00:00:05 Speaker 1: Welcome to this Country Life. 00:00:06 Speaker 2: I'm your host, Brent Reeves from cone hunting to trot lining and just general country living. 00:00:12 Speaker 1: I want you to stay a. 00:00:13 Speaker 2: While as I share my experiences in life lessons. This Country Life is presented by Case Knives on Meat Eaters Podcast Network, bringing you the best outdoor podcast. 00:00:25 Speaker 1: The airwaves have to offer. 00:00:27 Speaker 2: All right, friends, grab a chair or drop that tailgate. I've got some stories to share. The Dixie Mallard Duck cof. There's an old saying that I've heard all my life that goes like this, Every now and then, even a blind hog will find an acre. Now, I've taken the meeting to be that even the unskilled, unlucky, and generally unsuccessful can achieve a modicum of greatness, even by chance. I've done that on more than one occasion, my wife and children being pinnacle examples of my fortune. I'm going to give you another example of that old saying right now, and the story is the whole episode. We've got a lot of ground to cover, so let's get started. In nineteen eighty three, the hunting pressure on public land was a lot different than it is now, but it was still having to share the woods with utter hunters, and my brother Tim and I shied away from those well known public places like the ones that had made Stuttgart, Arkansas, the place for folks to duck hunt. Green timber duck hunting remains the experience of all experiences as far as we are concerned, and we could do that right where we lived, in our sacred saline river bottoms. In the timber company land we were hunting on was as public as it got except for the deer hunting in the days before leasing hunting clubs staked out their areas through generational gentleman agreements. Deer Camp A hunted from this map feature to that map feature, encompason the hundreds of not thousands of acres of upland and river bottom timber. Deer Camp B started where Deer Camp A's claim stopped, and so it went for all of the tens of thousands of Timber Company acres owned by the Potlatch Lumber Company, a timber concern that purchased the land and all the timber that grew on it inheriting the deer Camp claims from the Southern Lumber Company and the Bradley Lumber Company. In nineteen fifty eight, both of which operated lumber mills on each side of town in Warren, Arkansas. Coincidentally, the train that ferried pine chips from one mill to the other was the same one that I and a fellow sophistic had hopped on in front of the West Side Elementary shortly after getting off the school bus, trading a day of sixth grade education for cigarettes, snooker, and cheeseburgers from a diner in the middle of town. But that's not what we're talking about, not today, So let's get back to the duck hunting. Deer camps claimed deer hunting rights only on potlatches, land. Squirrels, coons, turkeys, rabbits, quailed and ducks were there for anyone who wanted to go. Deer season wasn't nearly as long back in the day, but really only the first week counted. That's when folks took vacation businesses closing. 00:03:45 Speaker 1: School let out. You heard me right, school let out the. 00:03:50 Speaker 2: Monday on the first week of deer season. Whether you deer hunted or not, you didn't go to school. Now, on the flip side of deer hunting was everything else most folks I knew had squirrel dogs or coon dogs, or pir dog or any combination of them. The outliers were the duck dogs. Few folks had them, and fewer folks duck hunted. And while it would be years before Tim or I ever owned the Labrador retriever, fetching our own ducks in the flooded timber of the Saline River bottoms wasn't a chore, especially considering that we were the only folks there. We never ran into anyone, and we spent a large portion of our time walking sloughs and boughs and hardwood flats that fluctuated in depth with the amount of rain. Beavers were our most valued allies, and the dams they built in the fall shoved water out into the flat woods, all the acrons of the red oak family and the preferred varieties of mallards. They lay patiently waiting for the water to rise and the ducks to find them as they rested and fed along their migration and followed the ever the rising river water that crept along the landscape, and good years with adequate duck hatches, rain and coal fronts. The only difference between the flooded timber of the self proclaimed duck capital of the world of Stuttgart and the river bottoms where we lived was the zip code. Some folks didn't believe me when I told them that they were running all over creation chasing ducks while Tim and I were smashing them right out the back door. Of course, I didn't tell them until it was all over and the leasing started. But for several years when the conditions were perfect in Stuttgart, the conditions were good at home. That's how it worked. We'd catch the overflow of ducks during the big migration years, and we named a