I’ve enjoyed writing in recent weeks about storied Arkansas duck clubs. They’re a part of our state’s unique heritage.

In my mind, two names stand above the rest as far as being legendary — Claypool’s near Weiner and Wingmead near Stuttgart.

I wrote about Claypool’s in last week’s post about the book “First Shooting Light.” Wallace Claypool of Memphis bought the land in 1941 as a sanctuary for ducks, building a reservoir that would become internationally famous on Dec. 23, 1956.

That’s the day NBC broadcast live as three blocks of TNT were fired off, causing an estimated 350,000 ducks to lift off the water.

The black-and-white photo of those ducks has become a classic in the history of the Arkansas outdoors.

Claypool, an automobile dealer, sold his land in 1966 to friends from Memphis. In the course of my research, I ran across an article by Eugenia Bone that ran in the November 2000 issue of Gourmet (I miss that magazine).

She had gone hunting at Claypool’s on a Thanksgiving weekend with her husband, Kevin, and an uncle from Memphis named Norfleet Turner.

The cast of characters on that hunt included men with colorful names such as Skeets Boyle (“vivacious and grumpy”), Toof Brown and Bayard Boyle Jr. (“a gentle loner who hunts by himself”).

John Riley — “a giant of a man and the terror of local poachers” — had run the place for 32 years by that point.

“Green rubber waders hang on pegs along one wall,” Bone writes. “Guns, primarily 12-gauge, rest on a tall rack. Masks, camouflage jackets and boxes of neat orange and yellow shells sit on a long bench. There’s a dead mouse in the toe of one seldom-worn wader. The shed is dingy and gloriously atmospheric, smelling of leather and wet wool and dogs held in high esteem.”

Bone writes lovingly of waiting for shooting time in the flooded timber: “Everything stills. And we wait. Very quietly. So concentrated is the quiet that the slow zigzag of a leaf falling from the canopy captures everyone’s attention. This is the true character of hunting: A zen-like state of simultaneous excitement and calm that allows for acute observation of nature. It’s why I don’t have to kill anything in order to experience a good hunt.

“Overhead, ducks fly by in flocks and pairs, and higher up, geese travel in tremendous, fluttering ribbons. Riley begins calling — a wonderful, lonely quack. … As the sky turns orange and pink, we shoot mallards and tiny, zippy teal for their sweet, tender meat. With every bird that falls like a feathery stone, the dogs leap off the blinds and lope through the water to retrieve it in soft jaws, their tails wagging fiercely.”

Bone tells of the famous people who have hunted at Claypool’s: “Jimmy Carter, Wernher von Braun, various DuPonts and baseball great Preacher Roe, but not Bill Clinton. (‘Skeets don’t like Bill Clinton,’ says John Riley.)”

Like my trips to Piney Creek, breakfast after the hunt is as good as the hunt itself at Claypool’s, Bone writes.

“Settling down to this breakfast is a true reward,” she says. “The table, by a picture window that looks out on a duck-resting pond, is set with thick, dinner-style ceramic, matching in spirit only. Pitchers of orange juice and milk are set out, as well as bowls of jelly, jam and marmalade. It may be country, but nothing is ever served in its original container.

“Then Mary comes out with the goods: a platter of scrambled eggs and another of fried country eggs, a basket of steaming homemade biscuits, a mound of curly bacon and a bowl of white gravy with the handle of a ladle sticking out of it. Everyone is pretty quiet for the first few minutes of furious piling on plates, and then the stories start — about the hunt, the dark water, the red sunrise.”

Here’s how Bone describes the club: “Inside, it smells like coffee. And peanuts, and gun metal — and rubber boots, and old tobacco, and even older men. There’s a big fire burning in the living room fireplace, and a coffeepot and mismatched mugs on the table. Hunters lounge on dumpy furniture that crackles when you lean back because of all the peanut shells behind the cushions. Others are banging around upstairs in the dormitory bedrooms.

“There are dead wasps on the windowsills and worn issues of Ducks Unlimited, dusty taxidermied ducks and old sepia-toned pictures of hunters and dogs and ducks and woods. And there are maps — beautiful maps, depicting Claypool’s 1,370 acres of flooded woods and reservoir, and maps showing the location of blinds: Brown’s Hole, Well Island, Snowden’s Hole, Johnny’s Hot Spot, Turner’s Hole, Mystery Hole, Fifth Avenue.”

It sounds like my kind of place.

