If hunting and fishing are your hobbies, sooner or later you’re going to succumb to the capricious whims of Murphy’s Law.
Accidents, mishaps, incidents — misadventures in the field go by a variety of names. My wife, Carol, calls them “Terry Moments,” and I have to admit I have more than my share of them. Several years ago, I even wrote a feature for Louisiana Sportsman about some of the more bizarre ones.Unfortunately, that story just scratched the surface because the Terry Moments continue unabated. I have noticed over time that they tend to fall into three categories. There are those that draw blood, those that damage property and the ones that simply cause me great embarrassment.
Carol usually becomes involved in the first category because she’s the one who has to take me to the emergency room. Her initiation occurred long ago when we were fiancés teaching school in DeRidder. I convinced her to go squirrel hunting with me in Whiskey Chitto bottom one warm October afternoon, and we managed to kill a big fox squirrel.
Back at my place, I was stripping off the skin with my thumb and knife blade when my thumb suddenly slipped. I knew immediately I was cut, instinctively closed my fist tightly, and looked down to see blood seeping between my fingers. Upon a closer examination, it didn’t look that bad, so we went into the kitchen expecting to just wash it off and put on a Band-Aid.
We washed and applied pressure and washed and applied pressure, but nothing worked. It just would not stop bleeding. After 30 minutes, I finally decided this called for medical attention.
At the emergency room I showed the cut to the doctor and asked him why it wouldn’t stop bleeding. He nonchalantly explained, “Well, it’s because you have a little artery right there where you sliced it. It’s going to keep bleeding until we stitch it up.”
I returned to school with a big bandage on my right thumb, and suspect the students at DeRidder Junior High were secretly thrilled because I couldn’t wield my paddle for a couple of weeks.
Fast forward about 10 years, and we were teaching in Natchitoches Parish. I got up early one morning, and headed to Little River near Pollock for some white perch fishing. Putting in at Big Creek, I grabbed the cord of my Mercury outboard and gave it hard yank.
What I didn’t notice was that an old fishing line with a bream hook had somehow become tangled in the motor. When I pulled the cord, my right thumb snagged the hook. The fishing line broke, but not before the hook drove into the quick, and the barbed point lodged deep under the nail.
I knew the old trick of pushing a hook on through the skin and clipping off the barb to extract it, but that was impossible because it was up under the nail. Returning to the truck, I got a pair of pliers, and for 10 minutes gritted my teeth and pulled from every possible angle, but it wouldn’t budge.
A game warden drove up while I was tugging on it, and offered some suggestions, but nothing worked. Defeated, I loaded everything back up, careful not to bang the protruding shank, and drove back home. Carol took me to the emergency room, where the doctor deadened my thumb and finally extracted the hook with some difficulty.
It was déjà vu all over again because about an inch away from the hook was a 10-year-old scar from a squirrel-cleaning mishap. This time, however, my young daughters Laura and Amie accompanied us. It was their first introduction to a Daddy Moment.
Another incident that left me bloody was more bearable because it resulted in a deer kill. Before daylight, I followed an old logging road for nearly a mile to get to a spot where I had killed a couple of bucks before.
It was still too dark to shoot when I sat on the wet ground and leaned back against a small pin oak tree. I hadn’t been there long when a deer snorted just behind me. I looked around the tree, only to see a white tail bounding through the dark woods.
A few minutes later, I looked back and saw another deer walking along the same path. It was far behind my left side, but I eased up my rifle, twisted around awkwardly, and saw antlers through the scope. When I pulled the trigger, the Ruger 7mm Magnum roared and jolted me to the bone.
Jumping up, I ran over to where the deer was standing, and found a nice 5-point lying motionless on the ground. It was only then that I felt something running down my nose. After wiping it off, I saw my fingers were covered in blood.
In my awkward position, I was unable to keep a firm grip on the rifle, and it smacked me good when I fired. When I finally got back to the truck and looked at myself in the rearview mirror, blood was smeared all over my face, and there was a nice half-moon cut near my right eyebrow. But I got the deer, and that’s what mattered.
Despite the occasional injury, it’s my gear that suffers the most from Terry Moments. I seem to have especially bad luck when pulling trailers. One of my most shocking incidents occurred when I was driving down a rough gravel road to put my boat in on Cocodrie Bayou near Acme.
