An Early advertisement for F.A. Allen's "Improved Duck Caller." and one of his boats. Calls by Allen, Ditto ,and especially Olt were copied by Cajun guides in local cane with the reed from a filed-down hard-rubber comb.

"Dat little squeal at the en' of the call is special," said the late Clarence "Dud" Faulk as he sat at his bench on a cool autumn afternoon many years ago. "Oldtimers say dat dat soun' come from a hen with some age on her," Faulk continued in his lilting Cajun accent. "Others say dat's a hen mallard with her throat so full of food dat she squeak when she call. Dos' duck dat hear dat sound jus' naturally come, 'cause dey know dat ol' hen know what she's a doin'," Faulk stated. So was my introduction to one of the unique aspects of Louisiana-style duck calling.

That long-ago afternoon took place in the late' 70s. Eli Haydel, who was then a fledging call maker, and I had met on "The Bus" at the World Duck Calling Championship, and at the time I was writing a great deal about calls and calling, and he invited me to come to Louisiana to experience its great hunting. During our time there we stopped by Dud Faulk's Lake Charles shop. Contrary to about everything written about Louisiana's best known call maker, "Dud" Faulk's first name wasn't Dudley, but Clarence, as was his father whose nickname was Patin. When pressed, Faulk couldn't really say why or how he got the nickname Dud, but Dud was it, and by it he went. Since that time, I've hunted numerous times in Louisiana, chiefly at The Hackberry Rod & Gun Club, south of Lake Charles, and there talk of legendary guides is not far from the surface.

The "Cajun" Call
Duck calls came late to Louisiana. History and legend tells us that early hunters and guides called ducks by mouth. Thomas E. Walsh from Greenville, Mississippi won the first National Duck Calling Contest, now the World's Championship, in 1936 calling by mouth. Some made the sound much like Donald Duck by squeezing the air between their cheek and tongue, others by blowing against a clenched fist or others by simply voicing "Ank, ank, ank" or some other variation. I'm not sure if ducks can discern pitch, but they can certainly determine tempo and rhythm, which explains why all of these various methods of calling work. Still, it wasn't until hunters came from the north to Southwest Louisiana to hunt that duck calls began to be used.

Characteristically, the cedar tone board of Cajun-style calls has a slight twist to add raspiness to the sounds. This one twists to the right, but if made by a left-handed maker would twist in the other direction.

"We didn't invent calls, we copied them from hunters who came south to hunt," Dud Faulk said. In fact calls made upcountry from the Cajun's coastal marshes nearly all appear to be either Glodo- or Arkansas-style calls; Cajun calls are unique. "The first were copied from the Olt hard Rubber calls," Faulk said. Copies they were, but with a twist. "Cajuns can't grunt into a call like they do in Arkansas," Eli Haydel said, "So the rasp has to come from inside the call."

Although he didn't invent the duck call, Victor Glodo gave the modern duck call its shape and style. Using a flat tone board and curved metal reed held to the tone board by a separate wooden wedge, Glodo's calls became identified with Tennessee's Reelfoot Lake area, and those with a curved tone board and flat hard-rubber reed became known as Arkansas-style calls. On the Mississippi River near Monmouth, Illinois, F. A. Allen made some of the earliest calls that used a flat tone board and a curved metal reed contained in a metal cylinder. His competitor Charles Ditto in nearby Keithsburg, Illinois made his calls with a curved tone board and flat rubber reed. Later on the Illinois River in Pekin, Illinois, Philip S. Olt made his hard-rubber calls that had a curved tone board and a flat hard-rubber reed, and it is likely that the Cajun guides copied a blend of the Olt, Ditto and Allen. But there's more to the Cajun call than that. Haydel said, "The sound tunnel is twisted on the end to add rasp to the sound. They had this little tool to shape the cedar tone channel. If the guy making it was right handed it twisted one way and if he was left handed it twisted the other accomplishing the same thing," Haydel said.

The Cajuns are a dispossessed people. They were French Canadians, who because they clung dearly to their French language and customs, were ejected in the early 1700s from Acadia--Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Eastern Quebec and Maine--by the English Canadians, which I suppose is better than my wife's ancestor whom the British hanged on Ile D'Orleans for his Frenchness. Following a series of long voyages the Cajuns landed in Southwestern Louisiana. A happy, carefree people, they lived off the land, making whatever they needed from native materials. When Olt calls began arriving tied to the lapels of visiting sports, these Cajun craftsmen began copying them using whatever was at hand. The reeds were made by filing down the back of a hard-rubber comb, the barrel and insert from native cane and the tone board from cedar. Because cane easily splits, calls were frequently reinforced using the brass heads from fired shotshells. Not of the volume of the calls from upriver, Nash Buckingham called them "Twittery cane affairs". The sound carried well across the open coastal marshes and coaxed clouds of wintering ducks to hand-carved decoys.