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old gun’s barrel—or the pounds of meat that were downed for our dinner table. Pa bought an entire case of shotgunshells at the beginning of each duck season—and purchased more if that wasn’t enough.
    The shotgun, more than sixty years old, has been retired. Silas, the last to use it regularly, still has it but doesn’t shoot it. Before his death, Pa sent the gun to Browning for refurbishing and repair but received a letter back from the company saying it was “extremely abused.” To repair and replace all the worn and damaged components would have cost almost as much as a new one. One of the faults, said the letter, was that the “barrel was kinked and unsafe” and would have to be replaced. Pa had always prized the hard-hitting, close pattern of shot the full-choke barrel delivered (you had to be pretty good to hit with it, as the tight cluster of shot left little room for error). He reluctantly laid the gun aside and bought a new one when times improved.
    My brothers and I were all excellent marksmen. Yet my first remembered experience with guns was anything but auspicious. Tommy and I received new BB guns for Christmas one year, but one of them didn’t survive. There’s still some confusion as to exactly what happened. As my brother Jimmy Frank remembers it, he found Tommy and me fishing in the outhouse toilet hole with straightened wire coat hangers. One of us had been holding a BB gun over the toilet hole. I remember it being Tommy; he, of course, says it was me. Whoever was the culprit was trying toget the other to do something (what isn’t remembered) and was bluffing that he would drop the BB gun if he didn’t do it. Then he did drop it—accidentally. It disappeared into the mess below.
    Tommy remembers that it was his gun and that I did the dropping. Harold remembers that it was his BB gun that was dropped into the hole, and he blames both Tommy and me. I don’t exactly recall what happened. Regardless, the gun was never recovered—although desultory fishing operations went on for some time.
    When Pa’s cast was finally removed, Barnwell Drilling Company put him back to work doing light duty as a tool pusher. He recovered almost completely, and later, after I left to go to college at Louisiana Tech, he and Granny moved south of Baton Rouge to Gonzales, Louisiana, where Pa worked as a pipe fitter in the area’s refinery and petrochemical construction boom along the Mississippi River.
    Fortuitously, Pa had acquired a union card during the construction of a plant in Marshall, Texas, where he worked for a few months shortly after the war. The plant was under a construction deadline and was hiring anyone who could fit pipe together—particularly those in the drilling industry. Workers were required to obtain a union membership, and it was this reinstated pipe-fitter card from the late 1940s that later gave him the seniority to get high-paying construction jobs—if he was willing to travel tothem, which he was in his later years. He worked at a particularly well-paying job in Page, Arizona, in the 1970s, where a coal-fired electricity-generating plant was being built.
    Even after we left the log cabin where I grew up and the beautiful woods and swamps surrounding it, I was never far from nature. I always found a way to get back to God’s most beautiful creation. Since I was a little kid, I’ve had this profound connection with and love for deep, dark, unmolested woods. I’ve always had a longing to be in the deep woods or on the water. I want to be on the lakes, streams, and rivers and be surrounded by everything that comes with it—the ducks, birds, fish, and other wildlife. I guess it’s in my DNA, and I just love being out there. Even to this day, it’s where I want to be. I think part of it is that there’s no clutter out there—there are no computers or cell phones (at least not in my duck blind), and constantly updated information isn’t being thrown at you from all directions. You