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ina Wood doesn’t like what she
sees, and tells Forrest so.
Her concern is justifiable. Calving
season in the southern Ozarks is
enough to make farmers uneasy, what
with the bountiful supply of black vul-
tures that always seem to know when
and where a cow and her newborn calf
are most vulnerable. The vulture Nina
is watching through the pickup’s side
window is circling the scruffy end of a
pasture where it angles down to meet a
wooded creek bottom. She spots a lone
cow that to her practiced eye looks and
acts as if it has recently given birth.
Nina suspects the hungry vulture is
waiting for the opportunity to find and
kill the calf.
Nina and Forrest’s grandson, Keith
Daffron, is in the truck trailing ours.
She phones him and asks him to inves-
tigate. Within a few minutes he reports
back, telling his grandmother that he
located the calf in high weeds where
vultures wouldn’t be able to get to it
without going to a lot of trouble.
Besides, he adds, he’ll return later to
make sure all is well. This satisfies
Nina, and Forrest drives on.
As banal as it seems, the episode is
somehow analogous to how Forrest
and Nina Wood tend to their lives:
Whatever they do, whatever they build,
it’s never undertaken without an atten-
tion to details.
Farm Living Suits Them
On this balmy autumn morning, not
counting the occasional detours to
check on this or that, we’re in Marion
County, Ark., and cruising Highway
178, which connects Flippin and
Mountain Home. It’s a fairly curvy and
hilly two-lane road whose importance
to the outside world isn’t really meas-
ured by the 33 miles it covers, but by
the various waypoints it links in the
lives of the founders of Ranger Boats.
Forrest and Nina see a lot of
Highway 178 and its side roads. Forrest
has the hat, and he has the cattle. That
equates to a lot of hard work. On a typ-
ical day, the couple might check on their
herd – about 1,200 head of crossbreeds
and Herefords plus a few registered
Angus tucked away on their own – and
rotate them to greener pastures. Then
there’s the haying. In growing season
that means baling hay, loading it on
trucks and taking it to various barns.
FLWFISHING.COM I FEBRUARY-MARCH 2018