling and generally risking life and limb. At one
point I looked around and everyone had fallen and was
on their backs, flopping around like someone had kicked over
the shining bucket in the bottom of the boat. It
was slick, and I'm not sure we could have broken
(12:41):
through with a truck. Enter tovex Tim with the explosives prepped,
He lit the fuse and we retreated to the relative
safety to witness the festivities. How long you cut that
fuse for tens old about any time now, And with
that it detonated with a large boom. Our clients were
(13:08):
cheering from the levee After they had all taken refuge
behind the four wheeler trailer about one hundred yards away.
Tim and I had tucked in behind the duck bline.
The results were less than we'd hope for, but we
had managed to knock a hole in the ice, a
hole almost big enough sticky foot in. Now we had
one more stick left, but decided against putting it in
(13:30):
that hole for fear of reckon the laser level filled
that we had leased. Doubtful the farmer would have appreciated
a big low spot in this dead center where we
were hunting the coming spring when planting time came, So
we all worked as hard as we could to make
that hole about the size of a kitchen table. The
biggest chunks of ice we slid into the ice that
(13:51):
we could that we couldn't break, or just lay it
on the outside of the hole. Then we threw three
decoys in it and called it good. It was all
we could do, and it worked like a charm. The
wind was steady, and the ducks that were coming in
were all migrators and looking for a place to sit,
no matter how small the hole was they wanted water.
(14:13):
It was literally the perfect storm. Temput all our hunters
into the blind and we stood behind it and we
shot another full ten man limit that afternoon, just like
we'd done the day before when we alternated groups. On
the third day, we were frozen solid and our guests
got an early start back home. We tried to talk
them out of coming at the beginning, but they wanted
(14:35):
to experience an Arkansas duck on now. While they didn't
get it in the classically historic sense, what they did
get was an experience with some Arkansas flare, and that's
just how that happened. Cold fronts, Man, We looked forward
(14:58):
to cold fronts as much as anything done. Number One,
it's going to start giving you some relief from the
heat that is the south. And number two, if you're
a duck hunter, it usually means more ducks are coming.
Ducks only go as far south as they have to.
They're fueling up to make it through the winter, select
a mate and travel back north to make more ducks.
(15:19):
So if stut guard Arkansas is as far south as
they need to go to have food and water, that's
where they'll spend the winter. If it stays warmer further
north will be their cold weather home. It's been my belief,
not from schooling, but from observation over the past almost
fifty years of chasing them, that ducks are energy hoarders,
(15:39):
and they're only going to burn enough to sufficiently stay
healthy enough to do what ducks do this time of year,
which again is to prep for making more ducks. Snow
and ice that cover and freeze all the food sources
up yonder force all the waterfowl to make tracks to
my neck of the woods. I remember watching the weather
man talking about all better bundle up and have plenty
(16:01):
of firewood on hand. There's a big coal front coming now.
My wife can hear a forecast like that, and she
starts inventoring wool socks and seeing how many she can
put on at the same time, just to stay inside.
All I hear him saying is Brent, you better get outside.
The critics are stirring now as I'm telling you all this.
(16:22):
I've been locked in the house for the past three
days because a particularly big coal front came through, bringing snow, ice,
and single digit temps in a historically low water year
that froze the water. We did have while giving the
lowest duck numbers recorded in the past twenty five years,
the old boot in the breeches, kicking them on down
(16:43):
the road. The light at the end of the tunnel
is it'll start warming up in the next day or
so and the ducks should start moving back in before
duck seasoned plump slips away. Now that's the ebb and
flow of coal fronts. Low duck numbers and unprecedented lower
There was a time when I wouldn't have missed a
minute of it, and Tim and I would have been
(17:05):
somewhere where there was open flowing water, even in this
severe cold, because there's one thing that's one hundred percent
guaranteed in nature, and that there is no one hundred
percent guarantees all the water doesn't freeze, all the ducks
don't leave, and all the duck hunters don't stay home.
(17:28):
Derek Reynolds a man who was first introduced to me
and Tim when he was a teenager. He wanted to
duck hunt and needed someone to take him, and we did,
and Derek became a member of our family. He now
has a beautiful family of his own, and he became
a staple at our guide service when he was a kid,
and if we'd ever had an official mascot, it would
(17:51):
have been him. And once they got to do with
cole fronts, well, I'll tell you. Derek sent me in
tim a pitcher this morning. It was ten degrees and
Derek and a friend of his were posing with two
limits of ducks. There was some open flowing water in
the background. The picture made me shiver just looking at it.