Wingmead, meanwhile, has the reputation of being an elegant place, a reputation promoted by its founder, Edgar Queeny. Wingmead, which is just off Arkansas Highway 33 in Prairie County, was built in 1939 by Queeny, a St. Louis resident who was the chairman of Monsanto. Peckerwood Lake was formed in 1942.

Queeny had a deep interest in how ducks fly. The book “Prairie Wings” was written at Wingmead and published in 1946.

The Wingmead estate recently was added to the National Register of Historic Places. In its nomination narrative, the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program noted: “Construction on Wingmead took place shortly after the land was acquired, and the complex that Queeny built was unlike any other duck hunting camp in the state. Designed in the colonial revival style, the main house encompassed approximately 10,000 square feet. In addition to the main house, the estate included several farm buildings, a kennel and a small cabin located one mile south of the main house that Queeny used as his personal retreat to do much of his writing. Queeny named the estate Wingmead, a word of Scottish origin that means ‘meadow of wings.'”

For several years, Queeny had stayed in a trailer when he visited Arkansas to hunt ducks. His wife finally gave him an ultimatum: If she were to accompany him in the future, he would need to get rid of the trailer.

Queeny consulted with Stuttgart businessman Roger Crowe to find land. Crowe found property on LaGrue Bayou, northwest of Roe and south of DeValls Bluff. Queeny formed an irrigation company and actually used eminent domain to acquire the 11,000 acres.

Queeny died July 7, 1968. His wife, Ethel, maintained the property until her death in 1975, when it was donated to Barnes Hospital in St. Louis. Barnes announced that the estate would be sold by sealed bids in January 1976.

Rumors as to who would buy Wingmead ranged from Johnny Cash to Elvis Presley.

The Lyon family of Little Rock was the purchaser. The estate is still owned by Frank Lyon Jr. and used as a hunting retreat and farming operation.

In his 1990 book “Private Tour: At Home In Arkansas,” Hunter Gray wrote: “Not many things have changed over the years at Wingmead. Hunters are still helped out of their muddy boots by the staff. A model 12 shotgun might be handed to you as if by a golf caddy. This is hunting with all the finery — the spirit of the hunt is alive and well at Wingmead. At the end of the day, the table is set with fine china embellished with the recognizable Wingmead logo.”

This is how an article published several years ago in AY magazine put it: “The word lodge is certainly a misnomer for the main house at Wingmead, which is reminiscent of a large, luxurious country inn. ‘There have been changes in farming and conservation practices,’ Frank Lyon Jr. said, ‘but we’ve tried to keep the lodge in the same condition as when Queeny had it.’

“Bedrooms occupy most of the space on the two levels; a wood-paneled office, brightened by abundant windows, sits at one end of the ground floor. Lining the walls are illustrations by Queeny’s friend Richard Bishop, once one of the country’s best-known wildlife artists. Also displayed is one of the few complete collections of federal waterfowl stamps and prints in private hands. A Bishop illustration of a flying mallard has become the Wingmead logo, seen on panels in the main room of the lodge, above the office fireplace, on glassware and dishes, and on the doors of vehicles.”

The article notes that “rumors inevitably developed about Queeny’s very private hunting grounds, and some of them were actually true. Guests at Wingmead, whether politicians, business tycoons or artists, were expected to arrive for dinner in formal dress: black tie and dinner jackets for men, long dresses for women. The sense of decorum continued even during hunts. A painting over the fireplace in the main house shows Queeny and his wife, Ethel, hunting in flooded timber, wearing old-style sporting jackets; their guide is wearing a jacket and bow tie.”

I’ve been fortunate to visit some of Arkansas’ great duck clubs through the years. But I’ve never seen Claypool’s or Wingmead.

One of these days, I would like to take a peek.

The rain was coming down hard when my alarm sounded at 3:30 a.m. Friday.

Thankfully, it wasn’t cold enough for ice, but it wasn’t warm, either — about 39 degrees.

There are few things that will make me get up at that hour. A trip to hunt ducks with the legendary Wiley Meacham at the Piney Creek Duck Club on the Monroe County-Lee County line near Monroe is one of them.

I’ve written about Wiley on this blog before. He’s 80 now, still getting up in the middle of the night and making the drive from his home in Brinkley to his farm office under the pecan trees at Monroe, on the land where he was born and raised.

