Retired Arkansas Game and Fish Commission Sgt. Bret Staggs understands there is something almost magical about a campfire’s ability to start even the most reserved of men telling tales—the longer those embers glow, the wilder the stories grow. But as Sgt. Tracey Blake, the current AGFC officer in charge of Lonoke, Arkansas and Prairie counties—and most anyone else who knows Staggs—can certainly attest, the retired game warden hardly needs a campfire to tell you one heck of a story. And Blake? Well, he has more than a few himself, of course.
And why wouldn’t he? Being a game warden—or a wildlife officer, as they’re officially known these days—in Arkansas involves a lot more than just checking fishing licenses. They’re full-fledged law-enforcement officers sworn to enforce all the state’s laws, not just those involving critters. And with only two wardens per county responsible for managing man and beast alike, they’re all bound to have a tale or two to tell.
ON BEING GREEN
I didn’t know what I was doing when I graduated from cadet school. I was so green—just eyes wide open. I thought it was all about writing tickets. Man, I didn’t even wear my bulletproof vest back then. I didn’t think that could happen to me [being shot]. It was like I was a kid, basically. I just wanted to ride in the mud and write tickets. I knew about the job from school, but the years have gone by, and I’ve learned a whole bunch since then.
When I first started—the first spring I was out—we had this big turtle operation. I think we had some information about these people taking alligator snapping turtles out of the wild, and we seized around 1,200 of them. We had to build a pen for these turtles. We had to baby-sit them for like three months. It was 40 or 50 officers, and it was bad. It was so bad.
So we have got the turtles in this pen, and the light bulb goes off. “Hey, man, we have to feed these things!” So some of us are running commercial nets to catch fish to feed these turtles, and that is a chore. And by now it’s the middle of the summer, so these fish are rotting. Oh, it was so bad.
It was one small pen at first—I would probably say a quarter of an acre—but they all started climbing out. We had to build a bigger one, so now we had to move them from one pen to the next. I won’t ever forget that. We carried them one by one. We tried to put them in a wheelbarrow, but with some of the big ones, you couldn’t. We had a couple of guys get bit. We had a guy—luckily he had his boots on because it tore a big ol’ hole in his boots—and another guy got snipped on his hand. Like I said, it took about 40 or 50 officers, and everybody remembers it.
—Tracey Blake
ROOKIE POSSUM BLUES
People night-hunted for deer a lot back in the early 1980s. You could go out, and you would hear a shot every night. I had only been working for a few months and decided to try and catch a night-hunter by myself. I backed my truck up behind this trash dumpster next to a church off the highway and hid there. A lot of deer were shot off this road. Around midnight, this old Subaru station wagon turned off the highway onto this gravel road. They drove about 100 yards and stopped the car. I saw all four doors open and four flashlights take off into the woods.
So I was thinking they were fixin’ to shoot a deer. They ran around the woods and came back to the car. Two of them got in, two of them sat on the hood, and they all drove off down the gravel road. So I jump in my truck, cranked it up and didn’t turn the headlights on. We didn’t have night-vision goggles back then, so you had to develop a feel for driving in the dark.
I follow these guys for about a half a mile with my lights out, and I was waiting on them to shoot. But a car starts coming up behind me, and when that happens, it blinds you. So I didn’t have any choice. I ran up behind them, blue-lighted them and turned my headlights on. Well, they pulled over and stopped. The boys on the hood jumped off, and I saw them both throw something down.
I assumed it was their guns. So I had them get their hands up and lined them up beside the car. All four of them were dressed in full camouflage like army guys. The whole works. The oldest one was about 15, and the youngest was probably 13. There was one big, tall, skinny one, and one short, fat one. Just everything you could imagine.
So I walk around the car and shine down over where the guns were supposed to be, and I found a stick about 4 feet long wrapped in black electrical tape, and a wrist-rocket slingshot. I am just like, “What in the world are y’all doing?”
“Catching possums.”
I’m like, “Yeah, right.” And they say, “Well, look in the back of the car.” So they popped open the back, and there were four possums just sitting there looking up at me.
Damn. Of all the things I could have done, I pull some boys over who were riding around shooting possums with a slingshot.
—Bret Staggs
AN OUTLAW
There’s only one person in the state that has a lifetime ban on his hunting and fishing license. We wrote him so many tickets over the years. He liked me, which was so weird. The guy was the biggest thug outlaw in the world, but he just loved me.
One time, he called me in October, and he wasn’t supposed to get his license back until January. He says, “Bret, you’ve got to help me get my license back. I am hungry. I need to talk to you.” So I tell him that I’ll be at the Game and Fish booth at the Jefferson County Fair, and I say, “Come by. I’ll meet you up there and talk to you.” He says, “OK, I’ll be there.”
Well, he never showed up. I tell Terry McCullens, my partner, “We told him exactly where we were going to be tonight, so he is going to be on the river shocking fish.”
I got to Trulock Park, hid my truck and saw a boat go by in the dark. I snuck down to the water and saw him doing circles in his boat shocking fish. He would build this device with parts from Radio Shack for about $12. It won’t shock you, but it does the fish. And the only fish it brings up are flatheads and blue catfish. It won’t bring up nothing else.
The only two places the outlaw could take a boat out were Trulock or Sheppard Island. So Terry took off toward Sheppard Island. He took out before Terry could get there, but Terry spotted him in Pine Bluff. Terry saw the truck pulling the boat, and it had water dripping and had fish and the shocking device. So we got him again before he even got his license back. He just wouldn’t quit. He had an eighth-grade education, and that was all he knew to do.
