Terra Firma Hippos in Alabama

After Hurricane Ivan decimated our hunting lease in Alabama, our landowner managed to get a timber company to come in and remove the fallen and damaged timber. This timber company left our roads in bad condition after they pulled out.

There were skidder ruts three feet deep in some places. The roads were so bad we couldn't travel them on our ATV's One of these roads had ruts three and a half feet deep, and of course the center hump in the road was three and a half feet tall.

I was walking down this road after a hard freeze the night before and decided to walk the center hump instead of the three and a half deep rut. When I jumped up onto the hump, I immediately sank up to my hips in the soupy mud under the frozen crust. I managed to lay down and extract myself with a swimming motion across the surface of this muck. Cursing and Swearing, I trudged back to my vehicle looking like a professional mud wrestler. My snake boots, rifle, binoculars, and backpack were covered in soupy prairie mud. After a shower and two hours of equipment cleaning, I went to another location for the evening hunt.

The next afternoon Jay Martin and I went to West Alabama to hunt on a mutual friend's lease. Another good friend Roy Barnhill, decided to hunt in the area with the three and a half deep ruts in the road. Roy suffered the same fate as yours truly when he jumped up on the center hump of this roadbed. Roy fell forward and crammed his Steyr rifle two feet into the mud. When Roy tried to extract himself, he simply sank further into the man-made quicksand. The harder he struggled, the deeper he sank, and the more fatigued he became. To make matters worse he could not get his son Brent, to answer his radio to tell him he was buried in the middle of a log road and needed help. It was now becoming dark and Roy now feared he would spend the night stuck in the mud fending off critters by waving his arms and yelling. Instead he did a lot of praying and a lot of crawling, and slowly he was able to extract himself from the man-made quicksand. Roy said he was totally exhausted from this ordeal and had to rest for 45 minutes before he could return to his vehicle on the main road.

When I saw the hole in the road where Roy had been trapped, it looked like a hippo had been stuck in the road. I told our landowner if I had known hippos were on the property I would have never joined the lease. Hippos kill more people in Africa than anything but Crocodiles, and I certainly did not want to be a victim. He said the hole in the road was made by Roy, not a Hippo, so I am still a member.

This is a good example of why hunting clubs should have a sign in board so that each member knows where to look for any member that is not back at camp within a reasonable time frame

Keep your your powder dry and introduce a child to hunting, fishing, and the outdoors, Bobby Barkley Director of Marketing NWF-LA Hook & Trigger Pro Staff.

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