fringe location that would be good when the regular places were great. It was forty miles one way trip from where we stood in the middle of the river bottoms in Cleveland County to ground zero of the public shooting grounds near Stuttgart, and the average flying speed of a Mallard duck is somewhere around thirty or forty miles an hour. I know folks that drive farther than that to work every day. Forty miles ain't no step for a stepper, as they say, which explains why on more than one occasion we killed ducks in the bottoms that had crawls full of rice Why were they leaving the food laden richness of the rice fields, where their travel routes were undisturbed and wide open for acres and acres to fly for an hour in pitching the decoor through a hole in the canopy that required acrobatics unmatched by the most skilled of test pilots. 00:06:44 Speaker 1: Why were they doing that? I don't know. Why were two boys that had the same thing out their back door driving an hour and a half to walk into a place they'd never hunted, just to say they went hunting in a place so popular it had more than one name. The Scatters by meta, the shooting grounds, the public shooting grounds all referred to one seemingly magical place that holds almost as many memories from me now as my beloved river Bottoms do. Maybe that's why we went, because of the romance of it. All the books we'd read, Tim reading them first and passed them down to me. Duck hunting was our thing, mine and his. 00:07:30 Speaker 2: I learned to love it because he did, and I loved him. I pestered and pestored him to go to the Scatters, and finally he took me. 00:07:40 Speaker 1: I was old enough to go by myself. 00:07:42 Speaker 2: I wasn't eighteen, I was close to it, but we always duck hunted together if we were able in this trip would be no different. We pulled into the parking lot that had ten to fit fifteen trucks already there. We'd gotten there later than we planned, and it was close to sunrise. Seeing that many vehicles in one spot where we'd be walking in behind folks in a place we'd never been, well, it was more than disheartening. But we'd committed and we were gonna check this box and do the best we could. We had it out the same trail to everyone else had, judging by the sloppy boot tracks that led from the similarly swampy parking area into the flooded woods. By the time the sun started sneaking up, we'd walked about a quarter of a mile from the truck and could hear folks calling, but none were very close to where we were. We saw some preening feathers on the water floating and the ones that get left when ducks are sitting around relaxing, nibbling and fixing their clothes, the waterfowl version of primping. Tim found a little hole in the timber and we dropped a eleven decoors scattered around in the open, and number twelve had blown out of the back of the truck somewhere between New Edinburgh and where we'd parked. Avowed to look for it on the way back home. Ducks started flying and the others started shooting before we did, and I felt like I had really wasted the morning. You only get so many of these mornings, and at that stage of our hunting lives, shooting ducks may not have been the most important part of the activity. 00:09:27 Speaker 1: Pardon. 00:09:28 Speaker 2: It wasn't far then, as if right on que. We got a small group to work, and after making loop after luke, they settled into the hole, each of us calling begging him through the tree tops until they hit the water fifty feet in front of us. Tim holler, get them, and we stepped out from behind the trees. 00:09:48 Speaker 1: The ducks got up and we started shooting. 00:09:50 Speaker 2: He got two and I got one. That was the only group that came in, and we couldn't have been more happy. We saw a lot of ducks flying, but they weren't working our area, and slowly we began to hear the calling and the shooting from the other groups subside until we were the only folks left. Not being known as quitters, we stayed until we had to leave to be out before the midday deadline. We slashed our way back to the parking lot, arriving on a slightly different course than we left on. The scatters are known for that, and even today with the advent of GPS, every year you hear about someone who wound up spending the night because they were lost, some even burning decoys to stay warm. Regardless, we'd made it back, and had that parking lot been a indicator of the heavenly rapture, it had happened, and neither one of us had made the cut. Everyone was gone, just my truck, me and Tim and an acre of ankle deep, sloppy buckshot, mud and gravel. Well, if this was the rapture, that twelfth decoy wasn't going to do us any good, because heat that night and for the rest of eternity was not going to be a problem. But in despite the fact that we got a little off course on the way out, I was feeling good about what we'd done. We followed a road map to a parking spot, walked into a place where'd never been, and brought out a