American Hunter: How Legendary Hunters Shaped America - Softcover

Robertson, Willie; Doyle, William

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1501128957 ISBN 13: 9781501128950

Publisher: Howard Books, 2016

Synopsis

New York Times bestselling author and star of A&E’s Duck Dynasty, Willie Robertson, teams up with William Doyle, the bestselling coauthor of American Gun, to share the history of America’s most well known hunters.

American Hunter is an amazing compilation of the history of America’s greatest hunters. Based on the colorful personalities of powerful men and women, this book begins with the Plains Indians and moves through legendary hunters like Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Kit Carson, Buffalo Bill, Teddy Roosevelt, Ernest Hemingway, Lyndon Johnson, and of course, Duck Dynasty’s Robertson family. Also included are the histories of American fox, rabbit, deer, squirrel, duck, goose, and big-game hunting, as well as action biographies of classic hunting weapons.

Author Willie Robertson, famed hunter of Duck Dynasty and Duck Commander, lends his voice to share this amazing collection of true stories to tell around the campfire after a long day’s hunt.

As Teddy Roosevelt put it, “The virility, clear-sighted common sense and resourcefulness of the American people is due to the fact that we have been a nation of hunters and frequenters of the forest, plains, and waters.” It’s about time we honor American hunters with a book that tells their incredible stories of skill, courage, and survival.

American Hunter is the perfect book for everyone who enjoys sweeping tales of American history and for those who love hunting, sport shooting, and wide open spaces.

About this title

About the Author:

Willie Robertson stars in A&E®’s hit show Duck Dynasty® and is the CEO of Duck Commander, a family operated business that creates products for duck hunters including duck calls, clothes, and videos. Willie, along with his wife and business partner Korie Robertson, also owns and operates Buck Commander where they create products for deer hunters. Willie took the family duck call making company from a living room operation to a multi-million dollar business. Willie lives with his wife, Korie, and their four children, John Luke, Sadie, Will, and Bella, in West Monroe, Louisiana.

William Doyle is the coauthor, with former US Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, of American Gun: A History of the US in Ten Firearms. His other books include A Soldier’s Dream: Captain Travis Patriquin and the Awakening of Iraq, An American Insurrection, Inside the Oval Office, and A Mission from God (with James Meredith). He served as director of original programming for HBO, and he is co-producer of the PBS special Navy SEALs: Their Untold Story.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

American Hunter CHAPTER 1

AN AMERICAN HUNTER IN THE FIELDS OF THE LORD

Be still!”

Phil whispers the command as he looks to the sky, gripping a twenty-gauge shotgun loaded with birdshot.

My brother Jase, Uncle Si, and I are crouched beside him, along with three of our buddies. We’re hidden in a duck blind on our property in Northeast Louisiana near the Ouachita River. A duck flying overhead would never spot us. We’re toting shotguns and wearing full duck-hunting camo. Our faces are smeared with black face paint and our ears are protected by plugs.

It’s a good morning for duck hunting. The sun is burning off the mist and all is quiet except for the buzzing insects and the random sounds of the woods. It’s nature in its purest form. Waiting, waiting, waiting—we do a lot of that.

We’ve had our morning coffee and biscuits that we cooked up in a little stove we keep in the back of the blind. Peggy Sue, our black Labrador retriever, stands inside the edge of the blind, every muscle straining to pounce into action.

My brother Jase blows on a duck call we made in our shop. Most people would just hear your basic “quack, quack, quack.” But the call has been handcrafted with precision and sounds more like a duck than most ducks do. In duck language, it sounds like “Hey, how’re you doing? Come on down here! This pond is a great place for ducks to hang out with other ducks and do fun duck things.” Our hand-painted decoy ducks are bobbing in the pond, a friendly party invitation.


Beauty of the hunt, 2008 (PAT HAGAN, US FISH & WILDLIFE SERVICE)

One good ol’ boy—a poet named Ogden Nash—said this about us duck-hunter types: “The hunter crouches in his blind, / ’Neath camouflage of every kind.” That’s us—six men versus a couple hundred juicy little birds.