The date had been marked on my calendar for weeks. Steve “Wild Man” Wilson of the Arkansas Game & Fish Commission had called to inform me that he would be filming his annual “Talkin’ Outdoors” Christmas show at Piney Creek. He invited me to be a part of the hunt.

If for some reason you feel the need for television background noise on Christmas morning, the show will air at 9 a.m. Sunday on KARZ-TV.

It will air again Christmas evening at 11:30 p.m. on KARK-TV, Channel 4.

You’ll be able to witness a group of grown men standing in cold water, wearing camouflage Santa caps (thanks, Wild Man) and singing Christmas songs.

“Why do grown men get up in the middle of the night and then act like that?” I’m sure my wife will ask.

Unless you’ve experienced the mallard madness in the flooded green timber of east Arkansas, you really can’t answer that question.

It’s an experience that goes far beyond shooting ducks.

Watching the sun rise. Listening to the owls and the geese. Exchanging stories. Giving friends a hard time after bad shots.

Listening to Steve Meacham and Don Thompson call the ducks.

Sharing a bench with Rex Johnson.

Back where we parked the boats, Joe Weiss was busy cooking Friday morning. Yes, cooking. These flooded woods have a kitchen.

In 1987, a grocery store owner named Lattimore Michael opened the first Back Yard Burgers restaurant in Cleveland, Miss. A year later, Weiss — a Clarksdale, Miss., native — became a franchisee and was instrumental in the expansion of the chain.

Joe now owns the Blue & White Restaurant, a roadside classic that has been in business alongside U.S. Highway 61 in Tunica, Miss., since 1937.

On this morning, though, Joe is playing chef in the flooded timber of the Arkansas Delta. He’s grilling slices of teal and sausages. He’s cutting cheese and putting out crackers and Mickle’s Pickles from Picayune, Miss. (truly some of the best pickles I’ve ever had).

After the hunt, standing there eating slices of teal on a cracker, I think about the great tradition of east Arkansas duck hunting.

Yesterday, after lunch at the Peabody Little Rock, I went by the lobby fountain to pay homage to the four mallard hens and one mallard drake that swim inside the hotel. Even the famous Peabody Hotel ducks have their genesis in an east Arkansas duck hunt.

In 1932, Frank Schutt, the general manager of the Peabody at Memphis, accompanied a friend named Chip Barwick on a duck hunting trip to east Arkansas.

The Peabody website tells what happened after that at the landmark Memphis hotel: “The men had a little too much Jack Daniel’s Tennessee sippin’ whiskey and thought it would be funny to place some of their live duck decoys (it was legal then for hunters to use live decoys) in the beautiful Peabody fountain. Three small English call ducks were selected as ‘guinea pigs,’ and the reaction was nothing short of enthusiastic. Soon, five North American mallard ducks would replace the original ducks.

“In 1940, bellman Edward Pembroke, a former circus animal trainer, offered to help with delivering the ducks to the fountain each day and taught them the now-famous Peabody duck march. Mr. Pembroke became the Peabody duckmaster, serving in that capacity for 50 years until his retirement in 1991.

“The original ducks have long since gone, but after 75 years, the marble fountain in the hotel lobby is still graced with ducks. The Peabody ducks march at 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. daily.”

It has long been a tradition in our family to have wild Arkansas ducks for dinner in the days leading up to Christmas. So it was that I brought two mallard drakes back with me, stopping at McSwain’s on U.S. Highway 165 in North Little Rock to have the ladies in the back room clean them for me.

With dozens of ducks in the back room, it was obvious that others had been hunting on that rainy Friday morning.  The ladies said they could clean my ducks while I waited, so I watched them work their magic.

Again, my thoughts turned to the colorful history of Arkansas duck hunting.

One of my favorite writers is Nash Buckingham, a Tennessean who died in 1971 at age 90. Buckingham wrote nine books and hundreds of articles for magazines such as Sports Afield, Outdoor Life and Field & Stream.

His preferred types of hunting were for ducks and bobwhite quail, the two types of hunting my father most enjoyed. My dad always considered duck and quail hunting to be gentlemen’s sports.

Just like the legend of the Peabody ducks, east Arkansas figures prominently in a well-known incident involving Buckingham.

Here’s how a story on him began in the June/July 2010 issue of Garden & Gun: “On Dec. 1, 1948, two hunters emerged from the cool wetlands of Clarendon, Ark., and ambled along a country road. The men — Nash Buckingham and Clifford Green — had spent a long morning in a duck blind and were headed back to Green’s car, on their way home.

