North LaSalle Parish History Tidbit…
This week, Ronald “Rip” Cannaday takes us down memory lane, with duck hunting stories from his boyhood.
These stories go back to the 1940s, the first one when I was about ten or eleven years old. My dad, Don Cannaday, and one of his hunting buddies from over in Tullos were going duck hunting on Catahoula Lake. They were drinking coffee at our house before daylight that morning. I could hear them talking, so I got up and told Daddy that I wanted to go. He said I would have to wait until another time.
After they left, and it got daylight, I got my 20-gauge single barrel. I went across Hwy. 84, and headed up Castor Creek to Goggle-Eye Lake. When I got to that little lake, I could see the water shaking. The frost was heavy that morning, but I laid down and crawled on my belly up a little bluff. When I peeked over the bluff, I saw ducks feeding, and they didn’t know I was there. I got two ducks together and pulled the trigger. I killed two of them and wounded another. So, I reloaded and got him too. That made me three big Mallard ducks, and I started home a proud little boy.
My dad and his hunting buddy came in about 10 o’clock that day and didn’t have a duck. Daddy said it was a “bluebird day,” and that meant that the ducks weren’t flying. But he would always laugh and tell this story, how I killed ducks that day and they didn’t.
Later, I did go to Catahoula Lake with him lots of times. Dad would call the ducks by doubling up his fist and blowing into it. One day in 1948, we were sitting on the lake. It was cold a cold day, with the wind about 20 mph, or more, out of the north. It was about noon and I was going to eat some Vienna sausage and crackers. Back then the cans had a lip on the side of the can, and you would put a key in the lip and twist the top off. But I was shaking so bad, I couldn’t put the key on the lip. My dad saw me and opened the can for me. It’s a day I’ll never forget, that cold day on Catahoula Lake, in a duck blind made of pine tops stuck in the mud.