Our guns are Mossbergs, made to our own specifications and under our own name. They’re made in America, just the way we like. I prefer hunting with a twenty-gauge shotgun. It’s lighter and you can swing it out a little more. It’s not as powerful as some other guns and doesn’t have as much range, but it’s good for ducks and quail, even doves. It’s easier to handle and gentler on my shoulder than the impact of ten-gauges and twelve-gauges, the really powerful guns.

When you’re ready to fire, your brain makes complex calculations based on years of shooting and muscle memory. It’s always different. You never know exactly where the animal will come from or how it will move. You’ve got to get out in front of those ducks and shoot ahead of their flight path so your shot hits them. Once you pull the trigger and fire, after your load travels thirty to forty yards, the bird drops.

That’s with a twenty-gauge. The whole idea with a twenty-gauge is to get the ducks to come in as close as possible so you can get a good clean shot. A twelve-gauge will reach out farther and you can take perhaps a sixty- or seventy-yard shot; you’ve got the power and the load to make it there. With a smaller-caliber gun, you’d never take that shot; it wouldn’t have enough range to reach its target.

I see a couple of big bass flipping around the pond and want to throw out a line and reel them in. But it would be risky to start fishing; I could totally lose the ducks.

It’s September, early teal season in Louisiana, the time of year when enormous flocks of blue-winged ducks migrate during the Grand Passage from breeding grounds in Canada to below the border, as far south as Peru. Lots of them stop to take a break on our property. Like many other people, we are folks who look at ducks as a great food source. Ducks are eaten by many creatures, and we’re just another one in line.

It’s the time of year when Phil busts out nuggets of backwoods wisdom, like “The Grand Passage, it comes and then they go back. Most humans are totally unaware of it; they’re oblivious to it. It’s happening right above their head. But they never look up to see it. They miss a lot.” He says this kind of thing at the beginning of every season. “The blue-wing’s on the move, the Grand Passage has begun. Brush your blinds. Grab your gun. Let’s go kill some ducks, boys.” We’re an old-school “farm to table” family, or, in this case, “sky to table.”

The duck blind we’re hiding in is one of nearly seventy duck blinds on our thousand-acre property. Ducks are a lot like airplanes; they’re going to “light” (land) into the wind. So we position our blinds to capitalize on whatever direction the wind is blowing to get the ducks when they’re coming down. We have blinds where you can only hunt well on a south wind or a north wind, and we have one big open water blind where you can only hunt well when it rains.


Pintail duck in flight at William L. Finley National Wildlife Refuge, Oregon (US FISH & WILDLIFE SERVICE)

Ducks are all about vision and what they can see from the air. The approach they make will change based on the wind. Right at daylight is when you get big flurries of ducks flying around, and you’ve got to remember that not far away are other hunters pushing the ducks around. The ducks are just looking for safe water to settle in where no one’s shooting at them!

Wood ducks are usually the first thing you see in the morning—they fly around like crazy. Teals are the same way. In fact, a teal hunt is typically over and done by eight a.m.; then the ducks quit flying. When he wakes up, the first thing a typical duck wants to do is eat, and he might go to a rice field. A lot of hunters will hunt in rice fields and do what you call “pass shooting,” firing at the ducks as they pass over, from about fifty or sixty yards.

On the Robertson property we don’t have rice fields, so we get ducks around nine a.m. who have already enjoyed their breakfast. They just want to find a spot to sit around all day and relax. We Robertsons have always liked to hunt ducks who have already eaten. When ducks are coming straight down into a patch of water, right before they land, they practically hover, or “break down.” They sort of look like a falling balloon.

That’s when you want to hit them, when they’re slow and close. You’re hidden, so they can’t see you. But once you start firing, the ducks will reverse course, turn up the energy, and try to back out. They’ll try to push right back up, which is difficult to do at any speed, so even though they’re reacting to our gunfire, we still have a good chance to get them.

