The Second Head of Chocalata

About the Book

Duck Hunting, fishing, and outdoor Stories are found in the Second Head of Chocalata. This book is a series of short stories based on memories from a boy. He remembered the stories his father shared with him about his youth when he became a duck hunter and fisherman. Then the boy remembered his own adventures with his family and his friends. Most of the stories deal with some type of outdoor activity such as hunting, fishing, frog gigging, or taking girls water skiing. Some are serious, some are sentimental, and some are meant to entertain, but all are based on real incidents.

Duck Hunting and fishing stories based on the lives of a man, his brothers, and a boy who lived near Mobile, Alabama and in particular near Mobile Bay and the Alabama River Delta. Most of their adventures chronicled in this book occurred on these waters.

The stories begin with the boy remembering his dad and his brothers' favorite hunting and fishing spot, "The Second Head of Chocalata".

Then the second story is one his dad told of his first duck hunting trip in 1928, and the third one is a fictionalized account of "Slim", a crewmate of the man's who was washed overboard during a gale in the Gulf of Mexico about 1931.

The majority of the stories are from the boy's life that begins with his first hunting trip at age five. Then the stories progress in time through the boy's teenage years, college years, and youthful adult time with some flashbacks from the present to those teen years. His adventures were only possible because of the friends he shared them with and each story highlights these friendships.

About the Author

Elmo D. Ziebach was born in Mobile February, 1947. He attended K.J. Clark Grammar School in downtown Mobile until his family moved to South Deer River, fifteen miles south of Mobile in 1954. He then rode the school bus to Hollinger's Island School and to high school at Theodore High. After graduation in 1965 he attended Auburn University and, to everyone's amazement, earned a degree in forest management, graduating seventh in his class during the fall of 1969. The other six in his class were more studious than he. A true baby boomer, the author went through grammar school worrying about nuclear war and hating the Reds. He twisted and raced cars as a teenager, was a college student at the height of the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the sexual revolution - but he did not attend "Woodstock".

He was raised in a family of hunters, fishermen, and fisherwomen; his mother and her sisters loved to fish as much as the men. Living in the rural part of Mobile County and on a bayou that emptied into Mobile Bay, he had many opportunities to have adventures in the out of doors. He loved the out of doors; that's why he became a forester so he could stay in the woods all the time. The last thirty years he has worked at his profession in Monroe County, Alabama, and calls Monroeville home. He is married and has three grown children.

His father, grandfather and great grandfather were all newspaper men. His Uncle Bill Ziebach wrote an "Out O'Doors" column for the Mobile Press Register" for twenty years. He was inspired to write because of them. He began writing for fun many years ago but only when he bought a computer did he start putting his stories and thoughts into an orderly form. His only work that has ever been in print was when for about a year he wrote an "out of doors" column for his local newspaper, The Monroe Journal.

This book began to take serious shape after his father died in 1997 and the author felt compelled to put these stories down while they were still retrievable from his memory.