by Si Robertson
The landowners in Germany were very particular about what you could shoot on their property. They didn’t like us shooting the biggest hogs. During one hunt, I noticed a hole that looked like a big horseshoe in the middle of tall brush. It was actually a trail where hogs had been running. A few minutes later, I heard dogs barking and it was getting louder. The dogs were running toward me! All of the sudden, the big hole in the brush was gone. A hog stuck its head through and kept running right at me. I didn’t think it was going to stop, so I grabbed my gun. The hog came within about three feet of me, but then it turned around and ran back into the hole. My sergeant major was with me and was yelling, “Can I shoot him? Can I shoot him?”
“No, he’s too big,” I said.
The hog probably weighed more than three hundred pounds and had huge tusks sticking out of the sides of its snout. It was pretty, but it was too big to shoot. A few minutes later, guns started going off, and I saw a forty-pound hog running my way. I looked through the scope of my rifle and saw two big oak trees. If the hog ran between the trees, I thought I had one chance to shoot it—if someone else didn’t get it first. When the hog hit my scope, I fired and the hog flipped in the air. The Germans blew their horns, signaling that the hunt was over. One of the Germans came down and asked everyone who shot it. About five guys claimed it, but I told him I was the last one to shoot when it fell. They gave the hog to my colonel, which was probably a good thing.
It was always fun to see the spread after a German hunt. There was such a variety of game. There was usually an elk, four or five roe deer, twelve hogs, a couple of pheasants, and a bunch of rabbits. You have to understand that a German hase isn’t much smaller than a roe deer. They’re the biggest rabbits I’ve ever seen! Whenever we went rabbit hunting, the Germans always warned us not to confuse a roe deer with a rabbit. But it was easy to do because they are so similar in size.
The first time I went rabbit hunting, I was convinced they had bulletproof fur! The Germans liked to shoot over-under shotguns, and I watched four of them fire at the same rabbit. Every time one of them shot twice, I saw fur fly, but the rabbit kept running. As the rabbit got closer, I told myself the rabbit wasn’t going to get by me. When it got close to me, the dogs were just about to catch it. The Germans were screaming, “Don’t shoot the dog! Don’t shoot the dog!” I fired my gun. Boom! It was a head shot and the rabbit flipped. The dog was so close it caught the rabbit in the air.
I’m not sure what would have happened if I’d accidentally shot the German’s dog. Those Germans loved their dogs. I’ve never had much success with hunting dogs—except for standarad poodles—but the Germans train their dogs meticulously. Sometimes when I walked into a restaurant in Germany, dogs would be sitting next to a table while their masters ate steaks. The dogs didn’t move and didn’t have an ounce of slobber on their mouths. That wouldn’t happen in Louisiana. At Phil’s house, Miss Kay’s dogs usually eat steak before we do!
One of the most ferocious dogs I’ve ever seen was in Germany—and it weighed only ten pounds! It was only a puppy, but it had razor-sharp teeth. Before we went hunting one morning, a couple of dogs started fighting. The little dog had latched on to a German shorthaired pointer’s ear and wouldn’t let go. I thought, Man, that dog’s tough. He’s a buzz saw with teeth! When the hunt started, dogs and pigs were running everywhere. All of the sudden, I saw a two-hundred-pound hog running toward me. The pig kept shaking its head. The little dog had latched on to its ear and wouldn’t let go! A couple of hours later, the little dog ripped the ears right off of a rabbit!
It’s a good things rabbits have good eyesight from eating so many carrots. If that rabbit had needed glasses, it would have been in trouble!
“I live by my own rules (reviewed, revised, and approved by my wife) . . . but still my own rules.”
Trasa poses with one of her prom dates. Once she lost her glasses and gained some confidence, my daughter was a beauty!
Semiretirement
I WAS STATIONED IN GERMANY three times for a total of nearly eight years while I served in the army. During my last deployment to Germany, the army informed me it didn’t need me anymore. In 1992, Congress trimmed the military budget by more than $278 million, and I was part of the cuts. After serving for more than twenty-four years, Uncle Sam forced me into retirement on January 31, 1993. The army told me to hit the road, Jack!
