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STUTTGART, Ark. — The first thing you feel walking into the 22,000-square-foot main tent at the World Championship Duck Gumbo Cookoff is a hand slapping your rear.

A blonde woman in a pink T-shirt checks her handiwork: a bright pink sticker that reads "White Trash Never Looked So Good" now taping a sweatshirt to a buttock. Tara Skinner ("like a hunter — skinner") turns to her friend to get another sticker with the logo of her gumbo team, Flamingo Gumbo. "I diapered him," she says. She then slaps another sticker on the passer-by's bumper, low enough to avoid the back of the sweatshirt entirely.

Folks are real friendly 'round these parts, but it turns out the swats are tradition. This is the 27th year of the gumbo competition, and for about the last 20 of those, teams have been printing stickers to plant on the hind quarters of cookoff-goers.

"You're going to get your ass hit," Skinner explains as a friend of hers approaches, carrying a purse bulging with cans of smuggled-in Busch Light. Gumbo is the excuse for the party, and duck calling is the excuse for gumbo. Other than that, this scene has as much to do with duck calling as football tailgating has to do with punt returns.

The result is one of the biggest annual parties in Arkansas, outside of Razorbacks games. Curtis Ahrens, the cookoff chairman (and recipient, by early afternoon, of three stickers himself) says 2,000 to 3,000 people will sluice through during the six-hour event. Along the way, they'll drink more than 10,000 16-ounce beers.

Set on a truck parking lot for a rice mill, the tents overhead house 56 booths (13 with more than one story), 55 portable toilets and a hundred volunteers who are paid only in free admission and three free beers.

Twenty-three teams are still on the waiting list, even after a bigger tent this year made room for eight more booths. And it's still elbow-to-elbow, with a band playing Aerosmith and AC/DC covers at one end, folks throwing Jell-O shots and Mardi Gras beads from the two-story booths in the middle — you've never seen so many colored beads on so many camouflage jackets — and the smells of gumbo wafting in from all corners.

Sloan Hampton of twice-champion Mojo Gumbo stands on the deck of his team's booth beside a 40-quart pot on a Coleman stove, checking the consistency of the boiling gumbo — okra, tomatoes, shrimp, homemade kielbasa, and duck Hampton shot himself, because at this competition, you better not bring storebought.

"Peking duck, it's a totally different thing," says Sloan Hampton, a rice and soybean farmer. "Wild is stronger." (Count Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones among the fans; Hampton says the Arkansas native hunts on Hampton's farm, and in the past has visited this very booth, once bringing along the team's cheerleaders to perform on stage.)

For an edge, MoJo adds secret seasonings from a can of pungent spices that a friend from Cavender's, the Greek spice maker, prepares just for the gumbo cookoff. "After you eat five gumbos, they all taste the same," Hampton says. "Hell, we may win it. We may not, either."

That nonchalance belies a strong desire to win the gumbo trophy, according to Ahrens.

"They win the gumbo, and they get on the phone calling home," he says. "'We won the gumbo, we won the gumbo.' It's like winning the Super Bowl."

It's mentioned to him that one old hand claimed never to have seen a fight in 15 years of coming to the cookoff.

"People come here for a good time," Ahrens says. "If you're gonna get pissed off because you get slapped on your ass, or your old lady gets slapped on the ass, then you're probably not going to come back. Because you are going to get that ass slapped."

That's the consensus, too, over at the Jumbeaux Gumbeaux booth. Jonathan Handy, a stockbroker from Austin, Texas, was on the waiting list for a booth from 1992, his first visit to the festival, to 2001. Since then his crew has been cooking up 10 gallons of gumbo a year with the intention of feeding as many people as possible during the day.

The team's stickers read, "It's All Ducked Up!!!" And a quick glance at the pants of the folks wandering around the cookoff suggests that the team has been highly active in placing their brand.

"This is the only place in America where you can slap random women on the ass and they say thank you," says Chris Johnston of the Jumbeaux Gumbeaux team.

Asked to recall some of the wilder moments in the cookoff's history, Johnston recalls a wet T-shirt contest that became a de facto no T-shirt contest.

As he ponders further, one of the Jumbeaux Gumbeaux members says hello but declines to offer a quote. Apparently when the biggest newspaper in the state interviewed him at a past festival, he said, "what happens in Stuttgart stays in Stuttgart."

His wife read the story. He no longer grants interviews.