CHAPTER 17
DUCK AND DRESSING
"I LOOKED INTO IT AND SAW FOUR-FOOTED ANIMALS OF THE EARTH, WILD BEASTS, REPTILES AND BIRDS. THEN I HEARD A VOICE TELLING ME, "GET UP, PETER. KILL AND EAT." "
-ACTS 11:67 Nowadays, people often ask me what it"s like hunting with my dad. We"ve actually had offers of tens of thousands of dollars from people who want to spend a day in Phil"s blind. It always amazes us because when we were growing up, duck hunting was our everyday life. When we were kids, we were always in the blind with Dad. I don"t remember my first hunt or the first duck I killed, like other young hunters. It was a different time and Phil wasn"t exactly a traditional dad. He didn"t take pictures of our first duck. It wasn"t sentimental; it was just life. We hunted and fished because we wouldn"t eat if we didn"t. Phil"s number one concern was always safety. If you were careless with a loaded gun, you would not come back to the blind. You"d be stuck at home with Mom the next time.
Also, you had to be prepared because Phil wasn"t gonna baby you out there. If you didn"t wear the proper clothes, you were gonna freeze your b.u.t.t off. And I did many times! You had to get your stuff together as well: sh.e.l.ls, guns, and whatever you needed. I will never forget a time when I was about ten and we were all going on a dove hunt. It was opening day, and we were all excited. I was shooting a .410 shotgun, but I could only find one sh.e.l.l. Since we were leaving early in the morning, Phil let me know we wouldn"t be able to stop at a store because none of them would be open that early in the morning.
"You better make that shot count," Phil told me.
WITH ONE FLICK OF PHIL"S WRIST, THE DOVE"S HEAD SEPARATED FROM ITS BODY.
So I shadowed Phil during the entire hunt, watching him drop "em. I ran to fetch the birds for Phil, and if any were still alive, he would pinch their heads. With one flick of Phil"s wrist, the dove"s head separated from its body. I was fascinated and yet a little freaked out. You can"t be sensitive when you"re hunting with Phil. I kept throwing my shotgun up to shoot, but I knew I had only one shot. Finally, about eleven o"clock in the morning, I saw my opportunity. I told Phil I was gonna take my shot. He was supportive and told me to make it count. Boom! Wouldn"t you know I smoked the dove? I couldn"t believe it. I went one-for-one with only one sh.e.l.l. As I turned to look at my dad with the biggest smile ever, I noticed he was putting his gun down. He"d shot at the exact same time. He wanted to make sure my shot counted.
"Good shot, Willie boy, put your safety back on," Phil told me.
I didn"t know why the safety mattered since I only had one sh.e.l.l, but he wanted to instill the practice in my brain. We"ll never know who hit that bird, but believe me, I told Jase that I got it for sure.
When hunting with Phil, the number one rule was always to follow the laws and regulations of the sport. He wouldn"t allow anyone to do anything illegal when it came to hunting. You had to have a license, wait for legal shooting times, and respect the rules of duck hunting. And safety checks were constant-and still are when we"re in the blind. Guns have to be put in a place where they will not fall over accidentally, even if a dog runs through the blind. Phil still tells us stories of when guys would come to him with one leg missing and blame their dogs for getting shot. When a dog accidentally knocks your gun down, it can step on the safety and its claws can pull the trigger. You wouldn"t believe how many people have been shot accidentally. Phil even invented a safety gun boot to put in a duck blind so it would never happen to us.
As far as the duck-blind rules, they are sort of unwritten in Phil"s blind. He always does most of the calling. You wouldn"t dare pull out your duck call and start wailing. He"ll let you call a drake whistle, but not a hen call. In fact, Jase had to wait several years before he could call with him. And you really only need about two good callers in a blind. People ask me, "Why don"t you call in the blind?" I ask them, "Would you call with Phil Robertson in your blind?"
It"s like pinch-hitting for Albert Pujols. It doesn"t make sense when you have the best duck caller in the world in your blind. The benefits of not s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up are better than those of taking a chance on doing something stupid. Believe me: if you mess up, you"re going to hear about it. I never will forget when we had about twenty-five mallards almost in the hole. They were on their third pa.s.s down when the text message alert on my phone went off. After my phone buzzed, the mallards decided not to come in. Phil looked down the row of guys with a look that was a mixture of craziness, agony, and Satan himself.
"What was that?" he hollered.
Now, there was no way I was gonna fess up.
"I heard something!" Phil yelled again.
I didn"t feel like trying to explain to him that there was no way the ducks heard my phone from sixty yards away, so I didn"t say a word. I"m glad waterboarding isn"t allowed in the blind, because ol" Phil would have filled our faces with water to find the culprit. There is always a lot of pressure to have 100 percent success. If we get four out of six ducks, we"ll sit there and debate for the next two hours why we didn"t get all six.
