John Stephens, bopped head and all, is the company's visionary and major source of energy. "I guess that whack with the wand took," Richenback said of his counterpart today. "John can do anything he sets his mind to."

Stephens is forever designing new products and trying to make improvements to old ones. He's anywhere and everywhere in the RNT shop. You're likely to find him elbow-deep in a balky, high-tech call-making machine, or designing a new product or product logo on the computer screen in his rear-of-the-building office. Or fitting duck call components together. Or discussing the next season's TV show schedule with Ronquest. Or asking Richenback's advice on just about anything under the sun.

This combination of talent, work ethic, energy level and love for both contest calling and duck hunting has taken Rich-N-Tone from a corner-of-the-garage hobby shop to the front of the custom duck call industry. RNT now has dealers in every state, and the list of calling contest wins by contestants using RNT calls is staggering: more than 70 assorted world-champion titles (nobody seems to know exactly how many, but at least 15 of them were men's world-champion titles) and more than 320 regional, state and local contest wins. Since 2003, RNT calls have chalked up more than 1,200 Top 5 contest finishes nationwide -- more than 200 per year.

As impressive as those numbers are, most hunters would agree that calling contests don't really have much to do with duck hunting -- right? Maybe yes; maybe no. As you might expect, the three world champions who are the faces of RNT have some opinions on that, as well as on many other subjects relating to duck hunting and duck calling.

"In contest calling, you blow a specific routine," Richenback explained, "and everything is exaggerated. The long, multi-note hail call, the long, complicated feeding chatter, all that -- it's all based on duck sounds, but it's stylized to appeal to human ears, to the judges' ears."

"You're calling to impress the judges when you're on the stage, but when you're in the woods, the judges all have feathers.

Stephens agreed. "You can call ducks successfully with a contest call," he said, "but you have to change your style of calling to do it. The basic difference is a hunting call won't have that high ringing note, and the contest call won't have the deep, raspy bottom. But the biggest difference to me is that in a contest you're trying to show what all you can do with a call; you've got to have realism in it, but you're showing out with it. When you're hunting, you're not showing out; you're trying to figure out whatever works. Sometimes that means showing out, but usually it's something less flashy."

"I call it gymnastics," observed Ronquest. "Like Butch said, you're calling to impress the judges when you're on the stage, but when you're in the woods, the judges all have feathers. You want to impress them, too, sure -- but you don't do it by pretty calling; you do it by figuring out what the judges like and then giving it to them."

That sounds easy enough. But how do you figure out what all those feathered judges want to hear?

"By trying different stuff," Richenback offered. "If this bunch of ducks comes by and you hit them with a loud hail call and they don't respond -- well, maybe you ought to try something a little different with the next bunch. It's not all that hard; it's just trial and error. It's a guessing game. And the longer you hunt ducks, the more times you go, the more ducks you try to work, the better you're going to get at guessing.