(18:12):
An aluminum boat with frozen mud, dirty snow, and covered
with ice. The mount of clothes those boys were wearing
reminded me of Randy in the movie A Christmas Story.
My response to this text was heck yeah, But in
parentheses I wrote, I'm glad I wasn't there, but that
was a lie. I would have been there. I've been
(18:35):
stoke for the past three days to get out and
see what's shaking in the woods. And I'm not sure
if it's habit and learned behavior or genetically ingrained in
me to be outside when it's cold, but that's where
I want to be. Maybe cold fronts affect me just
like they do other creatures. Now, I don't have any
scientific data to back that up, but I bet there's
(18:55):
something to it. I do know the coon stay in
the den for the most part where I live when
it's this cold, so cutting whaling loose would be more
like an exercise and futility. If I wanted to tree
a coon outside of his den, and with my duck
holes frozen up and dear not moving much, I've had
to lay up in the house and wait out the
(19:16):
cold TIMPs, just like an old boor coon, getting more
anxious every day. Then, when I thought staring out the
window at iced over roads and snow was going to
be my new hobby, a road greater and a salt
truck passed by my house. Then Michael Rosemand called and said,
get your stuff together. I've got some beagles and we're
(19:37):
going rabbit hunting. Man, old man, how I love a
cold front in this country life of mine. Thank y'all
so much for listening. Chuck a big log in that
fireplace that'll still be burning when you get back home.
Bundle up and get yourself outside, take someone with you,
(20:01):
and enjoy the gifts of winter. We don't know how
many of these we're going to get, and we need
to take advantage and revel and the ones we did
Until next week This is Brent Reed signing off. Y'all
be careful.
Welcome to this Country Life. I'm your host, Brent Riggs
from coon hunting to trot lining and just general country living.
I want you to stay a while as I share
my stories and the country skills that will help you
beat the system. This Country Life is proudly presented as
part of Meat Eaters Podcast Network, bringing you the best
(00:25):
outdoor podcast the airways have to offer. All right, friends,
pull you up a chair or drop that tailgate. I
think I got a thing or two to teach me.
Cold fronts, Good night, nurse. It's cold and Arkansas folks
a lot colder than we're used to and it's all
(00:48):
because of a big old cold front. And normally we
look forward to them because they usually ramps up the
hunting this time of year, but these major ones they
do just the opposite most of the time. We're gonna
talk about coal from us today, but first I'm going
to tell you a story. This story is called Dynamite,
(01:14):
Ice and Rice. I know more dynamite. I don't want
you to think that my life was just full of
stories and incidents that involved explosives, but there were a few,
and it wasn't limited to dealing with beaver dams. And
flooded timber. Not this time anyway. This was all due
to a major coal front and duck hunting right after
(01:37):
the turn of the century. The most recent one. My
brother Tim and I were prepping for a group of
hunters from the East Coast. A large percentage of our
clients hailed from up and down the Eastern seaboard, and
they always seemed to travel in herds. Now, other than
a few exceptions, if we got one of those rascals,
we got a whole passl of them. Not a problem.
(01:59):
Tim and I would try. I had a limited number
of hunters booking at the same time, to about eight,
and we would split them up and hunt four to
a guide for safety, and it's easier to hide a
smaller number of folks in the woods, which is where
we did the largest portion of our hunting. After all.
That's why folks travel to Arkansas to duck hunt. They
(02:20):
want to experience what it's like to have large groups
of ducks falling into the timber and hovering above the decoys.
It's one of my favorite things, but seeing others see
it for the first time is probably my most favorite
of ault. It's one of those if you know you know, moments,
and it has to be experienced in the flesh. Pictures,
(02:41):
stories and even films don't do it justice. Feeling the
air generated from the thump of beaten wings here, and
chattering and quacking of drakes and hens as they jockey
for position to land during the final approach, the splashing
of feathered bodies as they turn graceful flight into what
resembles amateur night at the dim Anglicien Derby for the
(03:01):
final few feet of descent to the surface of knee
deep water. That's the ticket, man, that's the show. That's
what you pay your money for. That's what you see
in your dreams when you lay down at night anticipating
the next morning's hunt. It plays over and over in
your head, and like that, one good golf shot out
(03:22):
of a thousand bad ones keeps a golfer coming back
to the tea box. The thought of having a chance
to witness a spectacle such as I just described is
what keeps a duck hunter spending his hard earned money
to travel halfway across the country and the off chance
that they might see it again or for the first time. Now,
(03:45):
the group we had coming would see none of that,
not even close, but they would see something just as incredible,
record lows, the product of a blast of Arctic air,
ice and snow. The can we talk about down here
forever and folks up north would probably call a Tuesday
(04:07):
was forecasted to hit a couple days before they arrived.