Christine and I moved to Hollytree, Alabama, which is located in the northern part of the state, not far from the Tennessee border. Christine and I really enjoyed living in the mountains in Germany, and the Appalachian Mountains in north Alabama were beautiful as well. We rented a house from an army friend of mine for about a year, and then we bought a place of our own and lived there for four more years. Trasa was in college, but Scott was still living with us and attended high school in Alabama.
Hey, you know what I didn’t do after I retired from the military? I didn’t shave. After shaving my face for more than two decades while I was in the army, I threw away my razors, Jack! Phil already had a long beard, and most of the Duckmen who were hunting with him on a regular basis had long, thick beards. Facial hair helps hide your pale skin from ducks. You might as well be wearing spotlights if you get into a duck blind with a clean-shaven face. The ducks will see you from a mile away! I’ve learned over the last several years that a beard helps camouflage your face and keeps you warm during the winter. Hey, you want to talk about fifty shades of gray? I have an entire range of hues in my beard nowadays. Hey, it’s tough being this good-looking.
Our house in Alabama was located in the mountains, and our property actually had about four levels from where rock had busted through the earth. It was a great hunting ground. There was an abundance of game and so many places to hide. I could walk on an upper level of rock and look down and see everything. One day, I was deer hunting and thought I heard a buck rubbing its antlers on a tree. But when I looked down, I saw about forty turkeys. I crawled closer to get a better look, but the scout saw me and started chirping. The turkeys took off running! I never figured out where the turkeys came from or where they went! Turkeys also liked to climb into a pine tree in my yard. Four turkeys climbed the tree, with one facing east, one west, one north, and one south. The rest of the turkeys slept under the tree, while the four in the tree stood guard.
We also had two giant pear trees about ten yards from our house. One day, a doe with two fawns walked into our yard to eat pears that had fallen to the ground. The deer gorged themselves on the pears for about thirty minutes. Every time one of the deer moved, it farted! The deer ate so many pears it looked like their bodies were going to explode! Their bellies were so bloated. I’d never seen a deer with so much gas! Christine, Scott, and I sat on the front porch laughing at them. When the deer finally left, they sounded like a train leaving our yard!
Now, I told you I don’t like snakes, and I don’t care if they’re venomous or nonvenomous. If you bring a snake close to me, you’re going to get hurt! I had a garden in our backyard in Alabama that was surrounded by waist-high grass. One day, I was out picking tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers from our garden, and our wiener dog ran into the weeds. As soon as the dog yelped, I knew what had happened to it. A rattlesnake had bitten the dog. I took the dog inside our house, and I saw the fang marks while Christine was holding it. We took the dog to the vet, but he said he couldn’t do anything because it was too much venom for such a little dog. The vet ended up putting our dog down.
About two weeks later, I was driving back to our house and saw a bunch of people gathered around a barn by my driveway. I looked and saw a big rattlesnake lying in the middle of the road. I drove my truck over the snake about ten times. I put it in reverse, slammed on the brakes, and made sure the snake was as flat as a pancake! When it was dead, I saw that the snake had about ten rattles and a button. It was huge! I knew it was the snake that killed my dog. One of my neighbors asked me if I wanted the rattles.
“No, you can have them,” I told h
im.
My neighbor slit the snake open with a knife and then cut off its head. He cut off the rattles, put them in his pocket, and walked down the road. I told Scott about the snake when he got home from school. Of course, Scott wanted to see it, so I took him down by the road. When Scott stepped on the snake’s body, it popped him even though its head had been cut off! There was a bloody mess all over his boot.
“Good grief,” Scott said. “Can you believe that?”
“Yeah, I can believe it,” I said. “That’s the only thing that snake is designed to do—strike you!”
Several years later, Phil and I went back to his house after a fishing trip. He saw a copperhead sitting on the front steps and killed it with a hoe. Phil chopped the snake into about ten pieces. Well, Jesse, who was Miss Kay’s prized rat terrier dog, grabbed the snake’s head and took off running. When the dog grabbed the snake’s head, it struck him. The dog staggered off into the woods, and when it came back its head was swollen like a basketball! Somehow, Jesse survived the snakebite.
