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The Night We Gigged Frogs
Once, Chuck and I - good Southerners we were, and a long way from home - he from Arkansas, me from Texas - figured it out that Westchester and Fairfield Counties were full of Yankee fools who didn't know about the potentials of froglegs - as on a summer night the ponds hereabouts ring (or used to) with frogs singing... So we decided to recapture the joys of our respective youths when we used to go gigging down South.
And we decided to start with Whatmore's large and frog-crowded pond. Chuck assured me he would have all the gear ready that night and to come on up and bring Jean - and she and Maggie could sleep in the house while we were out on the pond... Well, we got there a little after dark. I had picked up a couple of bottles of bourbon to get us through the night (it was foggy and gloomy out on the pond). We left the girls ashore and shoved off. The gig it turned out was a last-minute affair (as were so-often Chuck's contributions...). It was two short broomsticks he had shoved together with a garden-hose sleeve to hold them together! Gigging frogs with that contraption was kind of like shooting pool with a bent cue, believe me!
Well we had a pillow case for the frogs, the bourbon and
two paddles, and a car battery and old headlamp for a gigging light.
Well - to tell the truth - it went pretty good: that pond had never been worked over and those Yankee frogs were sittin' ducks (to mix a metaphor a bit on you). Pretty soon we had dozens and dozens of mortally-wounded but still viable frogs bleeding through the sack and in the boat all over us and everywhere. The bourbon helped dull our sensibilities a lot of course...
It got so everytime we opened the sack there was a big jailbreak and the frogs poured out... Well, we were out on that pond all night. Never had so much fun! Along about daybreak, we came ashore. We decided what we chiefly needed was a big breakfast of frog legs - fried up nice and brown. We were right at the back door. Jean and Maggie had just waked up and were yawning and looking at us (much disgust in Jean's eyes as she was not so much for this kind of laid-back living....!). At this point, Chuck who had picked up a machete on our way up, reaches into the sack and picks out a candidate. He lays him on the path, and whack! he chops him right in two - leaving the two little legs so you can just skin them out by pulling them out of the skin - kinda like pulling off a pair of longjohns.
But as he does this, the front end of the frog keeps on crawling away across the path and into the bushes. "Wa'a'l, I be doggone" says Chuck, "I wish youda looka here: why these here Yankee frogs is the most obliging frogs I ever see: you don't have to throw them away - they just crawl off in the bushes to die."
I'll never forget that scene: Jean tossing her cookies, the sun coming up, the sack of bloody frogs, Maggie scratching and scratching... Later, Jean, somewhat recovered, sitting around the kitchen table chomping on the legs (delicious!) while learning not to start every time the small legs kicked and twitched in the hot grease - as is the wont of frog legs in the fire since the dawn of time.
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