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Frogs, Snakes and the Walking Pig By Dennis Stewart |
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| Tensas
Parish in the 1970's had only one red light, no movie theaters, and
no teen centers, yet we young folks were never bored. We had fishing
on Lake Bruin and in the Mississippi river levee borrow pits, deer
hunting, squirrel hunting, arrowhead hunting, turkey hunting, and
most important of all to our cultural education, we had the Walking
Pig.
The Walking Pig served as our headquarters, the place where we planned our nightly expeditions, as well as the place where we met later to discuss our experiences. The Pig was a ramshackle, broken down building on Levee Street in St. Joseph. If you went to the bathroom when it was raining, you could expect to get wet. The floor tilted, and it was fun watching new-comers try to compensate for the tilt after a few drinks. One afternoon in late May we were at the Walking Pig making plans for the night. Turkey season was over, and dove season would not begin for another three months. We had grown tired of coon hunting. My oldest step-brother Claudey-Boy came up with the idea of going frog hunting. Claudey-Boy reminds me of Jimmy Buffett, with his laid-back, don’t worry about nothin’ attitude. He also looked something like Jimmy Buffett did way back then, before Buffett lost all of his hair. Four of us quickly gathered up our frog hunting gear, which consisted of a long pole with steel tines at the end called a frog gig, headlights like coal miners wear, and a case of Schlitz. We squeezed into the seat of an old pickup truck. This was before they invented extended cabs. It was also before mandatory seat belt laws. You had to have a lot of faith back then in each others hygiene practices. Or, you just had to be certain your body odor was stronger than the next guys. It didn’t take long to arrive at a nice, swampy, froggy-looking area. The water all over Tensas Parish was still high from the annual spring floods. This particular wooded area was usually not covered with water, but that night the water was several feet deep. It had oak, pecan, and cottonwood trees, some of which had fallen over the years, making the walking tough when it was dry, and even more hazardous when the fallen trees were under water. Most of us were experienced with wading through water in the woods. We hunted a lot on Riverside, the area across the levee from St. Joseph, and in the spring it was nothing for us to walk one hundred yards or more across beaver dams that were a foot under water. The water was too muddy to see the beaver dams, but we all knew how they zig-zagged from memory. One mis-step would put you in deep water infested with cotton mouths, but we never gave it a second thought. We all knew we would live forever, back then. Frog hunting at night in water four feet deep was no step for a Stepper. The hunt began. As we entered the water, the mosquitoes welcomed us. Claudey-Boy reminded me to take my wallet out of my back pants pocket and put it in my front shirt pocket as a precaution in case we waded into deep water. As I recall it, nearly 35 years later, there was no moon that night, and the woods were darker than an opened bottle of Wild Turkey’s future. We had our headlamps, but they only lit up a narrow area directly in front of your nose. As we waded into water that came up around our waists, we spotted several snakes swimming around us, no doubt puzzled about our sanity. We dealt with the snakes by shining our headlamps in a different direction. Out of sight, out of mind, the same philosophy that my flying instructor years later had in regard to emergency landings at night. If you don’t like what you see in your landing lights, he advised, just turn your lights off. We also spotted the occasional frog. Shortly after the hunt began, I tripped over an underwater log, and fell face first, completely immersed in the black water. It took me several panic-filled seconds to find my footing and stick my head back into the sweet air. Claudy-Boy laughed hysterically, and I sarcastically told him thanks for the advice about putting my wallet in my shirt pocket, that really helped a lot. Along about 11 p.m. we decided to call it a night, having gigged four or five frogs, and more importantly, having run out of Schlitz. Some of the more aggressive mosquitoes seemed to be flying quite erratically by then. Water squished out of our shoes as we entered the Walking Pig, but the bartender had no problem with taking my soggy dollar bill. So I ended the night, sitting on a bar stool in a widening puddle of water in the Walking Pig, a cold Schlitz in my hand, scratching mosquito bites on my face and arms, listening to Johnny Paycheck and Van Morrison on the jukebox, laughing with my friends about the night’s adventures, and as happy and contented as a dog with two bones.
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