This is God’s Grocery Store. The bounty of Earth is all around us. It’s peaceful and beautiful out here; the fall foliage is green, orange, and gold against a blue sky.


Willie Robertson hunting (COPYRIGHT © WILLIE ROBERTSON)

You don’t have to be crazy to be a duck hunter, but it does help. It’s usually hot, sweaty, and humid during duck season, and you’re constantly swatting at swarms of buzzing mosquitoes. Though the weather and mosquitoes are a nuisance, there’s just one thing we Robertsons really fear out in the woods—snakes. Our biggest fear is the cottonmouth water moccasin. We always figure that they’re probably slithering around not far off. There are a lot of snakes down here in Louisiana. If one gets in the duck blind, Uncle Si has a loaded pistol in his pants, ready to blow its head off. It’s a little frightening when you’re in a duck blind near the water and it’s getting dark, because you know those cottonmouths are out there. So we keep flashlights on hand to make sure there aren’t any snakes. We typically go in and try to clean the blinds out before the season starts. One year we went in a blind and killed nine cottonmouths. In the winter it’s not as bad, although we’ve seen them all the way to December.

Most of the guys in the duck blind wear our trademark thick beards, myself included. The beard’s original purpose was to protect us from the wind blowing in our faces. When you’re out there in the woods hunting, facial hair helps keep you warm. That’s why we first started with the beards, but now it’s morphed into our signature look. Somebody once asked my dad, “How long have you been growing that beard?” He said, “I ain’t growing it. It’s doing that on its own.”

I think 1988 was the last time Phil shaved his off. He lost a bet to a preacher, shaved his beard, and put on a suit. He said he’d never do it again. When Jase and I were younger and running the business, we thought we had to clean it up and put suits on to have business meetings with big companies. But about ten or twelve years ago I told Jase, “Forget that. Let’s just go like we normally are.” Sometimes in the heart of the summer, I look at people with their faces shaved and think it’d be nice, but once you get used to it, it’s not as hot. Most guys say it gets itchy, but once you grow it out into a big man beard, the itching is gone.

My wife, Korie, actually likes my beard. In fact, the last time I shaved, she said, “I think you should grow it back.” My youngest child has never seen me without it, and the last time I shaved, my older son started crying because he was used to the beard (that was a lot of years back—I don’t think he’d cry about it now).

I haven’t found a hat or sunglasses that’ll cover up this look, so I get recognized quite often. It comes with the terrain, so I’ve gotten used to that too. I love it when little kids come up to me. I try to get down and hear what they have to say and ask them who their favorite person on the show is. Sometimes at the airport, if I’m trying to get through security and about to miss my flight, or I’m just running out to buy groceries, it gets a little old. But I tell everybody, when I quit being recognized, it means our show is probably not good anymore.

As far back as I can remember, we were always out there hunting as a family. Hunting and fishing were always part of the family business. Our family feels the same way about hunting that the baroness Ann Mallalieu felt: “Hunting is our heritage, it is our poetry, it is our art, it is our pleasure. It is where many of our best friendships are made, it is our community. It is our whole way of life.”

Phil was a commercial fisherman before we started our hunting business. When I was a boy I helped sell his freshly caught fish at the market with my mom, Miss Kay. Even then I always tried to negotiate the price. But Phil always saved the best of the catch for our family and we ate a lot of fish growing up! We’d also share our fish with our church. We’d have a big fish fry at the church for people we were trying to convert. We’d feed forty or fifty people. Growing up in a family of hunters, we had a lot of shotguns on the property. We had .410 shotguns as kids, then moved up to twelve-gauge shotguns. I was about six when I learned to shoot a gun. “Hey, we’re going hunting,” Phil would say, and off we’d go. It was a normal childhood thing, not a big deal. We hunted every day we weren’t in school. Phil didn’t really treat us like children; he treated us more like little adults. We were good kids.

