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thought,” I said.
    I was lean and mean and could run for miles. After the man identified himself as a game warden, I put it into high gear. Forthe first one hundred yards, he was running with me. But I was grinning and thinking, This guy doesn’t realize that he’s not in good enough shape to be running with me . He was wearing cowboy boots and wasn’t properly dressed to keep up with me. A buddy who had dropped me off earlier picked me up on the other side of the woods.
    When I was in high school, our basketball coach, Billy Wiggins, asked me if we were killing any squirrels. He said he wanted to go hunting with me, as long as we weren’t hunting on land that had been posted for no trespassing. “Of course not,” I told him. “You’ll be fine.”
    Coach Wiggins and I went hunting right after daylight one morning, and it wasn’t long before I heard a truck coming at a pretty good rate of speed. It was coming across a pecan orchard right toward us. The last two words Coach Wiggins heard were, “Run, Coach!” I took off running in the other direction.
    Moving to Dixie also introduced me to frog gigging. Some of the larger bullfrogs have legs bigger than chicken drumsticks and are delicious! We never ate frogs before moving to Dixie, but they were so abundant in the area that they eventually became part of our regular diet. In springtime, in less than an hour we could gather up a large enough bunch to make a meal, even for a family as big as ours. The slough behind our house was overrunwith frogs, as were many others just a short distance across the road.
    To catch them, we waited until dark and immobilized them by blinding them on the shoreline with a bright flashlight. One of us held the light and another used a long-handled, spring-loaded clamp, or “grab,” to “gig” the frog. Some people called the clamps gigs—but the actual sharp-pronged gigs were illegal. The trick was to hit the frog sharply on the back, thus springing the grab and causing it to clamp around the frog, then to lift it out of the water or off the ground quickly so it couldn’t use its powerful legs to leap free.
    During one particularly memorable frog gigging, we caught a tow sack full of the big ones, probably thirty or forty pounds of them—so many that cleaning them was going to be a chore and take a while. So we laid the sack on the floor by the door when we went into the kitchen for a snack before beginning—carelessly leaving the top only loosely twisted to keep the frogs secure.
    While we lingered in the kitchen, the frogs worked themselves out of the bag. When we returned, the bullfrogs were everywhere: leaping and jumping under the beds, tables, chairs, and chest of drawers. They were even inside our shoes—and every other place they could find to hide! One big one was in the middle of a bed!

    It took us longer to find and catch the frogs the second time than it had the first.

    It took us longer to find and catch the frogs the second time than it had the first. We were still finding them hours later, and when we finally went to bed, we nervously wondered if we would wake up with a cold, clammy companion.
    Of course, we grew up with guns in the house. It was the era of Gene Autry and Roy Rogers. Cap pistols were always a big Christmas item in our house, and as we grew older, BB guns became our prized possessions. Shotguns and .22s for each of us were beyond my father’s means, but there was always ammunition for his shotgun, and he freely allowed all my brothers and me to use it.
    Every one of us learned to shoot with our father’s Browning semiautomatic sixteen-gauge shotgun. We also used a Remington .22 that belonged to our uncle Al Robertson and somehow wound up in our house. It was a bolt-action with a seven-shot clip.
    From the time Pa purchased his shotgun, the year after World War II ended, he or one of us boys hunted with it almost daily. It would be difficult to calculate how many shells were fired through the