- December 26, 2024
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The eyes, yellow in the beam of my headlamp, hung motionless between the lily pads in the shallow water.
It was long past midnight. I was sure I had it.
I stood up slowly in the canoe and silently hoisted the 12-foot gig pole, business end down, toward the frog as the boat drifted closer.
There was no moon out, and little light.
I drifted closer — just feet away now — as the craft slid to a rest in a watery thicket of sweating vegetation.
I angled the gig pole down and crept forward in the small craft for the kill, and froze: In the too-dim beam of my headlamp, a foot below the sharp end of my gig, was not a bullfrog — the creature I’d been hunting — but a 2-foot-long alligator, all but its snout and eyes submerged in the water, front and hind quarters stretched wide.
I blinked.
The gator, frozen in the light, didn’t budge. I noticed the patterns still visible in its scaly hide. Soon, as the gator ages, they’ll darken to a solid dark gray.
I angled the gig away, crept backward toward my seat in the canoe, knocked over a paddle I’d left resting on the gunnel and cursed at the clatter.
I looked up. The gator was gone, replaced by a faint ripple.
Monday night was my third fruitless effort to gig a frog.
Frog gigging, for the uninitiated, is an exhileratingly primitive form of hunting: The hunter takes a light and a long pole — tipped with pointed rods about the width of clothes wire — and uses the light to keep a frog frozen long enough to creep up and spear it.
Yes, they taste like chicken. Southerners, unsurprisingly, often like to deep-fry them. I’d gathered a few lemons and some garlic and oil and planned to throw my catch in a pan.
But first I needed to kill a frog.
Now, I know enough about frogs from years of hiking to know they’re easy enough to approach — and trip over or tread on — at night.
But I’d never gone gigging for frogs, and the trouble, I discovered, is finding them.
The first night I went out was more than a week ago. It was windy; maybe too windy for the frogs to hold their serenade.
I didn’t hear any ribbiting that night.
I headed out on the canoe again a few days later. This time, I heard plenty — far back in wide patches of water lilies too thick to cross, or else on land, on private property bordering the water.
My latest attempt was Monday. This time, they were closer. But the calls weren’t bullfrog calls. They were higher.
I hoped for pig frogs or leopard frogs; both species are edible and large enough to bother with.
After my brush with the little gator, I slipped up to a patch of grasses that vibrated with frog gurgles and chirps.
I brushed against the reeds.
Something cold and slimy landed on my shoulder.
I looked down, and there, peering up into my headlamp, was a bright green treefrog (inedible).
A second later, a pair of them — apparently mating, the male resting atop the larger female — landed on the canoe’s gunnel.
Another dropped into the bow.
I set down the gig, gathered them up, and gently placed them back in the grasses of their watery home.