“Buckingham, then 68 years old, was at the time one of the most famous writers in America, a sort of Mark Twain for the hunting set. At Green’s car, they met a warden, who asked to see their hunting licenses. The warden quickly realized that he was in the presence of the celebrated writer. He asked Buckingham if he could see the most famous shotgun in America, Buckingham’s talisman, an inanimate object that the writer had referred to — in loving, animistic terms — in a great number of his stories. The nine-pound, nine-ounce gun was a side-by-side 12-gauge Super Fox custom made by the A.H. Fox Gun Co. in Philadelphia.

“The carbon steel plates on the frame were ornately engraved with a leafy scroll. The gun company’s signature fox, nose in the air, was engraved on the floorplate. The barrels had been bored by the renowned barrel maker Burt Becker and delivered 90 percent patterns of shot at 40 feet, an uncharacteristically tight load for a waterfowling shotgun. It was named Bo Whoop. A hunting buddy had designated it so, after the distinct deep, bellowing sound it made upon discharge.

“The warden chatted up Buckingham, handling and admiring the writer’s gun, like a kid talking to Babe Ruth while holding the slugger’s bat. At some point during the conversation, the warden laid the gun down on the car’s back fender. Buckingham and Green soon bid the warden farewell and drove off, forgetting about Bo Whoop until many miles into their trip home. In a panic, they turned around and retraced their route, painstakingly eyeing every inch of the road, to no avail.”

Buckingham spent the next several years searching for Bo Whoop.

“He lamented the loss of Bo Whoop in print, likening it to the death of a treasured hunting dog,” the article states. “He took out ads in local newspapers, offering rewards. He befriended local wardens and police, appealing to them to be on the lookout. He would never find it. But in the process of its loss and failed recovery, its legend grew in stature. Bo Whoop became a metaphor for other things gone and never to be retrieved, like one’s youth or the American wildnerness.”

 Like Elvis sightings in later years, there were regular Bo Whoop sightings. All were false.

In 1950, two friends gave Buckingham a Fox gun named Bo Whoop II.

During the 1950s, a sawmill foreman in Savannah, Ga., bought a used Fox shotgun with a broken stock for $50. The foreman’s son inherited the shotgun upon his father’s death and stuck it in a closet.

In 2005, the son brought the gun to a noted South Carolina gunsmith named Jim Kelly for repair.

Kelly, a student of hunting history, saw “Made for Nash Buckingham” and “By Burt Becker Phila. PA” inscribed on the gun.

He had found Bo Whoop.

After having the stock repaired, the man passed the gun down to his son, who in turn decided to sell it in order to pay the medical expenses for his sick father. It would be auctioned by the James Julia Auction Co. in Maine.

In March 2010, an 84-year–old man named Hal Howard Jr. learned of the impending auction. Howard, a former T. Rowe Price executive, was raised in Memphis. His father was Buckingham’s best friend and hunting partner. Hal Howard Jr. was Buckingham’s godson.

“We hunted in Arkansas together,” Howard said.

Howard paid $201,250 for Bo Whoop, the third-highest amount ever paid for an American shotgun.

A month later, it was announced that Howard was donating Bo Whoop to the Ducks Unlimited national headquarters at Memphis.

What has never been clear is how Bo Whoop got from the woods near Clarendon to Georgia. But the shotgun is almost home now, just across the Mississippi River from the duck woods of Arkansas.

What a fine tradition Arkansas duck hunting is.

We’ll see you on KARZ at 9 a.m. Christmas Day.

Duck season begins in Arkansas on Saturday.

Hunters from across the country are migrating to our state today. You see, this is the mecca of their sport.

Let’s go back more than 60 years and read what Ralph Coghlan wrote in 1949 for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: “Let me say that, over a hunting experience of many years, I have never seen more ducks than darkened the Arkansas skies this year. Not being a bookkeeper, an accountant, a human adding machine or a member of the federal Fish and Wildlife Service, I couldn’t come within 100,000 of figuring how many I saw.

“I watched mallards sitting in vast and solid rafts on the Arkansas reservoirs, quacking raucously and happily, and at dusk, saw them start for the rice fields. They took off in successive roars like fleets of miniature B-29s, and for half an hour or more, the whole sky was alive with ducks.

