By Russell Graves

The sound is hard to describe phonetically but if you ever heard it you don’t forget it. “Wuh-um, wuh-um, wuh-um,” bellows the big bullfrog in a baritone voice from the edge of the small pond that sits a couple of hundred feet from the front porch of my country cabin in central Fannin County. He’s fervently looking for a mate, so each night he sings the same love song over and over. If you like the country, you are bound to love that sound. Nothing epitomizes Texas summer nights like fireflies and noisy bullfrogs.

I have a lifelong fascination with bullfrogs that started when I was a kid. Some of my earliest memories in the outdoors involve frog gigging with my dad and his cousin. My people are originally from the central Texas area around Kosse, but for years, we’d have our family reunion at Fort Parker State Park near Mexia.

During our three or four-day stints camping at the park, my dad would bring his jonboat. During the days, we’d fish the lake at the park, but at night, he’d launch the boat for a post-dusk foray down the Navasota River where he and his cousin Milton would tag team bullfrogs and haul a bucketful from the banks of the river while three burr headed boys (me and my two brothers) held the spotlight.
Occasionally, my dad would let one of us lean from the boat and try to catch a big green frog barehanded but lack of coordination and quickness led to the frogs jumping away more often than not. Back in the day, however, he and Milton were a formidable duo and were efficient at catching a mess of the amphibians.

After a night of frog catching, my dad would put the catch in a small tub with a bit of water so they wouldn’t dry out. The next morning he’d clean them. He was as good at cleaning frogs as he was at catching them. He’d reach into the bucket, snatch a frog out by the hind legs, and in one deft motion, lay them across a stump and chop off the back legs with a hatchet. He’d toss the front half back on the ground where they’d instinctively crawl back to the water.

“Where are the frogs going now, daddy?” I asked him. I couldn’t have been more than seven or eight at the time.
“They’ll go back to the river, grow some more legs, and we’ll catch them again next year,” he smiled with all the swagger of a 40-something while wearing his aviator sunglasses, cut-off jeans, and pearl snapped shirt. Back in the late 1970s my dad was the epitome of a “good ol’ boy”: a fan of Willie and Waylon, drinker of Pearl beer, and just the right combination of a hell-raising, blue-collar worker and a loving father who shared his love of the outdoors and her bounty with his boys.

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