mess of ducks, calling them in and shooting them the right way after letting them finish on water. Now, while I changed out my canvas waiters i'd bought it the farmer's co op, I saw the barrel of a duck called barely discernible in the mud beside my tire. I picked it up, and I could see that it had been there for quite a while. I slung the mud off and out of it, and I showed it to Tim, and I dropped it in the left hand pocket of my green army field jacket i'd bought at a surplus store. We planned to clean it up and see more about it when we got home, but I forgot about it. 00:12:01 Speaker 1: It's to ten. 00:12:08 Speaker 2: It was set in the pocket of that surplus jacket, hanging in the back of my closet for I don't know how long before I found it again, and when I did, I put it in a box, only to be stored away with a bunch of hunting items and keepsakes that got moved from assignment to assignment over the next thirty years, until a few years ago when I ran across that old friend once again. This time I wasn't in a hurry to get somewhere else, and I recognized it immediately by it still having some of the mud from that parking lot stuck inside that wooden barrel. Instantly I was back to that morning that started out somewhat suspect but ended with a group of ducks decoyed into the water that I can remember to this very moment, as if it were this. 00:12:57 Speaker 1: Morning, there would be one hundred. 00:13:00 Speaker 2: It's more in our futures, Tim and I would guide people there within the confines of the shooting grounds for nearly thirty years, starting a decade after that first day, the day I found this old call, I now held in my hands a small piece of black string, still attached to the barrel as a makeshift lanyard. The frayed is telling the tale and the fate of the hunter and how he lost that call, A wooden piece of turned wood that was nondescript, with no high gloss finisher, colorful decals, or engraving. Mud turned the powder when I touched it, and wiped it away almost as clean as if it had never been there, no cracks in the barrel. I wiped it off with a damp cloth until no dirt or residue from that day I found it remained. I went to the hardware store and bought a can of linseed on I put on a coat when I got back home. 00:14:00 Speaker 1: That's when I saw it. 00:14:01 Speaker 2: On the insert, the part that holds the read at the end of the call, you know where the where the sound comes out, are three thin, close parallel lines cut into the wood as it spun on the callmaker's lead, and one more during the collar where the insert and the barrel met, and then three more at the widest part of the barrel in. 00:14:23 Speaker 1: Another setting near the end. 00:14:25 Speaker 2: But in between the two decorative sets of thin lines on the barrel of the call, there's a brand, a one word brand the callmaker burned into the call, and it reads Dixie in all capital letters. And when I saw it, I sat back in my chair. Could this really be what I'm looking at? Could what I found forty years ago? That languished in the pocket of an old hunting coat and moved from home to home as I stumbled my way through life, each time shedding myself of items that I didn't want to include in the move, but miraculously hung on to a piece of real Arkansas duck hunting history. 00:15:13 Speaker 1: Yeah, that's exactly what I'd done. 00:15:17 Speaker 2: I'd found an original Dixie Mallard duck call, a highly collectible assault after call made by the man himself in the nineteen forties. That man's name was Chick Chick Major. Chick was the nickname of Darcy Manning Major. He was born in eighteen ninety four and was a well known figure in the world of duck hunting and duck calling in Arkansas. He was instrumental in the development of the distinctive Arkansas style duck call, an absolute legend not only in the annals of Arkansas duck hunting, but to the call making and collecting world at large. The Chick Major's Dixie Mallard duck hall has been a staple for hunters and collectors since he started producing them for himself. 00:16:10 Speaker 1: When other hunters heard them, they wanted them too, and. 00:16:14 Speaker 2: The first production calls started in nineteen forty one at a time and completely by hand, and for. 00:16:20 Speaker 1: Ten years he burned Dixie into each barrel before they left his workbench. 00:16:27 Speaker 2: That would continue until nineteen fifty, when the decorative decals replaced the Dixie brand. Now, fortunately for me, By this time, the interwebs had been invented, and I found the contact information of a man named Don Cahill. Mister Cahill married Brenda, one of Chick Major's daughters, and had continued on the legacy of the call making. 