UNCLE EARNEST

After Dad died I got to hankering to hunt bigger game.  In my part of Louisiana that meant Whitetails.  In the little stretch of woods Dad let me hunt in alone you'd jump a deer once in a while but I knew if I was going to have much luck I had to get farther back in the swamp.  Saline Swamp was a huge area that stretched for miles with no breaks. Where I hunted it was probably 20 miles between highways north and south and 3 times as far east and west with a big creek in the middle.  A man could get lost in there and never be found.  It had been off limits to me as a boy hunting alone.  
My Uncle Earnest was my mothers sisters husband.  Aunt Lillie Bell had died years earlier and Uncle Earnest had raised 3 daughters and a son alone.  They were grown and gone by the time I came along with kids my age.  Uncle Earnest lived alone at the edge of the swamp.  Uncle Earnest had never put running water into his house.  Not that he couldn't afford it, he just didn't seen the need.  It was just him living there.  He worked on the Parish road crew, he was a grader operator and one of the best.  All the contractors in our area tried to hire him but he just stayed with the parish.  He said when he quit farming and went to work for the parish he earned 50 cents a day and had more money than he'd ever seen in his life.

He had a pretty good sized piece of ground and I went to see him and asked if I could hunt on his land.  I'd been in there with Dad before he got sick and knew my way around some.  He told me to hunt all I wanted to, and gave me a pretty good idea where to hunt.  Uncle Earnest was a duck hunter, he and his brother knew that swamp like nobody else.  His brother committed suicide.  Uncle Earnest never quite got over that. He hunted alone after that, he never took anyone with him.  He was into his late 60's when I started hunting on his property.  The first morning I went, he came out on the porch when I drove up and said he had breakfast ready for me.  He even had an apple and a sandwich for me to take with me.  So I had 2 breakfasts and lunches that day.  He told me to let my Mom sleep when I was coming, just let him know and he'd have food ready when I got there.  That's what started it all.

One day he asked me if I'd like to go to the creek with him the next morning to duck hunt.  He said he had gotten older and was a little leary of going by himself but he'd go if I'd go with him.  We were inseparable after that.  I learned more from him than I could ever tell.  He hunted with a Browning Sweet 16 that he dearly loved.  He used a Model 12 Winchester for years but bought the Browning and retired it.  He send the Model 12 back to Winchester and had it completely overhauled and refinished.  It stayed in an old cabinet in his bedroom.  I had a little Remington 870 Wingmaster 20 guage.  We hunted squirrels and  ducks.   I learned that swamp almost as well as he did.  We'd walk about 1 1/2 miles from his house to the Harper Fish Hole and split up, he'd go one way up the creek and I'd go the other.

One morning I had killed a Wood Duck, we called them Squealers, and a couple of Fox Squirrels when I heard a squirrel barking across the creek.  It was the opening morning of deer season but we were duck hunting.  I crossed the creek on a "foot log" and eased into a flat where I heard the squirrel.  Three deer nearly ran over me, I thought they were all does when the one closest to me started scratching his shoulder with his antler.   He was a spike and legal.  That deer was close and I shot him with 7 1/2 shot in the little 20 ga.  I know, I wouldn't do it now but he was sooo close.  He ran behind some brush and when I got to him he was breathing his last.   I walked up behind him and shot him in the back of the head.  That hole was the only evidence he was shot, but I had killed my first deer.  I guess you could have heard me yelling all over Louisiana and off in the distance Earnest yelled back.  When he got there we tied the bucks feet together, cut a sapling and ran it through his legs.  We cut poles to use to cross the log.  It was cold that morning and about half way across the log Uncle Earnest started laughing, we both almost fell in.  He told me "If I fall in this creek, I'm gonna whip your ass."  We must have stood there trying to keep from falling in for a couple of minutes.  But we got him across and to the Harper Fish Hole, that's the first time I drove there in my pickup.  I learned a little about the mud that day too.

When we got out of the woods we took the deer to town, my Mom worked at a grocery store there, I wanted to show her.  In that little town when anybody is looking in the back of a pickup during deer season everybody looks.  A man walked up and all you could see was a big hole in the back of that bucks head.  He asked me what I shot him with, I told him my shotgun.  He grabbed his brothers arm and pointed and said "do you see where that kid shot that deer with a slug, dang son you are a good shot."  I started to tell him what really happened and Uncle Earnest almost broke my foot.  Those folks still think I shot the deer with a slug.
That was my Uncle Earnest.

Swamprat