{"id":36181,"date":"2016-10-18T10:00:18","date_gmt":"2016-10-18T15:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/?p=36181"},"modified":"2016-10-18T10:36:51","modified_gmt":"2016-10-18T15:36:51","slug":"fossil-hunting-with-eustace-winn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/fossil-hunting-with-eustace-winn\/","title":{"rendered":"Fossil Hunting with Eustace Winn"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was a brisk early autumn weekend.\u00a0 Walking out onto the porch in the morning to see Lake Ferguson<\/strong>, I felt free and light\u2014as though I could re-invent myself.\u00a0 Rather than being overwhelmed with the possibilities of what I could do in this fantastic weather, I simply had faith that whatever I did would be right.\u00a0 After making a cup of Juan Vald\u00e9z<\/strong> Colombian coffee, I called my old buddy Eustace Winn<\/strong> to see what he had planned for the day.\u00a0 My wife was out of town, and I had fish on the brain.\u00a0 The weather was too nice to spend the entire day working.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I was sort of amazed that Eustace wasn\u2019t working, but Ole Miss<\/strong> had beat Alabama<\/strong> the previous night, and he seemed to share the deep seated contentment that all Rebel fans felt that day.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I suggested that we take my new Land Cruiser on some off-road trail to fish along the Mississippi River<\/strong> off a rock dike for striped bass.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMan, I\u2019m glad you called!\u00a0 I left my boots out on a sandbar on the river.\u00a0 It\u2019s a $200 pair of boots.\u00a0 We can put the Wild Rebel<\/em> in the water and go fossil hunting this afternoon if you want to\u2026\u00a0 I\u2019ve got to go get my boots anyhow.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

I had been on the Wild Rebel<\/em> before.\u00a0 It is a 21 foot long, green duck boat with an enclosed cabin.\u00a0 Not everybody in the Delta has a boat they boast as ready for travel in the Mississippi River, but everybody knows not to pass on an offer to board the Wild Rebel<\/em> with Eustace at the helm.\u00a0 Eustace is a talented outdoorsman, his hand as steady on the wheel of his boat as it is on his rifle.\u00a0 He\u2019s not the sort of friend who talks about getting out on the water to call back in an hour and say he can\u2019t go. I don\u2019t think there\u2019s anywhere he\u2019d rather be than the River.<\/span><\/p>\n

The water had dropped from its record July highs down to near record lows in the quiet of late September.\u00a0 After lunch at the Benoit Outing Club<\/strong>, which we scarfed down heartily, we skipped down to the boat where our fishing poles, a few beers and certain adventure waited on us.\u00a0 Eustace made a comment about how happy he was.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cYou were born happy,\u201d I replied.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The anchor for the Wild Rebel is a steering wheel of an old car with about a three foot long shaft.\u00a0 It was wrapped around a steel column supporting the roof of the club\u2019s boat dock.\u00a0 Making circles around the column, Eustace unbound the steering wheel, placing it into the bow of the boat ahead of the enclosed compartment.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cDo you mind pushing us off?\u201d\u00a0 I pushed the boat off and back into Lake Whittington, ready to scare the strange, enormous Asian Carp to fly out of the water in our wake.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

We made it to the man-made channel feeding into the Mississippi.\u00a0 It looked like some kind of exotic South American river that we were swerving through in a James Bond movie, the engine singing at 4500 RPM\u2019s.\u00a0 Just before the channel reached the wide open arms of the Mississippi, it zigged and zagged.\u00a0 Without missing a beat, Eustace fishtailed the boat holding to the center of the channel and ripped it out into the wide open river water.\u00a0 We laughed hysterically, slapping a high five.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Nobody was out there except tow boats with their barges filled with rip rap, fertilizer and corn.\u00a0 It was so clear and cool and quiet, you could almost feel the world tilt on that day as it rotated on its axis moving towards a far reach of its elliptical orbit of the sun.\u00a0 We made landfall at a massive sandbar south of Catfish Point, where I jumped out and pulled the steering wheel out of the boat with me.\u00a0 I pulled it taught and hurled the make-shift anchor into the sand.<\/span><\/p>\n

Eustace had given me a tutorial at his house showing off various items we would be looking for on the vast, open sand bars of the Mississippi. There was mastodon ivory, woolly mammoth tusks, dinosaur and human bone in addition to more common findings such as river brick and petrified Mississippi mud molded into all sorts of interesting shapes.<\/span><\/p>\n

We brought back several sack-loads of rocks, brick, mud, and rusted steel, but we didn\u2019t find anything worth taking to a paleontologist.<\/span><\/p>\n

On the way back, we stopped at a rock dike to cast for a striped bass. Between the fast and slack water, on my third or fourth cast, I got snagged. As I walked backwards to try and unloosen my hook, I felt the familiar heavy tugging from the end of my rod. I had forgotten that striped bass like to take the bait straight down when they get hooked. It was too late, by then. The fish had shaken loose from my rooster tail bait.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cA friend of mine, who\u2019s a really good fossil hunter, told me once that he found a sloth claw, and before he found it, he could hear it calling to him, man,\u201d Eustace explained.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cYeah, I guess some things want to be found and others don\u2019t,\u201d I replied.<\/span><\/p>\n

Warren Hines is a writer based in the Mississippi Delta working on his memoir of travel stories. Follow him on Facebook @warrenhinesmustard.\u00a0\"The<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was a brisk early autumn weekend.\u00a0 Walking out onto the porch in the morning to see Lake<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":253,"featured_media":36182,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[283,9416,9421,9422,9294,9419,7494,9418,9417,9285,7067,1268,8489,9420],"class_list":["post-36181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-alabama","tag-benoit-outing-club","tag-boat","tag-boots","tag-eustace-winn","tag-fossils","tag-hunting","tag-juan-valdez","tag-lake-ferguson","tag-mississippi-river","tag-ole-miss","tag-river","tag-warren-hines","tag-wild-rebel"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/2016-10-13-Fossil-Hunting.jpg?fit=620%2C349&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/253"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36181"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36181\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}