I happened to glance in the rearview mirror to see my Mercury motor just drop off the back of the boat. What followed looked like a film clip of a cluster bomb run. The motor hit the ground at 35 mph, and shattered into a jillion pieces that kicked up dust and gravel as they skipped down the road.
Upon inspecting the transom, I found the motor clamps were still in place. Apparently, a hairline fracture had developed right above the clamps, and the motor just broke off. All I could do was pick up the larger pieces and drive back home.
Another expensive moment occurred during muzzleloader season when I borrowed my brother Danny’s rifle. It was a .50-caliber Hawken, and I was going to test various loads to see which one was most accurate. Not having a shooting bench, I decided to just rest the rifle over the cab of my truck and shoot at a target about 50 yards away.
After ramming down 100 grains of FFg black powder and a patched round ball, I fired and walked over to the target to find I had hit it dead center. Feeling rather smug walking back to the truck, I then noticed the windshield shimmered oddly in the sunlight. About two steps more, and it suddenly dawned on me that what initially looked like sun reflection was actually shattered glass. The muzzle blast had magically transformed some small nicks and cracks into one giant spider web of destruction.
Such Terry Moments do not discriminate. When friends are out with me, their property is equally at risk. My late buddy Jim Brister found this out one hot summer day several years ago when I invited him to go wade fishing on Dugdemona River. Jim already had his ATV loaded onto his trailer when I stopped at his house, and he told me to drive since I knew the way.
After about 45 minutes, I looked in the rearview mirror, and the four-wheeler appeared to be sitting at a bit of an angle on the trailer. It was nothing dramatic, but something just didn’t look quite right. The trailer was pulling smoothly with no jumping or swerving so I said nothing, but after awhile I finally asked Jim if his trailer set level because it looked like it was half a bubble off.
We decided to check it out, and I pulled over to the shoulder of the road. When I got out, Jim was standing by his door staring at the trailer.
“Did the tire go flat?” I asked.
In puzzled astonishment, Jim exclaimed, “Tire? We don’t even have a wheel!”
When I walked around the trailer, it took a moment to realize what I was seeing.
Apparently, we had, indeed, suffered a flat earlier, but I must have driven on for miles. First, the tire disintegrated and then the wheel itself ground down to the lug nuts. We must have looked like the space shuttle at launch with all the sparks that were flying as we roared down Highway 34.
To this day, I can’t explain why neither one of us didn’t notice anything. Jim said he remembered hearing a low bang when we took a sharp curve south of Chatham, but he didn’t say anything because there was no other noise or indication anything was wrong.
Having no spare, we had to leave the trailer on the side of the road. I felt terrible and offered several times to pay for the tire and wheel, but good-natured Jim refused. He always saw the humor in everything, and liked to point out to me that he got his revenge. When we were unloading everything to go fishing, he closed the door on my rod, breaking off the tip, and leaving me to fish with nothing but a stubby pole.
Fortunately, most of my Terry Moments do not result in injury or property damage — only embarrassment. I’ll never forget one that occurred when I was headed to North Arkansas for some rainbow trout fishing. I had stopped at the Mountain View Wal-Mart for some tackle, and upon leaving the parking lot gunned the truck to beat some traffic. What I didn’t notice was the high curb along the road.
When I cut sharply to the right to enter the road, the boat trailer jumped the curb. The combination of speed and sharp turn caused the boat and trailer to tip over right in the middle of the street. Rods, gas tank, tackle box, boat seats, paddle — everything went flying across four lanes of traffic. I screeched to a halt and rushed back to check on things, more worried about the motor (i.e., the replacement for the one that had fallen off my boat earlier) than anything else.
The motor was fine and still firmly attached to the boat, which was still tied down to the trailer, but they were all lying sideways in the middle of the road. As people came to a stop and started honking their horns, a Good Samaritan pulled over and helped me right the boat and trailer and collect my gear, and I pulled to the curb to reattach the trailer to my hitch.
On that occasion I was glad no family or friends were with me to see the mishap, but that has not always been the case. Sometimes there are witnesses.
On my Winn Parish hunting lease is an area known as “The Palmetto.” Low and wet, it’s a thicket that provides great cover for deer. One wet winter, I was able to drive in and park off on an old logging road and hunt until dark. When I got ready to leave, my tires spun down when I tried to back up to the logging road.