In Arkansas and South Arkansas anyway, any mention of snow
and ice was anticipated as eagerly as Christmas. Any ice
on the road meant school would be closed and the
whole state was shut down with a quarter inch of
ice or sleep. Literally, I ain't kidding. As a youngin
(04:28):
I'd go to bed with snow and ice forecasted for
the following day, having already made my plans on what
I was going to be hunting the next day, tracking rabbits, quail, deer,
whatever was in season or close to being in season
was on the agenda. Then I'd wake up to find
that the weather man had missed it. Once again, I
(04:50):
waited for the bus and the cold matter than a
mashed cat hating school and the weather man. But this time, however,
he nailed it. Temperatures in the twenties and several inches
of snow locked up the flooded woods, and Timber. Now
we told our clients about how everything was locking up,
but they wanted to come anyway, So Tim and I
(05:12):
scrambled to find a solution. Now we had an eighty
acre rice field at least next to forty acres of
woods that bordered the world famous by Meat of Wildlife
management area we called by a Meat of the Public
Shooting Grounds or the Scatters, among other local names. But
if hunters could get out to the main bow where
there was some current, they would keep the ducks moving
(05:34):
in and out instead of just sitting in there like
it was a sanctuary. There would be plenty of people
trying to get to those coveted open spots, so the
competition in there would be fierce, but it would work
to our advantage if we could just get some open water.
The evening our hunters arrived, we scouted the rice field,
which was fifteen minutes away from the camp. Now, ice
(05:56):
was already a quarter of an inch thick, and the
temperature wouldn't get close to thirty two for the next
few days. We drove a four wheeler out in the
ice and in the water in front of the skid
blind we had brushed up in the middle of the field.
We were breaking up a large area of muddy open
water as we drove in circles and made it shine
(06:16):
like a diamond. Of ducks coming in with the coal
front and they were landing in it before we got
back out on the turn road. To leave open water
would be the key to our success and a struggle
to maintain the blind would hold five people safely and comfortably.
Now that meant we had to stagger our groups. But
(06:36):
we had a plan that Tim would take his four
hunters and get in there at daylight. The trailer we
had for hauling the four wheeler would serve two purposes.
Once we arrived, he unload the four wheeler, then hook
it to the trailer to haul our hunters and all
their plunder along the turn row out to the blind.
He didn't hook the trailer and make a loop through
the ice where we were going to put the decoys
(06:58):
while our clients got in the blind. Now, once he
had the hole opened up, he'd parked a four wheeler
behind the blind and start hunting. Ten would hunt from
the opening of shooting ires till around nine o'clock, and
then I'd have my crew there where we parked our trucks.
You're ready to swap out when he came out. It
was a good plan. The best part was I got
(07:19):
to sleep late. It had been a long season. My
Nokia fifty one to ten cell phone started buzzing before
seven o'clock. The message from ten was y'all come now,
all caps and with several exclamation marks. Well that wasn't
a good sign. It was barely shooting light outside and
my crew had just started getting up and moving around.
(07:42):
No doubt he's stuck or is having some kind of trouble,
I thought. So regardless, I needed to get them open,
get them moving with whatever had transpired at the rice field. Y'all,
get your stuff up and let's go. We got to
go right now. Something drong just now. If someone had
been hurt, he would have said that, so I knew
whatever the emergency was, it was hunting related and not
(08:02):
an issue of life and death. So like herding cats,
I finally got my folks and all their stuff in
my bronco and we took off. I'd messaged him a
couple of times to see if I needed to bring
anything other than what he knew was in my ride,
but he never answered. In my head, I'm thinking he's
(08:24):
elbow deep in cold ice and mud, and I figured
he couldn't answer. So about seven twenty when I pulled
up to the property and saw Tim with the trailer
loaded with all his hunters, making their way back toward
us along the levee. Immediately my mind raised as to
what we were going to do with these hunters. Now.
If he's driving back, he's obviously not stuck, so the
(08:45):
rice field must be frozen up beyond opening up. I figured, man,
they hadn't been there forty five minutes from the time
shooting ears opened up until now, and I had no
idea what we were going to do next. But Tim
must have a plan. Wouldn't have called me to come over.
