Good Call: Reflections on Faith, Family, and Fowl

by Jase Robertson

  By the time we caught the fifty-five fish and returned to our truck, there was no sign of the road. The current from the water was so strong that our truck was shaking. I quickly realized we had underestimated the speed of the rising water and were now in a dangerous situation. I decided to get in the back of the truck with a life jacket on, while W. E. tried to navigate the submerged road. I had a better vantage point to see the painted lines of the highway, so every time he strayed from the road I banged on the roof of the truck. We traveled about a mile to a bridge on higher ground, where hundreds of people—along with the police—had gathered to watch the spectacle of the flood. I’m positive that we must have looked like Jesus walking on water. Noah might have used a giant ark to escape danger, but we used a truck and some redneck ingenuity! The crowd’s faces were filled with shock and bewilderment as they parted to make way for us. At some point, the people started cheering, and I felt like a politician running for office as I waved to the crowd. Even though we were basking in the glory of the moment and had an ice chest full of fish, we realized we were very fortunate to have survived.

  Another positive thing to come out of the floods was that the higher water levels revealed the areas on my dad’s property that ducks liked, and we took note of where they gathered. During high water, we also floated huge cypress logs to duck holes and used them to build duck blinds on. The high waters gave us access to lakes full of logs that we otherwise wouldn’t have had access to. After the floods receded, we had permanent blinds in spots where we knew ducks preferred to go. Over the years, my dad also purchased some of the adjoining land where we saw ducks during floods. By using the watermarks on the trees as a guide, we built levees and water-control structures to simulate the habitat that ducks seemed to favor.

  Before my dad purchased the additional property, we leased land at a hunting club in Tensas Parish, which is about eighty miles from our home. The land was located near the Mississippi River and was a great place to shoot ducks. My dad has always had a love affair with cypress tree breaks because of their beauty and the fact that ducks really seem to like what they have to offer. The trees provide a resting spot for ducks and usually have waist-deep water and green seed for them to eat.

  My dad was part of the lease in Tensas Parish for a couple of years, and in the second year, when I was about thirteen, we were involved in a major flood. My dad guided hunts to help pay for the cost of his share of the lease and to make extra money. As a kid in school, I saved my sick days for duck-hunting season. Under Louisiana laws, we were given twenty unexcused absences every academic year. Even if I was sick with a high fever or stomach virus before hunting season, I went to school so I could save my sick days to go duck-hunting. But as soon as cold fronts came down during hunting season, I became afflicted with what I called “duck fever.” The school I attended later implemented the “Jase Rule,” which required a doctor’s excuse for days missed, which I find kind of sad.

  During the year of the flood, I remember begging my dad to take me to Tensas Parish because of an approaching cold front. I knew the ducks would be coming there with it. My dad took me along mainly as a camp helper because he’d booked a full group of out-of-town hunters. Our camp was an old trailer sitting on a hump in the middle of a field beside the cypress break. Because the river was rising, the field became a safe haven for mice and ants. Every critter that crawls on the ground either drowns or moves to higher ground when water rises. The problem was our camp was on the highest point of ground for miles! My primary job was to kill the mice. My dad brought a dozen spring traps to catch them.

  I’ll never forget when we walked into the trailer. I saw mice scampering in every direction. There also was a man staying at the trailer who had helped my dad guide a previous trip. His name was Wayne, and he was from Missouri. He had decided to remain at the camp and become the caretaker while my dad was away. I’m not sure if it was because of the mice, the isolation, or a combination of both, but he seemed a little bit bewildered when I met him. He had actually frightened the wife of one of the other men who leased the property. When she showed up at the camp unannounced, Wayne believed she was an angel in a dream who had been sent to save him.

  As I started to set out the traps, one would pop before the next one was set. I caught over two hundred mice the first night! As I went to bed that night, I could hardly sleep from the anticipation of the next day’s hunt. I’d persuaded my dad to put me in a tree blind by myself while he entertained the out-of-town hunters in another tree blind about five hundred yards away. I also couldn’t sleep because I heard mice scurrying all over the trailer.