“For seven weeks in November 1949, wave after wave of mallards took off like scrambling fighter planes from their summer breeding grounds in Canada. Fanning out over four major flyways, they headed south. It was the heaviest migration of waterfowl that the U.S. had seen in years.

“Southward along the Mississippi Flyway, which in 1949 was traveled by the thickest squadrons of ducks and gunned by almost half the nation’s 2 million waterfowlers, the shooting was the best in years. Hunters from all over the U.S. converged on Stuttgart, which, at that early date, declared that its flooded woodlands and rice fields made it the Duck Capital of the World.”

As you can tell, the Arkansas reputation as a mecca for duck hunters has been decades in the making.

Bill Hope planted a small plot of rice near Stuttgart as an experiment in 1902. It yielded 139 bushels per acre despite all of the people who were pulling up stalks of this strange crop as souvenirs.

The Stuttgart Rice Mill Co. was incorporated on March 9, 1907. The mill was completed the following October and reported a profit on the first year’s crop of $16,000.

The cooperative of rice farmers that would become Riceland Foods Inc. was formed in 1921. The ducks followed the rice.

Writing for Delta Waterfowl magazine, Wayne Capooth explained: “Until the coming of drying facilities, harvested rice was left to dry in the fields, attracting southward-bound ducks and geese in indescribable numbers to feed. In addition, dotting the prairies were numerous timbered depressions known as ‘islands’ or ‘pin oak flats,’ at least two dozen of which were used as rice reservoirs or as ‘green tree’ reservoirs.

“The first rice reservoir, built by Art and Verne Tindall, was completed in 1927 near Elm Prong Mill Bayou. Verne Tindall remarked to the Stuttgart Daily Leader, ‘The first few years, it seemed as if all the ducks in the country tried to get into it.’

“By the mid-1940s, reservoirs were estimated to occupy about 10,000 acres, while the rice acreage of the Grand Prairie was about 175,000 acres. By 1950, about 200 had been built within the region and 50 were green-tree reservoirs. These reservoirs, constructed for irrigation, provided an additional attraction, resulting in the Grand Prairie becoming a nationally known venue for waterfowling.”

The first duck calling contest was held on Main Street in Stuttgart on Nov. 24, 1936, in conjunction with the annual Arkansas Rice Carnival. It was the idea of Thad McCollum and was sponsored by the American Legion. McCollum, Dr. H.V. Glenn and Arthur Shoemaker formed a committee to stage the event. Verne Tindall later replaced Shoemaker as a committee member.

There were 17 contestants in that first contest. Thomas Walsh won without using a call. Walsh, who raised ducks at his home in Greenville, Miss., produced the sounds with his throat. His prize was a hunting coat valued at $6.60 that the American Legion had purchased from the John Oberly Clothing Store.

The only other contestant to win the contest without a call was also from Greenville. Herman Callouet pulled off that feat in 1942.

By 1947, the prize was up to $1,000. Next week’s winner will receive a prize package worth more than $15,000.

Just as famous as the calling contest these days is the duck gumbo cook-off that is always held on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. I can only describe this as an Arkansas-grown bacchanalia that’s as close as you get in this state to Bourbon Street in New Orleans at Mardi Gras.

Cooking teams with names such as the Bud Light Rouxmasters (last year’s winner), the Flockers and Mallard Malee will wear custom shirts, work in elaborate booths and slap team stickers on the rears of women who walk by in tight jeans.

If you attend, plan on having to scream to be heard above the band Tragikly White and the hundreds of people who will be talking loudly with their friends.

The more than 50 teams are required to cook three quarts of gumbo each, and at least 50 percent of the meat must be duck. Teams begin cooking at 10 a.m., and the judging takes place at 3 p.m.

Each Thanksgiving, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones fires up his private jet following his team’s home game for a weekend of hunting at his Red Hill Duck Club near Stuttgart. Jones often can be spotted at the gumbo cook-off.

Capooth, the Delta Waterfowl writer, first attended the Wings Over the Prairie Festival in 1955 with his father. He was 10 years old.

He remembers staying at the old Riceland Hotel just down the hall from John Olin of Winchester-Western. Olin hunted at the Greebriar Club, which was known by locals as the Winchester Club.

“It was here on these famous grounds that King Buck retrieved his last greenhead,” Capooth writes. “Double national champion (1953 and 1954) King Buck was given his due when, in 1959, it was decided that the federal duck stamp for that year should commemorate the work of retrievers and their contribution to waterfowl conservation. … So it is that Maynard Reece painted a portrait of perhaps the greatest duck dog of them all.”