Not to worry. I had a Mazda four-wheel drive with a 6,000-pound Warn winch. Engaging the front wheels, I tried again, and all four tires spun down. I tried to go forward, but only dug in deeper. OK, I thought, I’ll just winch myself forward out of the holes and get a running start. Well, after about three unsuccessful attempts to back up to the road, I found I had winched myself right up to the tree, and couldn’t go forward or backward.
By then it was after dark and drizzling rain, so I gave up, walked about a mile to my uncle’s house and got a lift to my parents’ place. Friend and distant cousin Bobby Joe Chandler lived across the road, and he kindly agreed to go back with me in his old Jeep and get me out. With his son Craig, we worked on the truck for an hour or more, but neither the Jeep nor its winch could extract it.
That night a torrential rain fell, and I lay awake in bed imagining Dugdemona overflowing its banks and flooding my truck. But the waters rose slowly, and I had enough time to run to my cousin Jimmy Jones’ house and roust him out of bed (early on his day off as it turned out). He offered to drive his logging skidder back to the Palmetto and retrieve my truck.
Confident my nightmare was finally over, I was shocked to watch Jimmy’s skidder spin down without budging the stubborn Mazda. With each attempt, he gunned it more and more until I thought the skidder would jerk the chassis out from under my truck. Then, in one last violent pull, Jimmy broke the truck loose and slowly dragged it back out to the logging road. It was one of the few times in my life I had to call for assistance to get unstuck, but it was good to know that family can always be counted on to get you out of a bind.
Joe Saunders, a state regional archaeologist stationed at the University of Louisiana at Monroe where I teach history, has also seen me at my best. I have a deep interest in archaeology, and began to work occasionally with Joe soon after I joined the ULM faculty. Whenever I discover an archaeological site while out hunting or fishing, I tell Joe and take him out to record it.
One summer I discovered a couple of interesting sites on Little River that fit into some research Joe was engaged in, so we went back in my jonboat so he could collect a few artifacts and take some photographs. Finishing up our work, we made the long run back to Big Creek landing (the same place I impaled my thumb on a fishhook years before).
The position I sit in when I run my outboard motor cuts off the circulation in my left leg and makes it go numb if I stay there very long. As a result, when we eased into Big Creek my leg was completely dead.
Joe jumped out to pull the boat onshore, and I silently debated whether to try to stand or just admit what had happened and wait a moment to let the circulation restore. Too embarrassed to say anything to Joe, I decided to just step out of the boat, stand there and make small talk until I got the feeling back.
Gingerly easing up off the seat, I stepped over the side and tried to stand. As soon as I straightened up, my left leg gave way. For a moment I wobbled around trying to keep my balance, but then, like a tall pine tree under a logger’s saw, I slowly fell over backward into the creek with a huge splash.
As I struggled out of the water, Joe had this “What the … ?” look on his face, and it was evident by the reaction of nearby fishermen that they thought I had spent the day guzzling beer. I explained to Joe what had happened, discretely stripped out of my wet clothes and put on my rainsuit so he wouldn’t have to ride with a wet naked me all the way back to Monroe.
A few years later, I took Joe down to the Dewey Wills WMA to check out an Indian mound he was interested in. We drove deep into the woods, but the area was so grown up in thickets we couldn’t find the mound.
Separating, we stumbled through the briars in search of the site, and I finally came back out on the road we had driven in on. I looked down it one way to see if Joe had come out, and then glanced back in the other direction. Forty yards away was a game warden frozen in a quick draw stance with his right hand hovering above his pistol.
Taken aback, I quickly cried out, “Hey! How you doin’?”
Not moving an inch, he called back, “Hey! What are YOU doin’?”
About that time, Joe walked out on the road, and I quickly explained who we were and what we were up to. The warden relaxed and said he and his partner had been tromping through the woods all day looking for a marijuana patch reported in the area, and he thought he had caught us red-handed tending the crops. We finally found the mound, and then gave the warden a ride out to the main road. I never learned if he and his partner found what they were looking for.
Such incidents happen so regularly that Carol always asks me if I had any Terry Moments when I come in from an outing. If I’m lucky, I can say, “Nobody hurt, no property damaged — it was a good day.” On the other hand, I sometimes have to own up to some strange occurrence and watch her shake her head in silent disbelieve — like the time my trailer snapped in two at the ramp when I was loading up my boat, or when the boat slid off the trailer when I drove up a sharp incline or that time when I stepped off in a deep stump hole while wading the back water hunting deer.
My education at the School of Hardknocks continues.
