Free The Duck Commander Family by Willie Robertson, Korie Robertson

then Phil would go out and set out the traps. At daylight, Phil and Jase would leave and run the fishing nets until about ten o’clock in the morning. Kay and I would be waiting on the dock for them when they returned, and then Jase and I unloaded the fish and carried them back to the house.
    After we put the fish in the back of the truck, Kay and I would then drive to town to go to the markets and sell the fresh fish. One store would take maybe half of the fish, and then we’d head to another store to sell the rest. If we had any fish left after hitting the markets, we’d sit on the side of the road and sell them to the public. I learned pretty quickly that the faster you sold the fish, the faster you got to go home. I learned how to be a good salesman by selling those fish on the side of the road when I was a kid. When it’s hot, fish spoil quickly, so there was no time to waste. Once I saw that Mom was more likely to spend some of that cash we made on something I wanted at the store if I did a good job that day, that was just the motivation I needed to work on my craft.
    As I got older and wanted to buy more things, I realized selling stuff was my ticket. I mostly wanted an awesome boom box, tapes, and parachute pants. Mom wouldn’t buy me the really cool parachute pants with all the zippers; she got me crappy ones that just looked like a windbreaker and didn’t have zippers all over them. One summer I sold enough wormson the boat dock to finally get those pants, which looked exactly like Michael Jackson’s. They were awesome.
    When I was in high school, Phil decided he wanted to get into crawfishing. Like most other things, I’m sure we were doing it unlike anyone else. The problem with crawfish is you can never have enough bait. A crawfish will literally eat anything—as long as it’s dead and smells really bad. So if Jase and I spotted a dead possum lying in the road, we’d pick it up and throw it in the back of the truck. We were always looking for roadkill! We took the dead animals home, chopped them up, and threw them into the crawfish nets. Getting the bait became just as fun as the crawfishing.
    We had an old deep-freezer in the shop and started throwing roadkill in it. By the end of the summer, the freezer was filled with dead cats, dogs, deer, coons, possums, ducks, and anything else we could find in the road. It smelled awful! We also put tons of snakes in there. We baited snake traps in the water with little perch. We’d pull up the traps at night and then blast the snakes with shotguns. We’d get maybe eight snakes a night; most of them were water snakes but there were always a couple of water moccasins. You never knew what you were going to find in a snake trap.
    One night I caught a huge water snake and shot it in the head. I carried it up to the freezer and came back about ten minutes later with my cleaver to chop it up. I reached down in the freezer and grabbed the snake. That snake coiled up and reared its head back with its mouth wide open, ready to strike.It apparently wasn’t dead yet, but it nearly scared me half to death! I threw it down and hit it with the cleaver as hard and as fast as I could. Water snakes aren’t poisonous, but that was a big snake. Its bite certainly would have hurt. My heart was racing!
    Whenever one of our friends or cousins came to the house, we made them look in the freezer. It looked like a pet cemetery in there! Our family’s staple foods were the fish and the crawfish we caught, and you had to have food for the crawfish and bait for the fish as well. The stuff we found on the road worked great for both of these duties, and it was free. We were making lemonade out of lemons, son!
    We hunted snakes a lot when I was a kid. In the summer of 1991, the Ouachita River flooded Phil’s property pretty badly. Granny and Pa’s house was lower to the ground than Phil’s, so there was almost six feet of water in their house. Once the snakes got into their house, they