By Wilson Hall
Wilson met Ernest Brocket while researching a fishing story on Lake Seminole in the southwest corner of Georgia.

When I first met Ernest Brockett he was sitting in the reclining chair of the bait shop at Jack Wingate’s Lunker Lodge on Lake Seminole. He was over 75 years old, but his step was lively and his eyes were clear, giving a good indication of the quickness of mind within the man. When he was not fishing or hunting or working his garden or training his dog, he was at Wingate’s talking to people in the shop or out on the front porch. And at the first sign of interest, he would tell you about deer hunting, turkey calling, dog training or bass fishing. Then to all of this, he would add his philosophy of life.

There was a group of people standing around Ernest talking. Jack stopped me at the counter and asked me if I knew Ernest.
“No,” I said, “Who is he?”
“Go over and meet him,” Jack said. “We call him the ‘Sage of Seminole.’ ”
So I went over and introduced myself.
“I guess you have lived around here for a long time,” I said by way of breaking the ice.
“Might say I have,” Ernest said, showing me a circle of his thumb and index finger. “When I first came here the moon wasn’t but this big and there wasn’t no stars.
“Times have sure changed, ” he said. “When I was younger there wasn’t a body of water in this area that I couldn’t jump over in one jump. Now I catch bass where I used to hunt deer and turkey.”
“That was over twenty years ago, wasn’t it?” I asked.
“More or less,” Ernest said. “Are you a writer?”
“Yes,” I said. “I write for Brown’s Guide.”
“Do you write about hunting?”
“No,” I said, “I write about fishing.”
“Never mind that,” Ernest said. “I have got some information I want to pass on to the world. I want you to put it in your magazine.”
“Well, I can’t promise you that,” I said.
“I want to tell all the world how to call a deer,” he said. “This information is worth a million dollars to people who want to know it.”
“Call a deer!” I said. Then I thought: Here you are, about to have your leg pulled. Your have been around fishing and hunting camps long enough to see it coming. I did not know whether to laugh him off or carry the thing along to learn what the end would be.
“Okay,” I said, “How do you call a deer?”
“With these,” Ernest said and held out his brown bony fingers.
“How does it work?” I asked, bracing myself to become the butt of the joke.
“You have to be wearing khaki or denim pants,” he said. “And what you do is take your four fingers and thumb and get a good grasp on the muscle on the back of your leg. Then you drag your fingernails over the cloth in a quick crisp ‘crunch’ of a sound. This sounds like a deer chewing acorns. A deer’s hearing is 40 times better than a man’s. If a deer hears that sound on a still morning, he will come to where he thinks other deer are eating acorns.”
There is the end of the ride, I thought. Is my leg pulled or not?
I looked at Ernest in the eyes for a few moments, not saying anything. Ernest looked back at me, eye-to-eye. “Put that in your magazine and people will thank you for it,” he said.
Later that day, I asked one of the guides what he thought about Ernest’s “deer call.”
“Well,” he said, “I don’t know, because I never tried it. But last year Earnest killed a deer so close with his shotgun that they dug the wading out with the shot. He’s getting too old and doesn’t see as well as he used to, so he has to get them in close to get a good shot, and he shoots his deer every year.
Later Ernest told me: “I’ve tried to live my life by one principle: I always try to help the other fellow when he is in need. When I learn that someone needs help, I pray to God that I will be able to help them. I have plowed fields, dug ditches, helped build houses, given money. And I have had it returned to me. People don’t seem to feel that way about each other any more, not as much as they used to. But it is a good way to live. Can you imagine what kind of world it would be if everyone tried to help his neighbor? It would be hard for people to dispute.”

Well, world, here is the million dollars worth of information that Ernest wanted you to have. Use it in good health.

Dr. John Burrison, professor of English at Georgia State University, estimates there are dozens of stories involving preachers and chicken, but he selected the best of the bunch for his book Storytellers: Folktales & Legends from the South. This story was told by Don Buchanan of Decatur, who heard it from his father, a Baptist minister:

Once there was this preacher who loved fried chicken, as all preachers are supposed to love fried chicken. And he was invited to eat at the house of one of his parishioners one Sunday. After church he made his way through the country to this house, and it so happened, as he was crossing this particular creek, right in the middle of the bridge he stumbled and he lost his false teeth, and they fell in the creek.

Well, ‘course he couldn’t eat, but he couldn’t turn down this invitation either, so he went on to the house. And, as they ate dinner, he ate what he could eat—mash potatoes an’ things that weren’t so hard to chew—but he didn’t touch the fried chicken. Well, he had a great reputation for eating fried chicken, and so, of course, everybody at the table was amazed and couldn’t understand why he wasn’t eating any fried chicken. So finally they asked him. And he said, “Well, I just have to tell you the truth. I lost my teeth goin’ across the creek down here, an’ I just can’t eat any.”

Well, he no sooner got the words out of his mouth than a little boy ‘bout twelve years old jumped up from the table, grabbed a chicken leg from off the platter, got him a piece of string, and went out the door.

‘Bout half an hour later he came back in, and he had the teeth in his hand. An’ the preacher said, “How in the world did you get those teeth out of the creek?”

He said, “Well, I just took this chicken leg and tied the string on it and dipped it down in the water, and those teeth bit right on it!”

John Burrison’s academic interest in folklore evolved during his undergraduate years at Pennsylvania State University, where he published and edited Folkways magazine. He came to Georgia State University in 1966 to develop the folklore curriculum in the Department of English, where he teaches such courses as American Folklore, Georgia Folklife, British Folk Culture, and Irish Folk Culture. He serves as curator of the Folk Pottery Museum of Northeast Georgia at Sautee Nacoochee Center near Helen.