Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
“It barks here, but it bites way over there.” It was one of my dad’s favorite sayings when we were out deer or pheasant hunting. He was talking about a little long-distance shooting, whether it was several hundred yards on the Sweetwater after a whitetail or just a few dozen yards after a ringneck rooster flushed, it didn’t matter. The meaning was the same.
Dad would have turned 95 this month. He’s been gone for eight years now, and I still catch myself pulling out my phone to call him. I probably always will.
As an Arkansas farm boy, raised in the dire conditions of the Great Depression, he knew hardship as a youngster, but you’d never know it.
What you soon realized is that he had a bevy of sayings, just like the gun biting in the distance for almost every situation.
One of my favorites in later years, but not as a teenager when he said it to me often, was this one: “I’d like to buy you for what you’re worth and sell you for what you think you’re worth.” Truer words were never spoken in response to youthful arrogance, especially in our modern era of appearance over substance.
The legendary John Wooden, the greatest coach of all time in my opinion, had a similar saying: “Be more concerned with your character than with your reputation. Character is what you are, reputation is just what people think you are.”
He taught me at a very young age that telling the truth was always the right thing to do. It’s gotten me into trouble a time or two over the years, but it’s a lifestyle I’d never change. If only politicians followed that advice. Dad always said, “If you tell the truth you never have to worry about what you said when someone asks you.”
Who could argue with that? Ok, a politician could. In fact, they can talk around a question for hours and never answer anything.
As a youngster, maybe eight or nine years old, I was able to go with the big guys on an Arkansas coon hunt one night. My great-uncle Fred had redbone hounds, and my grandpa ran blueticks. Dad and a couple of his cousins, men in their 30s at the time, decided that as long as I could keep up, I was old enough to go.
We went into the wooded area on the back boundary of my grandpa’s cotton farm, and within minutes, the hounds were on a hot trail. We ran through the brush, jumped over downed trees, waded little creeks, and tried to stay up with the dogs. It was exhilarating.
Hounds make a different cry when they’re on a cold trail, a hot trail, or when they’ve treed a coon. Their cries changed just a couple of hundred yards ahead of us. We covered the ground in a couple of minutes, and the redbones, especially, were going nuts, their eyes rolling back in their heads and their feet scratching as they tried to climb an old black walnut tree.
My grandpa shone his acetylene lamp up the tree, and we spotted a hole in the side about 30 feet up the trunk. As he shone his lamp, a coon barreled out of the hole, grabbed a couple of branches, and hit the ground running, with the hounds in pursuit. Grandpa kept his light on the hole to see what had driven the coon out of the safety of the hollowed-out tree. A possum stuck its head out briefly, blinded by the light, then retreated back into its lair.
“A possum will whip a coon,” Dad said with a bit of wisdom in his voice. It’s a lesson I never forgot and a phrase that he often repeated when an underdog was giving his fair share in a fight.
A lifetime later, he watched a playoff game between Wind River and Shoshoni at Harold Bailey Field during my nephew Jake Conilogue’s senior year. Jake had a fabulous game, stuffing the Wranglers repeatedly. He finished with a couple of dozen tackles, and though the Cougars lost, he played the game of his life.
On the way home, we were talking about the game, and Dad said, “A possum will whip a coon.” I knew what he meant. He was proud of his grandson. He was proud of all five of his grandchildren.
He was never fond of politicians. He often remarked when we ran into one that, “he’s as crooked as a dog’s hind leg.”
When he’d call, just to talk, he’d often open the conversation with “What’s on your mind besides catfish and watermelon?”
As an Arkansas farm boy, catfish and watermelon were the staples of life. Along with home-cured bacon, ham, huge red tomatoes, okra, and green onions. He knew what was good; he learned it from eating my Grandma Sally’s cooking for all those years.
She swayed my taste in food as well. Southern cooking always had a heavy dollop of bacon grease, too much salt, a few too many hot peppers, and fruit pies or my favorite, “chewy chocolate cake.” Imagine a traditional cake, maybe eight inches high, compressed into two inches, and you’ll get the idea of the magic of chewy chocolate.
When I got a raw deal from the administrators at Lusk during my third year at Niobrara County High School, I was angry. The principal had changed my evaluations, forged my signature, and there was nothing I could do about it since I wasn’t tenured and only an at-will employee.
Mom was distraught; Dad knew better.
He called me early one morning before school and said, “It’s not a big deal, they can fire you, but they can’t eat you.” It brought a smile and a laugh, just what he intended. In retrospect, I hold no ill will toward anyone in Niobrara County; it remains one of my favorite places on earth, and I still have dozens of friends living there.
They say when God closes a door, he opens a window. He did for me in moving back to Fremont County. I still like to trapse around Lance Creek, Redbird, Hat Creek, Keeline, Node, Jay Em, and Van Tassel, and I always will. Great people in a great corner of the west.
My dad loved the open country of Niobrara County; he often told me that if we stayed there, I should buy a few hundred acres north of town. He enjoyed the “breaks” especially, as locals call the area near Hat Creek.
Dad was born in a shack along the L ‘Anguille River, a tributary of the St. Francis, which in turn flows into the Mississippi in 1931. Over the next 87 years, and the full 61 that I was privileged to know him, he never really left the rural setting where he was born.
He swapped largemouth bass and trout for catfish, deer, and antelope for rabbits, squirrels, and raccoons, but he was the same barefoot boy who wandered the wilds of Lee County his entire life.
I miss him.