After I left the military, I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do for the rest of my life. I was receiving a military pension, but I needed to find something to keep me busy. So I started working as a groundskeeper at a golf course near our house. Hey, there were snakes all over the golf course! One of the guys who worked with me killed a huge cottonmouth and was chasing everybody with it. When he started coming my way, I grabbed an iron stake. One of the other guys told him, “Hey, he will hurt you.”
“What are you talking about?” the guy asked.
“Hey, he will wrap that iron stake around your head,” the other guy said.
“The snake is already dead,” he said.
“Hey, if you bring that snake any closer, you’re going to be dead with him!” I said.
While I worked at the golf course, I nearly drove the superintendent slap insane because I kept asking him if I could fish for crappie in the ponds.
“You can’t fish on the course!” he told me. “We have golfers out there.”
“Hey, I’m not going to bother the golfers,” I said. “When they come up to the green, I’ll walk away and they won’t even see me.”
One day, the superintendent finally relented and let me fish in the ponds. I caught so many fish that I filled up the back of a golf cart cargo bed with bass and crappie. Some of the bass weighed between five and seven pounds! I must have caught thirty crappie, and they weighed about two pounds each.
The superintendent drove by me while I was fishing. “Good grief!” he said. “Where did you catch all those fish?”
“Duh,” I said. “In the pond! It’s a gold mine!”
After that day, the superintendent knew he wasn’t going to keep me from fishing in the ponds. Before too long, I was also begging the superintendent to let me hunt deer on the golf course. Whenever we mowed the fairways, I kept seeing eight-and ten-point bucks! I chased the deer with my lawn mower all over the golf course.
“Look, are you going to let me hunt deer out here?” I asked the superintendent.
“No!” he said. “You can’t deer hunt out here! There are golfers all over the place. You’ll shoot one of them!”
“Hey, I’ll be careful,” I said. “Did you look at the pond on the third hole this morning? There were sixteen deer down there. This place is like the Graceland for whitetails!”
A few months after I quit working at the golf course, one of my buddies called me and told me he shot a sixteen-point buck on the seventeenth fairway.
“They’re letting you hunt out there now?” I asked him.
“Yep, as soon as you left,” he said.
I could have filled up seven freezers with venison!
I worked at the golf course for about a year, and then one of my buddies and I left to go work for Hewlett-Packard in Huntsville, Alabama. I worked in the warehouse and backed the trucks up so we could load them up with computers. I worked there for about a year, until they started talking about layoffs. Then I went to work with my neighbor, who owned a homerepair business. We remodeled houses, built decks and barns, and completed other construction projects. It was good work, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to be doing manual labor for the rest of my life.
One day in the winter of 1999, I called Phil to see if they were killing any ducks in Louisiana.
“Hey, when you going to come work for me?” he said. “This Duck Commander thing is really starting to take off.”
“Nah, Christine told me she doesn’t want to live in Louisiana,” I said. “I don’t think it’s going to work.”
“Suit yourself,” Phil said. “Building duck calls is a heck of a lot more fun than repairing roofs.”
Phil wasn’t kidding.
“I’m so dope, I’m illegal in fifty-five states!”
Homecoming
REMEMBER WHEN I TOLD you Christine said she would never live in Louisiana again? When we were living in Alabama, I came home from work one day, and she stopped me in my tracks.
“You know what I think we should do?” she said. “If we can sell our house, we should move back to Louisiana so you can be closer to your brothers and sisters.”
“Are you sick?” I asked her.
Hey, I thought Christine was terminally ill. My children and I really thought she was going to die! After we left Fort Polk near Leesville, Louisiana, she told me she would never live in the state again—no matter what! I didn’t think there was any way she would ever move back to Louisiana, but she knew how much returning home meant to me. I called Trasa to tell her the news about our moving.
“Momma’s dying, isn’t she?” she asked.