00:16:50 Speaker 1: After mister Major passed away. 00:16:52 Speaker 2: In nineteen seventy four, Don Cahill continued on the legacy of building the Dixie Mallard calls starting in the next year. In nineteen seventy five, Now I contacted mister ky Hill and described the call I'd found way back when, and then rediscovered a couple more times in my trove of treasures as I moved around, and I sent him a picture of it to see if it was in fact an old Dixie Mallard call. He said, yep, that's an old one made during the nineteen forties. And we talked about it for a while and visited about duck hunting in general, and tried to make plans to talk in person where he could see the call for himself. Our schedules never allowed for the visit. Time marched on and mister k Hill passed away in November of twenty twenty three. Don's son, David, had taken over the business several years prior to this passing, and has now as a little over a year ago, turned the reins over of the call company to the fourth generation, his son, Tyler Cahill, the great grandson of Chick Major. I spoke with each of them about this call I have recently and was pleased to find out that they still have a legacy passion for call making that runs deep, not only in the history of their family, but in the history of Arkansas and duck hunting as well. That makes them a part of my family, or me a part of theirs, however you want to. 00:18:24 Speaker 1: Look at it. 00:18:26 Speaker 2: And while talking to Tyler, I skirted the question of his manufacturing progress in today's world of CNC machine and three D printing and AI generated content. I didn't want to hear that something his great grandfather could have never envisioned would be how these calls were being made today, So I skipped forward to Hey, Tyler, I have a first generation call. How do I go by getting one of yours? A fourth generation called to match it? I'm sure I expected wasn't what I received, He said, Well, mister Brennan, I picked up a lot of orders and it takes about three and a half hours to make one that doesn't include the tuning. And I stopped him right there, You making these by hand, Tyler. Oh, yes, sir, just like my great grandfather. 00:19:21 Speaker 1: Man. 00:19:23 Speaker 2: I can't tell you how happy that made me to hear him say that in today's world where just the other day, a friend of mine sent me a picture of me from high school that he turned into a video of me interacting with the camera. And I never know exactly what to believe, what's right and what aim But this man, this was different. Here's a family legacy and heritage built on craftsmanship and a utilitarian arnt that is continuing now in its eighty fifth year and fourth generation. It's better than that. Nothing, nothing's better than that. These are the stories of the people that deserve to be told and remembered, not just for the sake of nostalgia, but for the sake of how we got where we are. In a way, that duck call is a cave painting. It's a piece of Americana that continues to tell a relevant story just by being I met the third and the fourth generations of Ca Hills this week, and I talked to both of them about our common interest and love for duck hunting. Several years ago, I had the pleasure of sharing those same thoughts with the second generation of that call making family. The only one I never had the pleasure of talking to was the patriarch, the first generation, mister chick Major himself, as I was but a slip of a lad of eight when he died. I'm sitting here looking at this old piece of hand turned walnut and cedar. I can feel the cold wind of the day I found it forty two years ago. I can hear Tim and I call them those ducks, and the sound of their wings as they settled into the decoys with a splash. I can hear our boots as we waded through the timber back to the truck and fill the wet, gritty, muddy barrel of that call as I snatched it from the mud and gravel, like King Arthur pulled Excalibur from the stone. I may not have had the pleasure of speaking to Chick Major. The Chick Major speaks to me every time I look at that call. I thank you so much for listening. I'm gonna post some pictures of that old call on my social media and if you're interested in learning more about the folks who made and make them, check out Dixie Mallard duck Calls on Instagram and Facebook. If you're a duck hunter, you owe it to yourself to find out where we came from. And there's no better place to start than with Chick Major and his family. Now, the Public Timber Project is another page I. 00:22:03 Speaker 1: Encourage you to check out. 00:22:04 Speaker 2: They've got a great mission and a goal of all of us working together to better share the places we all love so much. 00:22:12 Speaker 1: There's some good folks doing some good things. 00:22:16 Speaker 2: They really could use your support and your help and recognition. 00:22:19 Speaker 1: We need to get the word out there about it. 00:22:22 Speaker 2: Check out Clay Bow's Bear Grease the Render, and Lake's news show Backwards University. 00:22:26 Speaker 1: How could you not like it? His name is Lake forbidness sake. 00:22:30 Speaker 2: So until next week, this is Brent Reeves signing off. 00:22:34 Speaker 1: Y'all be careful