Courtesy of Terry Jones.
Carol has always said that I live a charmed life. I’m starting to believe her after we attended the seventy-fifth annual meeting of the Louisiana Outdoor Writers Association (LOWA) in Thibodaux a few weeks ago. But, first the backstory:
During the 2015 hunting season, I experienced one of the many “Terry moments,” or outdoor mishaps, that Carol teases me about.
One of my favorite man toys is a twelve-foot fiberglass pirogue with a bow-mounted trolling motor. When the water is high on Dugdemona River and Saline Bayou during duck and deer season, I like to hunt out of it. I generally carry both a shotgun and rifle and keep one of them in a gun rack that I mounted on the gunwale.
My routine is to drift downstream with the current looking for ducks, deer, and squirrels and then use the trolling motor to go back upstream to the truck. It’s a great way to spend a day on the water and enjoy the beauty of those cypress-studded streams whether I shoot anything or not.
One day I was hunting on Dugdemona and had my shotgun in the gun rack.
Rounding a sharp curve in the creek, I ran into a treetop that had recently fallen over and blocked the channel. Because this often happens, I keep a small saw on board and can usually cut away enough limbs to make a hole and slip through the tangled mess.
After several minutes of sawing some limbs and breaking off others, I was finally stopped by limbs too large to remove.
Once I had backed out of the treetop, I noticed that my shotgun was no longer sitting in the gun rack. I quickly glanced around the pirogue thinking I may have laid it in the floor, but nope, it was nowhere to be seen. Apparently, a limb had worked its way under the gun and jerked it into the water while I was trying to get through the treetop.
Fortunately, I carry a large magnet on the end of a rope for just such emergencies so I can retrieve my gun if it falls overboard. Reentering the treetop, I started probing around with the magnet but the thick underwater limbs hampered my search. After a few minutes, the magnet got stuck under some limbs and I broke the rope trying to free it. I then went home.
Months later during the hot summer while walking along Dugdemona fishing, I realized that I was not far from the gun-snatching treetop. Thinking I might be able to find my shotgun now that the water was at its summertime low, I cut through the woods and soon reached the spot.
After a few minutes of searching, I saw the rusted gun lying in the muck (I never found the magnet). Since it was obviously way past salvaging and was still loaded with #4 steel shot, I stuck the barrel deep into the mud and left it standing there as a memorial to all of the guns Dugdemona has claimed over the years.
Fast forward seven years and the 2022 LOWA meeting. One of the highlights of the event is a popular raffle at the end of the awards banquet. LOWA is fortunate to have some great sponsors that donate items for the raffle, and prizes can range from fishing lures and soft ice chests to expensive rods and reels and hunting jackets.
This year I bought my usual number of tickets and gave half to Carol so she could help look for a winning number as the drawn tickets were called out.
One of the early prizes was a nice Cabela’s two-gun floatable gun case. When the winning number was called, there it was right in front of me and I excitedly claimed my prize. Chris Holmes, LOWA’s executive director, then said out loud, “Well, now you won’t lose any more shotguns in the creek!”
The last prize in our raffle is always a gun, and I have been trying in vain to win it for twenty years. This time when the winning ticket was called, Carol yelled out, “I have it! I have it! I won!”
Reaching over and gently reminding her that I bought the tickets, I said, “No, actually I have won it!”
I happily picked up my winning gun certificate, and wouldn’t you know it? The gun just happened to be a brand new Mossberg 500, the very model I lost in Dugdemona years earlier. A charmed life, indeed!
Dr. Terry L. Jones is a professor emeritus of history at the University of Louisiana at Monroe. For an autographed copy of Louisiana Pastimes, a collection of the author’s stories, send $25 to Terry L. Jones, P.O Box 1581, West Monroe, LA 71294.