We're sitting in the bronco and I turned to the
guys that were with me. I said, boys, I don't
(09:06):
know what's going on, but don't look like we're gonna
be hunting here today. Their disappointment was obvious, even though
they didn't say anything. But I was disappointed too. Now.
As they got closer, one of them said, look at
all those ducks. I looked out across that field, and
ducks were piloted into that rice field from every direction.
(09:29):
I looked back at the trailers. Tim got closer and
it was filled with mallard ducks and smiling duck hunters.
I started laughing. I said, y'all, get y'all, get your
stuff together. The B team is going in now. Tim
said it was an absolute dream. They couldn't spook the
ducks out of the field. All his hunters were wanting
(09:49):
to tell their buddies about what they'd done, but I
was in a hurry to get them out there. Who
knew how long this would last, and I wanted all
of them to have every opportunity to shoot ducks that
we could give them. So I got my boys loaded
up and we looked back at that rice field that
had a tordinata of ducks bombiting that muddy water. I
(10:09):
told Tim, y'all can wait here if you want. We're
gonna be back in a few minutes. He didn't wait,
but I wasn't wrong. Tim and his crew went back
to fix breakfast for all of us. It took us
longer to get ready at the camp and get there
than it did for us to shoot five limits of ducks.
Wave after wave of ducks being pushed into the area
(10:30):
where that coal front were falling into the decoys. It
was too cold to have my lab out there, so
I was picking up dead ducks and live ones were
still dropping in. As high as you could see a duck,
you could call at him, and immediately they locked up
and fell like a rock. Wings were pressed close to
their sides, and they sounded like a jet engine as
(10:51):
they gained speed, getting closer and closer. No circling, no, nothing,
straight down, like they were on a string. We were
back at the camp before Tim could get the biscuits done.
We'd shot ten limits of mallards tag team style. But
what about tomorrow? What were we going to do about tomorrow?
(11:12):
Most folks are judging their jobs by their last performance.
A duck guide has to sell himself on what he's
going to do next, and I had no clue what
we were going to do. That ice would be too
thick to break with the four wheeler. Tim had a plan, though.
He knew what we were going to do next, and
(11:33):
what we were going to do next was going to
be just as entertaining as what we had just done.
We planned to hunt after the sun came up the
next day. It would give us time to safely put
our plan into action. We had acquired two sticks of
(11:59):
tovekx tovax more or less replaced dynamite than that. It
was safer the store and handle back then you could
legally buy it. That's enough of that. That's not the
important part of the story. Anyway. Our plan was to
blow a hole in the ice that had become a
lot thicker through the night. Breaking it with a four
wheeler wasn't possible any longer. We could do doughnuts without
(12:21):
even trying. All ten of us were walking on the ice,
jumping up and down, trying to make a hole, slipping
and falling and generally risking life and limb. At one
point I looked around and everyone had fallen and was
on their backs, flopping around like someone had kicked over
the shining bucket in the bottom of the boat. It
was slick, and I'm not sure we could have broken
(12:41):
through with a truck. Enter tovex Tim with the explosives prepped,
He lit the fuse and we retreated to the relative
safety to witness the festivities. How long you cut that
fuse for tens old about any time now, And with
that it detonated with a large boom. Our clients were
(13:08):
cheering from the levee After they had all taken refuge
behind the four wheeler trailer about one hundred yards away.
Tim and I had tucked in behind the duck bline.
The results were less than we'd hope for, but we
had managed to knock a hole in the ice, a
hole almost big enough sticky foot in. Now we had
one more stick left, but decided against putting it in
(13:30):
that hole for fear of reckon the laser level filled
that we had leased. Doubtful the farmer would have appreciated
a big low spot in this dead center where we
were hunting the coming spring when planting time came, So
we all worked as hard as we could to make
that hole about the size of a kitchen table. The
biggest chunks of ice we slid into the ice that
(13:51):
we could that we couldn't break, or just lay it
on the outside of the hole. Then we threw three
decoys in it and called it good. It was all
we could do, and it worked like a charm. The
wind was steady, and the ducks that were coming in
were all migrators and looking for a place to sit,
no matter how small the hole was they wanted water.
(14:13):
It was literally the perfect storm. Temput all our hunters
into the blind and we stood behind it and we
shot another full ten man limit that afternoon, just like
we'd done the day before when we alternated groups. On
the third day, we were frozen solid and our guests
got an early start back home. We tried to talk
them out of coming at the beginning, but they wanted
(14:35):
to experience an Arkansas duck on now. While they didn't
get it in the classically historic sense, what they did
get was an experience with some Arkansas flare, and that's
just how that happened. Cold fronts, Man, We looked forward
(14:58):
to cold fronts as much as anything done. Number One,
it's going to start giving you some relief from the
heat that is the south. And number two, if you're
a duck hunter, it usually means more ducks are coming.