“I think so,” I said.
Christine was actually fine, but she was willing to make a sacrifice so I would be happy. I was ready to start working for Duck Commander, and Phil’s business was really starting to prosper. Every time I went back to Louisiana to go hunting with Phil, he was always trying to get me to work for him. I knew Phil needed some help, and I figured helping him build duck calls would be a heck of a lot better than what I was doing for a living at the time. Christine had been working for the U.S. Department of Defense for about ten years, and she was working about ten hours a day and six days a week. We didn’t have much of a life outside of work, which was really what we’d been doing our entire lives. Christine was getting ready to retire and needed a break.
Well, God must have been watching over us again. After Christine and I seriously talked about moving to Louisiana, we agreed to call a real estate agent the next Monday and advertise our house in the newspaper. Hey, we never even had to put our house on the market. We talked about it on a Friday and Saturday and went to church on Sunday morning. We told some of the people in our congregation that we were going to move to Louisiana if we could sell our house. One of the women in our church overheard us talking, and her eyes immediately lit up.
“Hey, you want to sell your house?” she said. “My daughter wants to buy it. That’s her dream house.”
We found out later that we had actually outbid her daughter for the house when we’d purchased it a few years earlier. I came up with a sale price that would pretty much allow us to break even or make a little bit of cash, and the lady’s daughter agreed to buy it a couple of days later. There was no negotiating or haggling over the price, probably because there weren’t any real estate agents involved. I probably could have asked for more money, but I was ready to move to Louisiana.
Hey, as soon as the girl signed a contract to buy my house, I packed my bags and jumped in my truck.
“Okay, baby, I’ll see you later,” I told Christine. “You can find me at Phil’s house.”
I drove straight to West Monroe and started working for Phil the next day. Well, we actually hunted and fished for a few days, but Christine doesn’t need to know that. I left her behind to pack up the house and handle the details. She wasn’t too happy about my leaving, but she was used to doing it, since we’d moved so many times while I was in the mi
litary. A few weeks later, Christine called me and said I had to come back to Alabama to sign the closing papers for our house.
“You can’t do it without me?” I asked.
“No, honey, legally you have to be physically present to sign it,” she said.
We moved to West Monroe and bought a house a few miles down the road from Miss Kay and Phil. From day one, I was the reedman at Duck Commander, which is what Phil wanted me to do. He said I made reeds better than anyone else, because nobody else took the time to do them right. Whenever Jase, Willie, Jep, or someone else built reeds, you could never build a duck call quickly because you were always fixing the reeds.
When I built the reeds, if you looked at one hundred of them, they all looked the same. They were uniform. I figured out exactly how short to cut the reeds and determined that the top reed has to be just a little bit shorter than the bottom one for the calls to sound right. After I bend two reeds and put a dimple and rivet in them so they’ll stick together, you don’t even have to blow the calls to make sure they sound right. Of course, Jase, Godwin, Jep, Martin, me, and other Duck Commander employees blow every duck call to make sure it sounds like an actual duck. I don’t know how many reeds I’ve built over the years. At one point, I’d made four hundred thousand reeds, which were put into two hundred thousand duck calls. We only have one duck call that doesn’t use reeds.
Of course, I didn’t realize what I was getting into when I took a job with Duck Commander. I figured I’d build duck calls for a few years, and hunt and fish on most days. But when Willie bought the company from Phil, he had much bigger dreams for it. I had no idea Hollywood and cable TV were part of his plans!
Phil had been making hunting videos for several years, and eventually I had a regular role in them. At first, whenever they pointed the cameras at me, I told them, “Hey, y’all don’t have to film me. Film somebody else.” I really didn’t want to be on the video; I was only out there to hunt and shoot ducks. But then they started filming me on the sly, and I never saw them doing it. Jase or Willie would do something in the blind to make me angry, or I’d start telling them a story from Vietnam, and I wouldn’t even know that they were filming me! Well, the people who were buying our hunting DVDs loved hearing my stories. They started calling and writing to Duck Commander, telling us they wanted to hear more Uncle Si stories.