Most of the quality time I spent with my dad was in the duck blind. When I was young I didn"t appreciate what it took to be so successful at the sport. We just knew that it was what Dad loved and you had to respect that. No matter what the weather was like, whether it was rain, sleet, or snow, Dad was out in the blind. I didn"t hunt nearly as much when I was in high school because I was into sports and girls. It wasn"t until I came home from college that I really started to understand how special duck hunting is. I grew up in and around the business of duck hunting, so it wasn"t as cool for me as it was for other guys. MOST OF THE QUALITY TIME I SPENT WITH MY DAD WAS IN THE DUCK BLIND.
My most memorable hunts happened when I was older. We were in Arkansas one year, and it was a slow day. I talked Phil into moving to an area where we saw ducks going down. We decided to take a small crew-Phil, Jase, a camera guy, and me. The mallards were pouring in like we had been seeing all morning, so we didn"t even have to call that much. It was just one of those spots where the ducks wanted to be. We each grabbed a cypress tree and spread out. We limited out in like twenty minutes, all green heads! It was a special hunt.
On another memorable hunt, a lone mallard came in. Jase told Phil, "Let"s let Willie take this one." Now, I know why he said it. Jase was convinced I would raise my gun and miss. Well, I raised my gun and folded it. Phil looked at Jase and said, "Ol" Willie"s been practicing." We laughed and talked about my shot the entire morning.
My favorite duck is an American wigeon. I just think they are prettiest. We don"t get a whole heck of a lot of them on our land in Louisiana, so we went to New Mexico to do some duck hunting. We scouted in the mornings on bluffs and looked at the potholes to see if they had birds in them. If we found ducks, we made our way down and hunted them. We found tons of wigeon there, and I loved it. It was a different type of hunting; we all like being in different environments. We also saw sandhill cranes, and those suckers came down like helicopters. Phil tried to bite their heads and that was a mistake. Sandhill cranes" heads are much harder than the heads of the ducks Phil was used to. He nearly broke his teeth! But let me tell you something, they are some of the best birds I have eaten in my life. They call them the "rib-eye of the sky," and they"re right. I also went and visited the UFO Museum in Roswell, New Mexico, while we were there. I couldn"t talk Jase or Phil into going with me, so I took our camera guy Jeremy Helm. It was, well, let"s just say, strange.
We mostly duck-hunt in Northeast Louisiana in flooded timber. Phil has always believed a duck in flooded timber is the hardest duck to hunt. Usually, they"ve already fed and are looking for a place to sit and rest. Of course, there are a lot of other things that can get them in the timber besides us, so the ducks are always a little skittish.
Honestly, hunting in the timber is the only way we could have filmed our DVDs all these years because it allows us to hide our equipment. I don"t think people realize how much equipment and personnel we have to hide when we hunt. There are sound guys, wires, camera guys, directors, gaffers, and a whole bunch of other equipment. We stick people in trees and anywhere else where we can hide them. Plus, one of the things we always try to capture on film is a duck with a background. Think about when you look up and the sky is your background; you lose perception on how far away everything is. But when there is a tree behind the duck you can tell the distance a lot better. If we shoot a duck at twenty yards, it looks like forty yards on TV. So we have to get the ducks as close to us as possible because it looks the best and it also helps your chances of getting them. We don"t do much pa.s.s shooting. It"s fun, but it doesn"t look good on film; the ducks look like little dots. It"s way more fun trying to get a big group hovering over your decoys-and it looks better on film too. But it"s hard because the closer the ducks get to you, the harder it is to get them to commit. A duck has way better eyesight than a human. You gotta remember they came down all the way from Canada, so by the time they get to Louisiana, well, they"ve seen just about everything.
If you"ve ever been duck hunting, you know there"s a lot of idle time involved in the sport. You"re basically at the mercy of the ducks, weather, and G.o.d. Being Robertsons, we figured the best way to spend our free time in the blind is by cooking. There"s only one chef in the blind, and several of us take turns. Everyone tries to outdo everyone else when it comes to cooking. Phil likes to say that everything tastes better in the blind-even sardines. Over time, as the blinds got bigger and bigger, so did the kitchen. Now we have a fully operational kitchen in the blind we call the "Big Blind," complete with a cooktop, boiler, and mini fridge. Most of the time, breakfast includes eggs, bacon, biscuits, and mayhaw jelly. But that"s only the start. On other occasions, we"ve eaten deer, dove, quail, ham, pot roast, steaks, and spaghetti for lunch in the blind. We even boiled Alaskan king crab legs one time. It"s a wonder anyone came back out to shoot ducks that day. BEING ROBERTSONS, WE FIGURED THE BEST WAY TO SPEND OUR FREE TIME IN THE BLIND IS BY COOKING.