Ducks only go as far south as they have to.
They're fueling up to make it through the winter, select
a mate and travel back north to make more ducks.
(15:19):
So if stut guard Arkansas is as far south as
they need to go to have food and water, that's
where they'll spend the winter. If it stays warmer further
north will be their cold weather home. It's been my belief,
not from schooling, but from observation over the past almost
fifty years of chasing them, that ducks are energy hoarders,
(15:39):
and they're only going to burn enough to sufficiently stay
healthy enough to do what ducks do this time of year,
which again is to prep for making more ducks. Snow
and ice that cover and freeze all the food sources
up yonder force all the waterfowl to make tracks to
my neck of the woods. I remember watching the weather
man talking about all better bundle up and have plenty
(16:01):
of firewood on hand. There's a big coal front coming now.
My wife can hear a forecast like that, and she
starts inventoring wool socks and seeing how many she can
put on at the same time, just to stay inside.
All I hear him saying is Brent, you better get outside.
The critics are stirring now as I'm telling you all this.
(16:22):
I've been locked in the house for the past three
days because a particularly big coal front came through, bringing snow, ice,
and single digit temps in a historically low water year
that froze the water. We did have while giving the
lowest duck numbers recorded in the past twenty five years,
the old boot in the breeches, kicking them on down
(16:43):
the road. The light at the end of the tunnel
is it'll start warming up in the next day or
so and the ducks should start moving back in before
duck seasoned plump slips away. Now that's the ebb and
flow of coal fronts. Low duck numbers and unprecedented lower
There was a time when I wouldn't have missed a
minute of it, and Tim and I would have been
(17:05):
somewhere where there was open flowing water, even in this
severe cold, because there's one thing that's one hundred percent
guaranteed in nature, and that there is no one hundred
percent guarantees all the water doesn't freeze, all the ducks
don't leave, and all the duck hunters don't stay home.
(17:28):
Derek Reynolds a man who was first introduced to me
and Tim when he was a teenager. He wanted to
duck hunt and needed someone to take him, and we did,
and Derek became a member of our family. He now
has a beautiful family of his own, and he became
a staple at our guide service when he was a kid,
and if we'd ever had an official mascot, it would
(17:51):
have been him. And once they got to do with
cole fronts, well, I'll tell you. Derek sent me in
tim a pitcher this morning. It was ten degrees and
Derek and a friend of his were posing with two
limits of ducks. There was some open flowing water in
the background. The picture made me shiver just looking at it.
(18:12):
An aluminum boat with frozen mud, dirty snow, and covered
with ice. The mount of clothes those boys were wearing
reminded me of Randy in the movie A Christmas Story.
My response to this text was heck yeah, But in
parentheses I wrote, I'm glad I wasn't there, but that
was a lie. I would have been there. I've been
(18:35):
stoke for the past three days to get out and
see what's shaking in the woods. And I'm not sure
if it's habit and learned behavior or genetically ingrained in
me to be outside when it's cold, but that's where
I want to be. Maybe cold fronts affect me just
like they do other creatures. Now, I don't have any
scientific data to back that up, but I bet there's
(18:55):
something to it. I do know the coon stay in
the den for the most part where I live when
it's this cold, so cutting whaling loose would be more
like an exercise and futility. If I wanted to tree
a coon outside of his den, and with my duck
holes frozen up and dear not moving much, I've had
to lay up in the house and wait out the
(19:16):
cold TIMPs, just like an old boor coon, getting more
anxious every day. Then, when I thought staring out the
window at iced over roads and snow was going to
be my new hobby, a road greater and a salt
truck passed by my house. Then Michael Rosemand called and said,
get your stuff together. I've got some beagles and we're
(19:37):
going rabbit hunting. Man, old man, how I love a
cold front in this country life of mine. Thank y'all
so much for listening. Chuck a big log in that
fireplace that'll still be burning when you get back home.
Bundle up and get yourself outside, take someone with you,
(20:01):
and enjoy the gifts of winter. We don't know how
many of these we're going to get, and we need
to take advantage and revel and the ones we did
Until next week This is Brent Reed signing off. Y'all
be careful.
Host
Clay Newcomb
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.