—Bret Staggs
THE STORY OF A GLASS EYE
There have been a bunch of characters—we dealt with one three years ago. This guy has got a glass eye and he is a known outlaw. We had information that he was fishing commercially and trying to make some money. So we sat on him, I think it was like a week, and watched him while we built our case. He was a real nice guy. He told us straight up, “Yeah, I was fishing. I’m just trying to make a living.”
So we were sitting there interviewing him, and he had a Coke can. He popped his eye out like you would a contact, put it in his hand, washed his eye off with that Coke and popped it right back in his face.
That is a character.
—Tracey Blake
CHASING CRIMINALS
I have been out there at times and man, you just feel like—you just feel uncomfortable. The hair on the back of your neck stands up, and you need to turn around and flash your light. I guess that is just your conscience, but I have had times where it’s just been like, “Man, something is up.” You don’t know what it is, but something is up.
We were on a search last spring. The night before, there was a traffic stop with a deputy and the guy ran into a lake. The deputy thought the man had drowned. We were out there looking for him that night. We were dragging the lake, we had our sonar out, we had a diver. And then we all left, and he was hiding under a boat dock. A neighbor saw him come out and take off running, and I was like, the first one there. I ran across a swamp to get to the guy, but I couldn’t find him. I was like, “Man, he is going to jump out of a tree on me.” I had my gun drawn. I was looking up, looking down. We came to find out he was just belly crawling and I never saw him. He just had some outstanding warrants. It’s crazy. Nonsense.
—Tracey Blake
BY LAND OR BY SEA
I shot an outboard motor one time. I got a call that people were shocking fish one night. I put my boat in about 10:30 p.m. I ran up on them, oh, probably about 1 in the morning. I eased up on them, and when I got real close, I turned my spotlight on them and shouted, “Game warden!”
They took off.
I was chasing them down the river in complete darkness. The guy on the front of the boat had a spotlight in my eyes trying to blind me. And I had the light on them. The guy running the motor, well, I knew who he was, and he had a reputation for carrying a pistol in his pocket. And I could see he was grabbing for something. I’m also a big baseball fan, and not long before this happened some Cleveland Indian baseball players had run a boat under a boat dock, and it killed two or three of them. I was like, “I’ve got to put a stop to this.” So I pulled my pistol out and shot his motor. Well, that ended that chase.
I wrote them a $1,000 ticket apiece for shocking fish and a $1,000 ticket for fleeing, and I took their boat and their truck. Well, they filed a lawsuit, and Game and Fish gave them their stuff back and suspended me for 30 days for shooting the motor.
—Bret Staggs
ON THE SPORTING PUBLIC
I would rather deal with animals. People can just go absolutely crazy over a deer hunt or a duck hunt. I haven’t seen any straight-up fights, but I have heard of them. And I have seen things that just make me stop and scratch my head because I cannot believe this person is acting like this. Who drives around at 3:30 a.m. on these roads to shoot a deer out of his window? It is so satisfying to have those types of complaints during deer season because we’ll go set up a decoy to catch those folks. It looks like a real deer. It moves and everything. When somebody shoots it, you don’t really have to say anything to them. They are caught.
There was one time I watched a guy shoot some geese out of a tractor. He just pulled up into some geese, opened the door and unloaded. The tractor was still going, and he just shot them.
During duck season last winter, we had an issue with people coming in early on management land. You can’t be in before 4 a.m. We were at a particular spot, dressed up like we were going hunting, and folks started coming in. It was like 3:55 a.m., and some guys took off running, and I ran behind one of them and yelled, “Stop! Game warden!”
The guy stops and turns around and puts his light on me, and I whip my badge out. And he says, “That’s not real,” and turns around and takes off running. So I stop. I was shocked. So here I go and take off running again and catch him, like actually grab him this time, and tell him I am a game warden. And he says, “Man, that badge is fake.”
I had my pistol on me, so I showed him, and said, “Does that look fake to you?”
“Oh no, it doesn’t.”
I just gave him a warning.
—Tracey Blake
CHANNELING ANDY GRIFFITH
You have to learn how to handle people. If you pull up to a deer camp and there is an illegal deer hanging, and they all want to mouth off, you learn really quick that you don’t argue with 25 people. You pick out the loudest, mouthiest guy in the bunch and argue with him. Make it personal between you and him, and it gives everybody else the opportunity to back out. And then, once you make it personal between you and him, you can diffuse the situation. But you can’t do it in a group.
You have to use the Andy Griffith mentality. It is almost baby-sitting. There was one time when a guy shot a deer on his property, and it fell dead on another guy’s property. Well, they were arguing and just kept on and kept on.
So I told the guys, “Well, I don’t see any way of solving this problem, so I will tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to give you each three bullets, and you go stand by that tree, and you go stand by that tree. I am going to go get in my truck and turn the siren on. When I do, y’all start shooting, and whichever one of you is alive can have the deer.” They didn’t want to do that. “No, if that deer is that damn important, y’all shoot it out. Now, you’ll probably be in prison, but you’ll have that deer.”
Well, they didn’t want to do that, so I said, “Well, how else are we going to solve this?”
One of them kept the meat, and the other kept the horns.
They would not listen to anything I had to say ’til I told them to shoot it out. I think it made it dawn on them how stupid they were being. Sometimes you have to think outside the box to get things done—maybe do things your bosses didn’t tell you to do.
— Bret Staggs