For all of you headed duck hunting on this opening weekend, best of luck and be safe. Know that you’re taking part in a treasured Arkansas tradition.

Take ’em!

It was raining steadily as I pulled away from my home at 4 a.m. Sunday.

I had ignored Wiley’s advice. He had called the previous afternoon and said: “If it’s raining fairly hard when you get up tomorrow morning, I suggest you go back to bed.”

Indeed, the rain was coming down when the alarm went off at 3:30 a.m. But I was wide awake. I figured that even if we didn’t go duck hunting, I might as well have a big breakfast with the guys and swap some stories.

The rain never stopped as I made the drive east on Interstate 40. In fact, it got harder. As I pulled into the parking lot of Gene’s Barbeque in Brinkley shortly after 5 a.m., I could see the forlorn faces of the men standing out front, outfitted in camouflage. Some of them likely had driven a long way to hunt ducks in east Arkansas, and the weather was not cooperating.

Inside the restaurant, the cooks had not yet made an appearance. But there were more hunters, drinking coffee and trading tales of past hunting adventures.

Wiley introduced me to one hunter from Mississippi. He introduced me to another couple of people from Tennessee.

“How long have you been coming over here?” he asked one of the out-of-state visitors.

“Every year since 1972,” the man answered.

Early on a Sunday morning at Gene’s, it quickly becomes evident what duck hunting means to the Arkansas economy.

Steve Meacham, one of Wiley’s three sons, came into the restaurant and said of his father: “You know why he made you come down here in the rain, don’t you? To get you back for not mentioning his name until the very end of that column.”

I recently had written a column on duck hunting for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. It had become somewhat of a joke in these parts that I had failed to mention Wiley’s name until the final paragraph of the column. At age 78, Wiley is the patriarch of the Piney Creek Duck Club and one of a small fraternity of famous Arkansas duck hunting guides who have been practicing their craft for more than 50 years.

Finally, we decided to make the drive south to the small community of Monroe and the famous Piney Creek Duck Club, which recently was featured on the ESPN Outdoors website. The fellows who had spent the night there were doing the same thing the hunters had been doing back at Gene’s — drinking coffee and waiting for the rain to stop.

We decided to reverse the order on this Sunday morning. Rather than hunting first and then coming back for a huge breakfast, we would have that huge breakfast first and hunt later in the morning once the rain had stopped. My wife always gives me a hard time about our healthy fare. We had the usual — biscuits, gravy, hash browns, sausage and eggs. Someone opened a can of sliced pineapple so we could tell our wives we ate fruit.

As someone who has long been intrigued by Delta history, I was fascinated as I listened to Wiley talk about growing up on that farm. He talked about the thriving community that Monroe once had been, its stores and restaurants fueled by the thousands of sharecroppers who lived in the area. The same story could be told about countless other Delta communities that are now almost ghost towns in this age of agricultural mechanization.

He talked about the large sawmill at Monroe as the area was cleared of its bottomland hardwoods in the 1930s. He told me where the cotton gin had been. He pointed out where the farm’s pond had once been located and discussed how his father even tried to the raise sheep at one time.

He talked about accompanying his father as they took several bales of cotton on a truck to Memphis. They would join many other Delta farmers in driving up and down Front Street — “Cotton Row” — seeking the best prices for their products from the many cotton buyers along the street. Thousands of bales of cotton would be stacked on the sidewalks in those days.

By the time we had finished breakfast, the rain had stopped and the sun was working its way through the clouds.

It was time to put on our waders and head into the flooded green timber. No one hunts in the afternoon at Piney Creek. So for the first time in my memory, I rode the boat into the flooded woods when it wasn’t dark. By the time we reached the hole and took our places, all of the clouds were gone.

The hunting was slow. There were some ducks. There also were thousands of geese, a hawk and a majestic bald eagle circling these woods along the Monroe County-Lee County line.

As I sat there and breathed in the country air, I thought of a couple of things.

First, while duck hunters would consider this a slow morning, birdwatchers would pay good money to sit there and see what I was seeing. Those of us who get to do this on a regular basis should never take it for granted.

Second, I thought about how sad it is that so many of my fellow Arkansans never truly experience the Arkansas outdoors, whether it’s a cold January morning in the Delta or a hot June afternoon spent floating a stream in the Ozarks. For too many of us, even in a still-rural state like Arkansas, “outdoor activity” consists of walking through the parking lot at Wal-Mart.