Phil was definitely old-school when it came to his sons hunting; it was an automatic thing. He always told us, “Hunting and being outdoors will keep a bunch of young men out of trouble. It’s hard to do a lot of bad things when you’re out sitting in a tree stand or a duck blind. It keeps you off the streets and you’re doing something entertaining.” The great South Carolina hunter and poet Archibald Rutledge sounded a little like Phil when he said:

If more fathers were woodsmen, and would teach their sons to be likewise, most of the so-called father-and-son problems would vanish. . . . If a man brings up his sons to be hunters, they will never grow away from him. Rather the passing years will only bring them closer, with a thousand happy memories of the woods and fields.

That perfectly describes our family. Hunting is a huge reason why we’re so close as a family.

Phil and my brothers Al and Jase taught me how to carry and handle guns, and they taught me firearms safety, too, so nobody accidentally got shot. We didn’t shoot at targets, we shot at something real.

I have one particular memory of a dove hunt when I was about eight. Phil was not the kind of father who laid all of your gear out for you. He said, “You’re in charge of getting your stuff together.” I took along my little .410 single-barrel shotgun, one of the smallest-caliber shotguns there is. I realized I only had one shell. I said, “Dad, I only have one shell.” He said, “Well, son, you’ve only got one shot. Better make it count.” I thought, Oh, crap! There’s nothing like an all-day dove hunt when you’ve only got one shot! I spent most of the day trailing Phil and picking up his birds; I was fascinated by the way he twirled their heads off. Finally, about three or four hours into the hunt, I had my best chance at a shot.

I took the shot. The dove fell. I was so proud. I looked over and Phil had shot at the same exact time that I had. It’s a little unclear who exactly shot that bird, but I’m going to claim it. That one shot was successful!

Phil can remember the first time his father took him hunting. He was about eleven years old. He remembers aiming his shotgun and whispering to his dad, “What do I have?” The reply: “You got a green-winged teal and a pintail.” He never forgot it. Today, he can take you to the very spot they were standing in and say, “Look, they were right there.” He’s been chasing ducks ever since.

BUT BACK TO THE DUCK blind, where the boys and I are waiting for the ducks. We wait and wait and wait. Jase blows away on the duck call. I peer across the horizon.

Suddenly, a flock of dozens of teals swoops in from the north, circling in a wide arc over the water. It’s game time.


In the blind, Jase and Willie (COPYRIGHT © DUCK COMMANDER)

“Big bunch, big bunch,” whispers Phil, “right over there!” We tighten our grips on our guns and wait for the final word. “Coming down the lane, coming toward us. Here they come . . .”

They come closer, closer, then level off in a horizontal pass right in front of the blind as they prepare to light on the water. There are so many of them and they’re so close, it sounds like a jumbo jet passing.

“Kill ’em,” says Phil firmly.

In an instant, six men and six guns pop out of the brush and open fire. “Shoot low,” says Phil.

The roar of blasting gunfire echoes hard and loud off the water. It’s a war zone. It looks like a wartime guerilla ambush. Bursts of shot catch ducks in midflight, one after the other, instantly killing most of them and sending them down in hard splashes to the water. Some spin, others drop straight down, motionless. The dog is so excited she can barely stand it, but she knows to stay put until the shooting stops.

I knock down two ducks escaping overhead who are flying close together, and one even slams into the duck blind, within arm’s reach. We’re shooting real good, each man bringing down different ducks. The sky is filled with floating feathers and it looks kind of like a ticker-tape parade.

“Cut him, Jase,” says Phil, gesturing toward an escaping bird. “Hit that drake!” Jase knocks him down with one shot.

Food falls from the sky. One of our buddies chuckles, “It’s raining feathers, it’s raining ducks!” Ten, twenty birds drop to the ground and the count keeps going. Spent shotgun shell casings drift in the water.

“Now we’re cooking with peanut oil!” shouts Uncle Si after a while. “We’ve done killed m...

About this edition

• Publisher: Howard Books
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1501128957
• ISBN 13: 9781501128950
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272