Of course, you never know what the chef is going to come up with out in a blind. Uncle Si likes to say he"s the MacGyver of cooking. Si says if you give him a piece of bread, cabbage, coconut, mustard greens, pig"s feet, pine cones, and a woodp.e.c.k.e.r, he"ll make a delicious chicken pot pie! My favorite duck to eat is a wood duck, or woodie, as we call "em. They"re acorn eaters, so their meat is very clean and tasty. Most of "em are local ducks, and they live in trees. Our place is full of "em and you can now harvest three a day (it used to only be two). They typically fly at daylight and fly really crazy, darting and dodging to avoid trees as they fly through. They also don"t fly very high in the air and stick to the treetops. Wood ducks are hard to call, although I have seen us peel "em in from time to time. They squeal and make a noise in the air, but when they sit they have a different set of sounds. We always try to mimic the sitting sound so they think their buddies are on the water in front of us. They really don"t leave the woods much, which I guess is why they have their name. They are some of the most beautiful ducks, but I just love the way they taste. They"re my favorite ducks to eat hands down.
Growing up like we did is scary to think about now. We did some dangerous things; there"s really no other way to say it. I shudder to think of my kids doing the things we did back then. It was a different time. I always feel like I came up in the last days of the good ol" days. Now you would never think of letting your children do what we did. There seems to be so much fear nowadays. We"re concerned about lawsuits and predatory people, and I guess we know more about our surroundings and it"s caused us to see danger everywhere. When I was a kid, we always rode in the back of the truck on the way home from town. No one ever thought about what would happen if we got in a wreck or if one of the kids simply fell out. I drove for years without a license. We just survived. I guess G.o.d was looking over us. He had a plan for my family. He always provided for us, and we always gave Him the glory for what we had, and we still do.
I believe our faith is what sets us apart. It"s not about our beards, our success, or our hunting skills. It"s the Lord. He keeps us in line. That"s why we don"t fight and bicker much, like a lot of families do. And when we do, we forgive one another because the Lord forgave us. That"s why we don"t let our own selfish desires pull us apart. We not only read the Bible and study it, but we actually live by it. We believe that what"s in the Bible is the truth. We live our lives trusting that G.o.d"s promises are real.
When Phil came to the Lord and began to live differently, we witnessed it happen. We saw how Phil turned his life over to G.o.d and how it changed him and our family for good. We had a crazy life growing up, but I wouldn"t change any of it. My parents may not have been the best parents in the world all the time by parenting experts" standards, but they did the absolute best they could in the circ.u.mstances they were in. And despite the obstacles, they set the bar high for us. I am so proud of them and all they"ve accomplished. I am proud of each of my brothers, and I have a super relationship with each of them. I really love getting to see them every day at work. I realize that so many people will never know what that"s like. WE HAD A CRAZY LIFE GROWING UP, BUT I WOULDN"T CHANGE ANY OF IT.
I am the most proud of my children and my wife, Korie. Without her, none of this would have ever happened. She took a chance on a cute boy with dimples in whom she saw potential. Our life together has never been boring. We endured hard times with hopes and dreams of doing the inconceivable. We were content when we had very little and when we had a lot. Our kids are strong, spiritual, and well disciplined. They will have their hopes and dreams as they grow, and I will be right there beside them cheering them on.
Sure, the Robertson family has its flaws, but we"re pretty good at quite a few things-like duck hunting, frog catching, fishing, and selling worms. But most important, we"re really good at being a family. Like I say in one way or another at the end of each episode of Duck Dynasty, at the end of the day, we"re a family first, and everything else is just not worth getting that worked up over.
We"ve enjoyed showing our family to the world through the TV screen. Best of all, it"s actually fun for us to watch the show, because the Robertsons always find a way to laugh at themselves. We"re the ones laughing the hardest when one of us does something stupid, which, as you can see, happens quite often!
My advice is: Don"t take yourself too seriously, laugh a lot, enjoy your time with family, and appreciate the unique talents of others. Trust in G.o.d, love your neighbor, say you"re sorry, forgive, and work hard. Sit down to a good meal, turn off your cell phone, respect your elders, and, of course, get out in the woods and enjoy some good ol" frog legs. That"s the Robertson way!
DUCK AND DRESSING RECIPE
A cla.s.sic at the Robertson household, this is our Thanksgiving meal at Phil and Kay"s house. Ducks are as fresh as daylight that same morning. It is a hard one to perfect. We only eat this a few times a year, and not because we don"t love it; we just do it for special occasions. If you don"t have any ducks, try this dressing with turkey next Thanksgiving. I promise it"ll be the best you"ve ever eaten. 5 or 6 ducks
salt and pepper to taste
1 bay leaf
8 hot dog buns
2 bundles green onions
1 bell pepper
2 celery stalks
1 stick b.u.t.ter
a 9-by-12-inch pan of cornbread
1 sleeve of saltine crackers
2 eggs, whipped
1/2 cup evaporated milk
1 teaspoon sage
Phil Robertson"s Cajun Style Seasoning Original 1. Place cleaned ducks into a large pot. Then add salt, black pepper, and bay leaf, and fill pot with water. Boil for 21/2 hours.