“Mom, I\’m getting another whiff of you,” complained my son, Alec, as he sat on the ice chest located in the middle of our canoe. I sat in the front of the canoe with trusty gig in hand, while my husband practiced the fine art of poling our craft into sloughs and other good froggy areas on the Meramec River.

An “eau-dee-slew” scent rose from my mud-clogged pores, a result of my second tumble into the muddy waters of the Maramec. We\’ll get to that part later.

We met on the banks of the river that evening with local outdoor enthusiasts Bill and Charlene Cooper, and their son, Cody. At that time, they hosted the television show “Outdoors with Bill and Pete,” which ran in the Columbia, Mo., very-early-Saturday-morning television market.

The Coopers, as usual, put us to shame with their state-of-the-art, hi-tech trolling motor on a camouflaged, flat-end canoe. They carried a precision-cut, water-jet crafted gig and sat on camo comfort seats. They brought high-powered lights that were probably capable of signaling distress signs to aircraft.

We brought our previously-owned canoe, a homemade gig, an ice chest for me to sit on, and my husband\’s Maglight®. We carried two free mesh trash bags from the Conservation Department for frog storage.

Since this was our son\’s first time to gig, Bill and my husband gave him a quick primer on gigging before we embarked. From a distance the two men looked like two defensive-line coaches in the huddle, telling Alec how to hit and where to stick.

We put in after sunset, and soon parted company. The Coopers trolled on ahead, while we stayed behind – hung up on a rock – spinning \’round and \’round. My husband\’s homemade pole lacked a few feet of length, making it very difficult for him to maneuver the canoe. He finally got into a rhythm of poling and we were off. And, we are not even going to get into the short pole comments I heard that evening, because after all, this is a family blog, right Jody?

To Alec\’s credit, he gigged the first frog of the evening perfectly. A nice, swift clean stab, and the frog was ours.

The first tumble of the evening happened without notice. Usually, you get a second or two and you realize what\’s going to happen. This was not the case. My husband shifted his weight in the back of the canoe, and my ice chest shifted quickly to the same side. We both fell out to the left side of the canoe, splashing Alec.

He just laughed. We complained a little about bruising our tailbones, but other than that, and the fact that we were both wet to our necks, we were fine.

We worked the bank some more. We got into a slough, where the stink rose from the mud. The frogs sang sweetly in there. My concentration level had spiked to high mode now, and I worked at keeping the beam of light on a particularly handsome bullfrog while my husband moved the canoe closer and closer, and Alec prepared for the strike.

Before Alec could even move the gig, I leaned over a little too far to my right and “plop,” I went for a swim in the thickest, gooiest, most obnoxious-smelling mud I\’ve ever experienced.

Alec and my husband suffered a moment of shock, and when they found out that I wasn\’t hurt – just stuck in the mud – they started laughing. Well, I had to admit, I looked like a monster from the lagoon.

We decided that it might be better if I gigged for a while. Having gigged for fish on the Osage, this frog gigging stuff came easy. Alec suffered from sitting downwind of my new scent.

For the next two hours, we worked the banks and I gigged a couple and missed a lot. Our collection of frogs would occasionally find a way out of the sacks. That made life interesting for a while, as the guys tried to catch the frogs.

Alec wound up kicking one out of the canoe because it landed, “plop,” on his left foot, setting off his amphibious-kicking reflex.

We came off the river at about midnight. From my changing room behind a bush, I changed into a chambray shirt and a beach-towel skirt. Alec commented that he hoped we would not be in a car accident on the way home. His concern reminded me of a mother\’s interest in her children\’s choice of underwear in case of a quick trip to the ER, except he worried because I did not have any underwear.

At 1:30 a.m., as my son and husband cleaned the frogs on the back stoop, my son commented that he was glad we didn\’t catch our limit. But, hey, we really caught our limit, and then some, of fun and of making memories.

© Barbara Baird, Women\’s Outdoor News

Bill Cooper and Barbara Baird.

Bill\’s tines have broken off his gig! This was an earlier trip on a different river, and we also fell into the river on this trip, but it was Bill\’s fault.

Photo by:  Jason Baird

Cartoon image by Nic Frising, who illustrated Barb\’s column in The Ozarks Mountaineer.