  As I finally started to close my eyes, I heard quite a commotion from my dad, who was sleeping in a bunk below me. Then I heard a loud thud against the wall.

  “Danged rat was trying to build a nest in my beard,” he said. “He needs to find somewhere else to build a nest.”

  My dad and I started laughing.

  “We’re going to need some more mousetraps, Jase,” he said.

  My dad finally decided to kill the mice with poison, which drove them to a leaky hot water tank. The line of mice trekking to the water tank turned into a traffic jam inside the walls of the trailer. When the lead mice died, those coming behind crowded into one another, dying in heaps—and then the ants started eating them. When we looked inside the walls, the dead mice were stacked like bricks. There were hundreds of them, and they looked like insulation.

  As the week went on, the smell of the dead mice became so bad that it eventually ran us out of the trailer. Phil decided he would one day burn the trailer and start over at the camp. Ultimately, the state took over the property and turned it into a wildlife refuge, so we lost the lease, too. It became a burial ground for one of the greatest mouse infestations in human history. It was epic.

  Unfortunately, mice are the least of our worries when we’re cleaning out our duck blinds before hunting season. We’ve found all kinds of wildlife in our blinds—mostly snakes, insects, alligators, and birds. We were spring-cleaning one of our blinds and stumbled upon four baby birds in a nest built in our coffeepot. They were small yellow-breasted birds that are known as great crested flycatchers. We decided to help them along, and after a few days of observation and feeding, they flew away healthy. To some it might seem ironic that we would help raise birds in a place where we shoot ducks, but it is a principle of what we do as hunters. We spend way more time, energy, and money helping the future population of ducks and their habitat than we do shooting a few for supper during hunting season. There has never been a single duck season in which hunters shot even 1 percent of the number of ducks that died during the migration process. Humans have a responsibility to keep the animal kingdom balanced, and hunters are the primary caretakers of animals’ habitats and their future well-being.

  Back to my story about the trip with my dad to the flooded Tensas Parish and his promise to put me in a duck blind by myself while he conducted his guided hunt. My dad dropped me off at the tree blind—which was about thirty feet up a tree—before daylight. I was beginning to experiment with duck calls for the first time. I had a knack for it. My dad says it takes about a year for the average person to learn how to blow a duck call, but I listened to him talk to other people about how to do it. Of course, I also listened to him blow duck calls, and there wasn’t anyone better I could have learned from. I never tried to blow a duck call until I had all the required information, and then I went out and tried it with real ducks. I’d listen to them, and then I’d blow. I’d listen again, and then I’d blow.

  On that morning at Tensas Parish, a cold front passed through, and it was about thirty degrees with a strong north wind. As the boat full of my dad’s hunting party puttered away into darkness, I quickly realized I wasn’t wearing enough clothes to stay warm. I was wearing two layers: pants, a shirt, and a pair of coveralls. I started pacing up and down the duck blind to keep my blood circulating. After several minutes, the sun was a welcome sight, because I figur
ed it would start to warm up. Unfortunately, it didn’t get much warmer.

  Before too long, I saw a few ducks fly close by. I was under strict orders from my dad to only shoot ducks that I called in over my decoys. I was sending out an occasional call but wasn’t getting a response. Then I’d hear volleys of gunfire from my dad’s blind, which caused me to jump. I realized then that the only thing worse than being in the wrong spot was being close enough to hear someone else in the right spot!

  By midmorning, my excitement and anticipation had turned into complete misery because of the cold. But all of a sudden two mallard ducks flew by me at eye level. I grabbed my duck call and blew on it about three times. The ducks stopped, turned, floated down, and sat in the decoy spread in front of me. I grabbed my gun, but my body was so cold that I couldn’t raise it to my shoulder. Actually, I was even colder than before, because when nature called, I was forced to unzip my coveralls. When I was finished doing my business, my fingers were too numb to zip the coveralls back up!