With the duck season entering its final two weeks, I said farewell at 1 p.m., tuned the radio to the Cowboys-Vikings playoff game and headed back toward Little Rock.

I sure am glad I had not taken Wiley’s advice. I’m happy I had not gone back to bed at 3:30 a.m. Sleep can wait.

Tucked inside my copy of “The Season,” the wonderful book on Arkansas duck hunting by Steve Bowman and Mark Stallings, is a note from Wiley Meacham of Brinkley.

The note is dated Feb. 10, 2005. It was written soon after the conclusion of the 2004-05 duck season.

It says: “Sorry we could not have had a better duck season. It looks as if our place is a has-been. Don’t give up on us. We may have a few more hunts. Maybe next year.”

Obviously, Wiley didn’t consider the 2004-05 season to have been up to his standards. I laugh now as I read the note almost five years later. That’s because the “place” Wiley describes is the Piney Creek Duck Club on the Monroe County-Lee County line. And it has never been a has-been. It’s quite simply one of the finest duck hunting spots in Arkansas, meaning it’s one of the finest duck hunting spots in the world.

And Wiley, who has been hunting this land for more than 50 years, is one of the state’s most famous duck guides.

Like a football coach who knows just how good his team is, though, he likes to poormouth the place. When things are slow — and they will be slow from time to time in even the finest hunting holes — he will say, “My, aren’t we having fun?”

Or he will mutter, “This used to be a good place to hunt.”

I’ve had the honor of being invited to hunt the flooded green timber at Piney Creek for almost 15 years now, and I’ve never failed to have a good time. Yes, there have been times when the ducks weren’t flying. But the trips have always been fun.

I made my first trip of the current season on Sunday. Hunting alongside Wiley, Don Thompson, Rex Johnson and Don’s grandson Ethan, the hunting could not have been better. The ducks worked well all morning. I happen to be one of the world’s poorest shots, but I figure it gives the others a chance to rib me in their good-natured way.

Following a huge breakfast after the hunt, I departed about 11:40 a.m. By the time I reached McSwain Sports Center on the England Highway at North Little Rock to have my four mallards cleaned, the line was out the side door. Lots of people hunted Sunday. And lots of people killed ducks.

I grew up in Southwest Arkansas shooting at any duck that flew within range. My father had learned to love duck hunting when he was a coach at Newport. He maintained a passion for the sport even though he spent most of his adult life in Clark County. Around Arkadelphia, we often simply sat along the edge of various creeks and sloughs, popping at wood ducks as they flew by. I didn’t know the joys of green timber hunting in east Arkansas.

The “duck club” my dad belonged to in the Ouachita River bottoms was more of a supper club, where the members would gather once a month to eat and socialize. There were few mallards killed.

It’s fitting therefore that I’m probably one of the few people with a spoonbill (technically a shoveler) mounted in my den. I was never too proud to hunt what the purists describe as “trash ducks.” To me, a duck was a duck.

There’s a story behind that spoonbill. Several years ago, I was eating dinner with my wife and two sons in the back room of Gene’s Barbecue at Brinkley with owner and duck hunting companion Gene DePriest. Gene insisted that each of my boys take one of the duck mounts off the wall of the restaurant and carry it home. I aruged with him, but Gene was adamant that each boy take a mount home. One picked a pintail. The other picked a spoonie. Both mounts remain on the wall of our den.

As the bumper sticker on the back of Wiley’s truck says: “Spoonies have green heads too.”

In “The Season,” my friend Steve Bowman (who I’ve known since he was a college freshman at Ouachita) writes: “When it gets here and it’s so cold it chills down to the bone, duck hunters anticipate the sunrise of the next day. They look forward to the clanging of an alarm clock, the trip into the darkness to sit in the cold and wait. And when the sun washes light across the sky, anticipation is measured in increasingly smaller increments. They anticipate the next hour, when surely the next wave of migrants will be enticed by the perfect cadence of hail calls and feeding chuckles. Then it comes to minutes waiting for the clock to finally tick to 30 minutes before sunrise, and the game is on. It’s present in the thoughts of when to make the next call, when to raise the gun, seeing the next retrieve or waiting for the last duck to fill the bag. Anticipation never stops.”

Thanks, Wiley, for counting me among your duck hunting friends.

My, aren’t we having fun?