Read Happy, Happy, Happy: My Life and Legacy as the Duck Commander for Free Online

immobile at first, but within a few months, he was able to get around and help with the cooking.
    My sister Judy was a rock and did much of the cooking, though all of us helped, and she saw that Silas and Jan got off to school in good order. Fortunately, the school bus stopped in front of our house.
    To help make ends meet, Tommy and I gathered pecans and sold them for thirty-five cents a pound. In three hours, we could gather about a hundred pounds—equaling the weekly disability payment. Tommy also cleaned the church building each week in Blanchard, Louisiana, where we worshipped, for five dollars a week. With this money he was able to pay for our school meals, which were fifteen cents per day per child, thanks to Louisiana’s liberal school-lunch supplement.
    Our food staples became rice and beans, which we bought by the hundred-pound sack. To this we added corn bread. Our meager diet made fresh game and fish doubly appreciated. Fortunately, vegetables were cheap in a farming area, and we purchased what we could with our scanty means from the Biondos, an Italian family that had a commercial truck farm a few miles down the road.
    As I noted earlier, a real man can’t survive without meat, so it was up to Tommy and me to find some. It wasn’t easy, becausewe no longer had acres and acres of bountiful land surrounding our home. There were plenty of farms around us, but the farmers in the area didn’t want anyone on their land. They depended on it for their living and were diligent in warning off what they considered intruders.
    Tommy, Silas, and I often led the farmers on wild-goose chases through the woods surrounding their plowed land. When the ground was wet, the red clay in the plowed fields would cling to our shoes and build up to several inches in depth and pounds in weight. My only remedy was to stop occasionally, shake my leg vigorously to dislodge the mud, do the same with my other leg, and then continue on. Progression across the thick land was sometimes nothing more than three steps and a kick!
    We never considered what we were doing as poaching on someone else’s land. We had our own code. We didn’t bother any equipment, crops, or anything on someone else’s farm. And I was always careful not to step on any young cotton or corn plants. But if it flew, grew wild, swam, or lived in trees, I figured that it belonged to whoever captured or gathered it. I might have even picked up a ripe watermelon (there were thousands of them out there) every once in a while—wouldn’t have wanted it to be overlooked and get overripe!
    I can still remember my first encounter with a game warden. I was squirrel-hunting out of season—my family had to eat—and Ihad a mess of them. It happened before I repented and was one of the reasons I needed to repent. When I squirrel-hunted, I carried a big, metal safety pin, and I sharpened its end so it would run through the squirrels’ legs right above the joint. If I saw a game warden, I’d drop the squirrels, close up the pin, and then take off running like the wind. On this occasion, I was wearing two pairs of old men’s argyle socks without any shoes and had my pant legs taped so they wouldn’t flop when I was running. I was trying to be as quiet as possible. I was sitting there shooting squirrels when I sensed that someone was watching me. I couldn’t see anybody and couldn’t hear anybody, but I just had a feeling come over me that I was being stalked in the woods.

    If it flew, grew wild, swam, or lived in trees, I figured that it belonged to whoever captured or gathered it.

    Suddenly I heard a stick break behind me, and I turned and saw a man standing there with a gun in his hand. He was wearing a wide-rimmed cowboy hat and identified himself as a game warden. He was standing about twenty yards from me. When I heard the stick break, I dropped the squirrels and they hit the ground.
    “Hold it, son,” he told me. “I’m a game warden.”
    “That’s what I