  Despite not being able to shoot, I felt a great sense of pride and accomplishment as I reflected on calling in wild ducks for the first time. It was amazing to me that the ducks were swimming around painted decoys because of the sounds I made with a call. I was instantly hooked and it really didn’t matter to me that I was too cold to shoot. Unfortunately, my dad pulled up to my blind in his boat about the same time. He watched the ducks fly away from my decoys. He pointed at them in amazement.

  “Why didn’t you shoot?” he asked me.

  Due to my pride, I decided to tell him, “I didn’t want to mess y’all up with my gunfire.”

  My dad shook his head in disbelief.

  “But I called them in with these duck calls I made,” I proudly told him.

  The next day, I went into my dad’s shop, where he was boring barrels for duck calls.

  “Hey, you want to hear my duck call?” I asked him. I was a little bit nervous because I’d never blown a call in front of him before.

  “Yeah, let me he hear it,” he said.

  I blew on the duck call.

  “You sound like a gadwall,” he said.

  A gadwall hen sounds like a mallard hen, except her cadence is a little shorter and sounds scratchier. But they’re pretty close. I didn’t know if he was complimenting me or criticizing me!

  “Hey, look on the bright side,” he said. “If the sperm count had been lower, you might have come out as a shoveler.”

  Shovelers are pretty much trash ducks and aren’t very good to eat. But after Phil told me I sounded like a gadwall, I’ve always had a special place for them in my heart. Several years later, I actually invented the first gadwall drake call. Gadwalls are unique in that the hen very rarely makes a sound. One day, we were working the ducks, and I had a mallard hen call in one hand and our six-in-one whistle in the other because we were working pintails. I blew the hen call and then the whistle. One time, I blew them at the same time and stopped. That sounds like a gadwall drake, I thought to myself. I started blowing them simultaneously so my dad could hear them.

  “Hey, you might be onto something,” he said. “Why don’t we try that? We’ll get the gadwall decoys and try it on ’em. If it gets them into the decoys, we’ll figure out a way to build them.”

  It was amazing how many gadwalls responded to my drake call. We ended up building the call, and no one has successfully duplicated it. It isn’t the prettiest of duck calls, but it’s effective.

  My first attempt at making duck calls was through trial and error, before I’d even attempted to call in ducks on my own. Of course, my dad invented wooden duck calls that were the first double-reeded calls in the world. The most critical component of a duck call is the insert or soundboard where the reeds sit. To my knowledge, my dad was the first person to successfully mass-produce duck calls made with cedar inserts. Cedar is a soft wood and once you start boring holes into it, it’s an imperfect system because the wood gives way sporadically. That’s what makes every duck call an original. They are dependent on the skill of a call maker to reach their full potential. There really aren’t two of them alike. We’ve made tens of thousands of wooden calls through the years, and not two of them sound identical. Each call seems like a new creation crafted with its own uniqueness.

  Duck calls remind me of how God uses people to make Himself known. Like duck calls, people are all a bit different and are dependent on their maker and designer for their individualism in life. Duck calls and their unique individual sounds breathe life into decoys that are essentially dead. Likewise, God uses different people with unique perspectives to illustrate His existence and shout out the message of eternal life through Jesus Christ. The audible sound that each mallard hen makes is virtually the same; however, the tone and cadence are unique. Similarly, the Gospel message is the same yesterday, today, and forever, yet the perspective and life experience are different and unique for each person relaying it.

  We Duckmen have always been on a mission to build the world’s greatest duck blind. The largest blind we ever built is on my dad’s property, and it is named the Lake Blind. It has three sides of shooting porches with a fully functional kitchen and living quarters in the middle. The side that does not have a shooting porch functions as a pull-in garage for the boat. The blind has a stove, a refrigerator, bunk beds, and a commode. We put the toilet in because once we had a guest relieve himself at the entrance of the blind, but he missed his mark a bit, leaving his waste products on the blind itself! My dad was not happy, so the next thing we knew we had a toilet—complete with plumbing that was battery operated! The blind is awesome, especially on slow days, but it is a haven for everything that roams the swamp.

