Of Ducks, Delfa, and the Last of the Big Woods.

Author William Faulkner kept the terminology terse and to the point. He called the thick tangle of trees bordering the Mississippi River lowlands the "Big Woods," and used this nearly extinct landscape as a deep, dark, and almost impenetrable stage setting that would reap him a Nobel Prize.

Today the Big Woods are mostly cleared and converted to a monotone of soybean fields or, as in the Arkansas Delta country, rice fields that flood the world's supermarket shelves with a staple grain. If you want to see the Big Woods as Faulkner or, better yet, as the Choctaw Indians knew these massive cathedral forests, the best place--actually the only place on a massive scale--is along the lower White River and Cache River in eastern Arkansas.

The woods here truly are big, even though in overall acreage they're but a fragment of the original. Big and also ancient, if trees a thousand years old qualify. It's a forest the nation deemed worth preserving, but only through the brutal will of heated court battles and what was nearly an armed insurrection. It's a place that inspires emotion, no matter whether you go there to count tree rings or call wintering mallard ducks down from the sky.

The Cache River preserve lies north of the better-known bottomland refuge forest of White River. It protects more than a half-million acres of the last, best big timber remaining in an ecosystem that once included some seven states and at least 24 million acres of seasonally flooded baldcypress, water tupelo, and oak. Dozens of other specialized species have likewise adapted to the rich muck and periodic overflows of the Mississippi River alluvial plain.

This remnant of the once-vast Big Woods is now relegated to the banks of murky waters like the Cache, Bayou DeView, and the lower White River. The best of the remaining big trees are collected in federal wildlife refuges that contain fragments of what was once among the world's most magnificent forests.

Today it seems almost incongruous that any of these woods are still standing, especially when you drive across the manicured rice fields that cover the majority of eastern Arkansas like a huge, mechanically flooded patchwork quilt. Although vast numbers of the best big trees went to the sawmill early in the century, many survived, protected by a network of swamps and wild river oxbows. Many also survived in part because of a bird that seeks out the sloughs of the Cache and White Rivers in much the same manner that winter-weary northerners flock to sunnier climes when north winds begin to howl.

Every autumn millions of mallard ducks swarm into the Cache/White River country--the heart of their wintering grounds along the Mississippi Flyway. Nowhere else on the continent can you find such concentrations. The ducks descend to feed on waste grain left in nearby fields. However, the key attraction remains the seasonally flooded timber along the sinuous delta rivers and a rich shallow water smorgasbord of everything from invertebrates to hardwood mast.

"When we get an overflow on the Cache, that's where most of our birds go," insisted Dave Donaldson, premiere Arkansas waterfowl biologist in 1973 when he testified against U.S. Army Corps of Engineers plans to channelize the river. Corps draglines straightened seven miles of the Cache while bulldozers assaulted the woodland border before a government task force concluded the activity was the "single most damaging project to waterfowl in the nation today," and funding dried up.

Then in 1980 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced plans for a proposed Cache River National Wildlife Refuge, including lands to be acquired with more than $3 million from federal duck stamp sales. In 1990 the White River/Cache River/Bayou DeView floodplain was named a wetland of international importance by the Ramsar Convention, an intergovernmental conservation effort that originated in Ramsar, Iran, in 1971. Years of studies and conferences resulted in a treaty signed by 49 nations, all seeking to provide a framework for protecting the world's remaining wetlands. The remaining Big Woods of Arkansas joined the Everglades and Okefenokee Swamp as one of only eight areas in the United States so designated, as research indicated that the forests of the Cache and White were the only pristine bottomland habitat remaining in the entire Mississippi River basin.

If Corps of Engineers plans had proceeded, today the Cache and its tributaries would be little more than straight, barren ditches.

The battle over the preservation of the Big Woods was heated to say the least, and at one point the governor of Arkansas threatened to call out the National Guard in an effort to stop the dredging. The struggle to preserve this magnificent bottomland forest came just in time. By 1970 more than 75 percent of the Cache River country's 1.2 million acres of hardwoods had already disappeared.

