Another Arkansas duck season begins today. Alarms will ring at 4 a.m. or earlier, and thousands of people will drive through the darkness to their favorite hunting holes.
Duck season is an integral part of the cultural fabric that makes Arkansas unique. Memories will be made, and stories will be told for years to come. In a duck hunter's heart, the season never really concludes. There's just more time to read about duck hunting and quietly contemplate future hunts. This first day is much like the first day of school or the first game of football season. The possibilities seem endless, and optimism reigns.
One of the people I hunted with through the years was fond of saying, "I've gotten to the point where I'd rather talk about it than actually do it." I may be reaching that point. The older I get, the more I think back on duck hunts with my father and his friends. They were men who influenced my life greatly. Almost all of them are gone now.
I also enjoy researching the rich history of duck hunting in this state. Arkansas remains the mecca of the sport. From Ernest Hemingway to Jimmy Carter to Dick Cheney, famous Americans have been lured here for decades to experience our duck-hunting culture.
When Hemingway was in Piggott visiting his in-laws in late 1932, he decided to head south to hunt ducks along the lower White River in southeast Arkansas. The writer was accompanied by Max Perkins, the legendary book editor known for discovering and nurturing authors such as Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe.
Perkins wrote in a letter dated Christmas Day 1932: "I've just got back, two days ago, from the sunny South. In six days on the White River in Arkansas, we saw the sun once for a couple of minutes and all the time we froze. Hemingway wrote that he 'needed' to see me, and it had to be done while duck shooting, in the snow, on the shore of a river with cakes of ice on it. And you have to kneel down a lot of the time or sit. We got quite a lot of ducks, but not nearly so many as Hem thought we should; but I had a fine time."
Perkins wrote about the tough men who lived along the lower Arkansas and White rivers, making their living hunting, fishing, gathering mussel shells and trapping.
"We were five hours by train from Memphis, but we went half of that by motor and almost ran down several hogs that ambled across our road," he wrote. "The whole country and the people were just as in the days of Mark Twain. We went into several houseboats to get some corn whiskey and saw men who lived always on the river. They were dressed just like the men told about in Huckleberry Finn, their trousers stuffed into their boots, and they talked just like them."
A few such men can still be found living on houseboats on the rivers of east Arkansas--the Arkansas, White, St. Francis, Cache and Black--but much of what you'll find these days are well-heeled people who come from across the country in search of mallards. Ambassadors, movie stars, musicians, professional athletes and titans of industry descend on Arkansas in search of ducks. If you were to stake out the Stuttgart airport during the 60-day season, you would be shocked by the number of faces you recognized.
Given that tradition, I wasn't surprised when I found myself at a duck club near DeWitt several years ago as dinner was being prepared by Dickie Brennan from the Brennan family of New Orleans, one of the best-known restaurant families in the world. Brennan is an avid duck hunter and was spending the week at a duck club known as Little Siberia. He had driven to the Arkansas Delta from the Crescent City and brought food--lots of food.
The lodge is on the banks of a reservoir that covers almost 700 acres and is adjacent to Bayou Meto. The reservoir was constructed in part by German prisoners of war in 1943-44. The lodge faces west, which allowed us to watch a glorious winter sunset as Brennan prepared dinner. It was an evening I'll always remember.
I went to the bookshelf in the lodge that night and pulled out a copy of Ohio native Keith Russell's book The Duck-Huntingest Gentleman. First published in 1977, the collection of waterfowling stories contains a piece about a Thanksgiving trip Russell made to Arkansas. The hunting was slow from a pit blind in a flooded field that first morning in Arkansas. It was even slower the second morning in the pin oak flats. When the late Dr. Rex Hancock heard Russell complaining in the back of Buerkle Drug Store on Main Street in Stuttgart, Hancock promised to take the visitor "where the ducks are."
That place was the reservoir at Little Siberia. Hancock, a dentist who died in 1986, was among the South's foremost conservationists. He was best known for his lengthy battle to keep the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from turning the Cache River into a drainage ditch. Shortly after Hancock's death, the federal government earmarked more than $33 million from the federal duck stamp program for the establishment of the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge.
Max Perkins wrote back in 1932: "We got up in pitch dark every morning, Hem's idea of daybreak. I had an argument with him about it, but he said the sun had nothing to do with it; that was the only way to shoot ducks. So I gave in, with mental reservations. We really had a grand time."
Duck season has dawned. Once more, memories will be made by the thousands of people who find their way to the fields and flooded timber of Arkansas. May it ever be so.
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Senior Editor Rex Nelson's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. He's also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.
Editorial on 11/23/2019