  One time, one of the guys hunting with us climbed into a sleeping bag on one of the bunks to take a nap. He didn’t know there was a nest of black-faced bees in his bag! He was stung all over his body. It was a two-day ordeal getting the bees and sleeping bag out of the blind. Phil had to wrap his entire body and wear a mask to get them out. I was decked out in football gear, complete with shoulder pads and a helmet. The only places I did not have completely covered were my eyes and nose. In spite of my efforts, I was stung right between the eyes and couldn’t see for two days due to the swelling.

  One of our most dangerous missions before hunting season is de-snaking our blinds. Because of the location of most of our blinds, they’re a hot spot for cottonmouth moccasins and other venomous snakes. During one cleaning we killed a couple of cottonmouths and a black widow spider. Phil walked out onto the shooting porch and said, “I think we got it.” As I looked at Phil, I saw a cottonmouth hanging from a button willow only inches from his head. After prompting my dad to duck, I shot the snake over his head.

  We built another duck blind on floating cypress logs at a beaver pond on Phil’s property. As I climbed out of the duck blind one day to retrieve some ducks, I stepped on a log with a hole in it. I didn’t know there was a cottonmouth moccasin inside the hole! When I came back, I stepped on the log again and the snake struck at my face. I leaped back and fell into the water. It was the closest encounter I have ever had, and after the near miss, I retaliated with my shotgun and killed the snake. When you’re in the woods or swamp, if you get bit by a venomous snake, your chances of surviving are slim because you’re so far away from a hospital and antivenin. It’s one of the biggest dangers of hunting, but it’s a risk we’re willing to take. It’s amazing none of us has ever been bitten.

  At the time of this writing, we have around forty duck blinds on my dad’s property. It is a full-time job maintaining the blinds in the off-season, and oftentimes some of the blinds are forgotten until ducks start going into their areas.

  A couple of years ago, we were hunting an old blind that was literally falling apart. One of our cameramen noticed a jar sitting inside a huge crack in the floor. He retrieved the jar and saw that it was full of brown fuzzy pickles—with an expiration date eleven years old! His discovery began a very entertaining debate about the hea
lth hazards of eating one of the pickles, which we assumed had once been green. Phil and I believed eating one would make you sick for at least a couple of days. Uncle Si thought their consumption would cause immediate death. However, the cameraman, who has a degree in microbiology, gave a long list of reasons why the twelve-year-old pickles were fit for human consumption. He ate one of the pickles, despite the gags and gasps of everyone watching, including Uncle Si’s exclamations for someone to call 911! The cameraman never showed any signs of discomfort, even though he did admit it tasted awful. This is one of the many reasons my dad has always described cameramen as “weirdos.”

  The strangest thing we’ve found in our blinds during our annual cleanings was a female buzzard, which had built a nest and laid an egg in the middle of one of our tree blinds. The smell was indescribable and produced an immediate gag reflex. In an effort to relocate the buzzard, I discovered the hard way that an angry buzzard’s best defense is projectile vomiting. We eventually removed the buzzard, but we couldn’t do anything about the smell. We tried everything known to man to get rid of it, but nothing worked. We determined that we couldn’t cohabitate with a buzzard and eventually burned the blind and started over.

  The incident with the buzzard reminds me so much of our spiritual well-being. As a Christian, there are some situations you can’t reside in and stay faithful to Christ. Second Peter 2:22 describes the problem of not breaking free from your past lifestyle and declaring Jesus Christ as Lord: “Of them the proverbs are true: ‘A dog returns to its vomit’ and, ‘A sow that is washed goes back to her wallowing in the mud.’ ” Real buzzards were made by God for the specific purpose of feeding on rotten things, but from a spiritual perspective, who wants a buzzard-type lifestyle? As a human, if you feed on evil, rotten things, your spiritual lifestyle will stink. And just like the buzzard defends its domain with projectile vomiting, people spew filth from their mouth toward Christians when their evil behavior is threatened. First Peter 4:3–4 states: “For you have spent enough time in the past doing what pagans choose to do—living in debauchery, lust, drunkenness, orgies, carousing and detestable idolatry. They think it strange that you do not plunge with them into the same flood of dissipation, and they heap abuse on you.” In a world flooded with dissipation, Jesus Christ is always the high ground.