A program to protect eastern Arkansas' unique bottomland hardwoods actually swung into action as far back as the 1950s, when the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission began purchasing as much of the remaining forest as possible. Then, in 1986, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service made the first official land purchase for the Cache River Wildlife Refuge. Over the years the agency accumulated some 39,000 acres in a checkerboard pattern along the river, in acquisitions ranging from 20-acre parcels up to 15,000-acre blocks.

Today federal wildlife managers continue to purchase land from willing sellers, especially any hardwood bottoms that flood when the Cache leaves its banks.

AMERICAN FORESTS joined efforts to protect the Cache River watershed in 1994 and 1995 by planting more than 150,000 seedlings in a Global ReLeaf Forest there. Working in concert with the Arkansas Nature Conservancy, AMERICAN FORESTS planted trees on 520 acres of former soybean fields to return the land to bottomland hardwoods.

It's only fitting that the ducks traveling this ancient flyway pattern should reside for a few mild months under some of the oldest trees left on the continent. Forestry Officials with the University of Arkansas point out that cypress groves along the southern end of Bayou DeView represent the largest stand of ancient timber left in the lower Mississippi Valley. Tree ring samples indicate that some of the huge baldcypress are as much as a thousand years old, With many others more than 800.

Even though most of the old-growth has been logged, certain groves such as one near the confluence of Bayou DeView and the Cache River remain special. University foresters point out that many of these giants escaped the saw because they were hollow. Today pilgrims can view trees that were tall and robust 400 years before Columbus set sail. They're the Delta's answer to California's redwoods, patriarch trees rising above the swirling splash of primitive alligator gar, the lightning strike of a surly cottonmouth or the pterodactyl-like flight of a great blue heron here in the mosquito-infested silence of damp dark earth.

By examining old-growth post oaks and cypress, researchers have been able to chart water levels in the flooded forests, deciphering a true natural history text stretching back nearly 300 years. Old trees resemble old people, the foresters claim. Each has a story to offer that pieces together what it was like here in the past. Information gleaned will help modern foresters manage the tracts of Big Woods bottomland still shading delta streams that haven't been savaged by the bulldozer and dredge.

Even today conservationists continue to battle plans to divert and channelize the big timber delta streams. Funding exists for Corps projects that would result in rivers that are neat, straight, and tidy with water levels religiously regulated, so that additional acres could be converted to soybeans and rice.

But convert more of the Big Woods to crop fields and you will have lost more--ecologically, far too much--of the last best wilderness forest in the southern United States. Unneeded and mostly unwanted "progress" would doze down big cypress and water tupelos with their buttressed bases, rip through sluggish blackwater meanders that echo the shrill cry of startled wood ducks, shatter old-growth hickories that drop autumn nuts big as ping-pong balls, and plunder a remnant oak tribe and its carbohydrate-rich acorns: overcup, red, white, post, water, willow, pin, and swamp chestnut, among others.

Drain the remaining delta Big Woods and you'd lose the black bears that survived extermination by hiding out in these nearly impenetrable tangles. Lost would be a rich, rare fishery, habitat for wading birds, resting and nesting areas for migratory songbirds and critical habitat for deer, squirrel, and fur bearers.

In a way, even though it is surrounded by neatly maintained acres of corporate farming, the Big Woods mirrors a time when all the Mississippi bottoms were wilderness--big timber country to be sure, woods to be marveled at in the journals of French trappers, poineering naturalists like Thomas Nuttall, and later in the testimonials of the tough pioneers that persevered and set their own roots in the intervening prairies.

Like an enduring open air cathedral, the Big Woods echo a refrain from an older, wilder America. A place where the Quapaw and choctaws paddled dugout canoes, ivory-billed woodpeckers shreded bark from ancient trees, and mallard ducks rained down ahead of the first autumn blue norther. The Big Woods are a living memorial, and a wisely kept one. A place where giants persist amid the rich muck of another seasonal flood.

Gary Lantz is a freelance writer in Norman, Oklahoma.