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117 Grabbing Dinner Bill Heavey Since Jody Meche’s wife is working late and since Jody and I will be out frogging until midnight or so, we need to get enough calories into Bryce, the couple’s fourteen-year-old, to hold him until his mama gets home. Thus it is that my introduction to the art of frogging takes place in the drive-through line of the McDonald’s in Henderson, Louisiana, about twenty-five miles east of Lafayette. Like many froggers in the Atchafalaya Basin, Jody is not a fan of gigs and mechanical grabbers. He prefers to catch his frogs bare-handed. For one thing, gigs and mechanical grabbers aren’t the most reliable things. They also kill the frog, and while a dead frog must be iced immediately, a grabbed frog can be kept alive for several days. As we inch forward toward a Number Four Value Meal, Jody explains that you locate frogs by shining them, since their eyes reflect light. We’ll each wear a hard hat rigged up with a powerful sealed-beam lamp. Once Jody spots a frog, he’ll point it out to me and drive the boat over, putting the frog on my strong side (right), if possible. At which point I, kneeling in the front, will reach down and grab the frog. Jody’s not sure whether the frog is stunned by the bright light or simply has too much faith in its natural camouflage. Either way, he says, you can generally get pretty close to a frog before it dives for cover. Of course, there’s more to it. You need a frogging attitude, a mind-set, if you expect to come home with enough frogs to feed your friends, which is our goal this night. “Now, Bill,” Jody tells me, “you got to remember something when you go to grab that frog tonight.” He greets the lady inside the squawk box and places Bryce’s order. “You’re not petting that frog,” he says. “You’re not slapping that frog. You got to . . .” He presses his lips together, searching for bill heavey 118 something that will illustrate his point. His eye comes to rest on an empty coffee cup in the truck’s holder. “You got to grab that frog.” As he speaks, a large right fist shoots out, seizing and crushing the Styrofoam cup so quickly and completely that it basically explodes inside the cab. The noise alone is extraordinary. Even Jody seems somewhat abashed at the violence he has wrought. “Well, OK then,” I say as evenly as possible, picking shards of the cup from my lap. Frog season in Louisiana runs year-round, with the exception of April and May, when it closes to allow the amphibians to breed undisturbed. While it’s possible to catch frogs all year, Jody says late winter and early fall are best. Late winter is good because the lilies haven’t greened up yet and it’s easy to spot the frogs. Late summer and early fall are good because the water in the Atchafalaya Basin falls, concentrating the frogs. Ideally, you want days that are warm but not too warm, followed by nights that are cool but not too cool. “Frogs feed on the crawfish under the lilies right after dusk,” Jody explains. “When they’re full, they float to the surface and kind of lie there.” Today we had a daytime high in the mid-eighties, which should drop to the mid-sixties after dark. Jody reckons we should have excellent frogging. A friend of his caught more than two hundred the other night and sold them for two dollars apiece. We get Bryce’s order and head home to drop him off. I ask if there are alligators where we’ll be frogging. “Oh, yeah,” Jody says. “Lotta gators. Most of ’em are small, six feet or less, but there are a few big ones around. They’ll be out, hunting frogs same as us. Frog eyes are kind of white or sometimes have a little green tinge to ’em. Gators have red eyes. You don’t want to grab anything that has red eyes.” Right, I think. No grabbing red eyes. EATING WILD When I asked Jody how much of his family’s meat is wild game, he initially said “about half.” Upon reflection, he bumped the number to 70 percent. Jody has two small freezers. In them we found the following: fourteen frogs...

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