Hide, Horn, Fish, and Fowl: Texas Hunting and Fishing Lore

A THANKSGIVING CATFISH

The author at the Texas Folklife Festival, 2010 7978-ch05.pdf 10/6/11 8:17 AM Page 292 A THANKSGIVING CATFISH by Jerry Young  Fishermen and storytellers have a bent for telling whoppers, and this whopper has been told around by one of Texas’ truest tale rattlers. Harley and Hazel Wilson had a passel of kids. Well, just three to be exact. There was Lucille and Arlene, and Harley Jr. They lived on a run-down, no-count piece of land over in Panola County on the Sabine (pronounced “Say Being” by locals) Slough. Why, that piece of land was so poor and run-down and no-count that there was nothing to do with it but donate it to the Baptist Church. So that’s what Harley did. The Baptist folks were glad to get hold of that piece of land, because being close by the slough and all, it was convenient for baptizing. Well, the Baptists got together and built a church building on the land. But that land was so poor, so run down, so no good that for the church dedication, the deacons had to go up to Marshall and buy fifty pounds of commercial fertilizer before the congregation could raise a tune on that land. After Harley got shed of that piece of land, he moved Hazel and the kids farther up the Slough to a place called Half Mile Bend. Now, fishing was a whole lot better in Half Mile Bend, and Harley’d rather fish than plow any day. And besides that, Old Slew Fin lived in Half Mile Bend. Old Slew Fin was one monstrous channel cat. That fish measured out six feet, four inches from the tip of his snout to the end of his tail, and weighed over 146 pounds. That channel cat could tear up a seine net without working up a sweat, and he ate three barbed hooks off a trot line like they were paw paw berries. You might wonder how Old Slew Fin got his name. Well, Sam Davis owns this brace of full-blooded fish dogs. Those dogs are so full-blooded that they are registered with the National Fish Dog 293 7978-ch05.pdf 10/6/11 8:17 AM Page 293 Society. As the story goes, and I don’t have no reason not to believe Sam, it seems that those dogs treed that catfish in his den one Sunday afternoon, and while they were digging him out, one of those dogs accidentally bit off Old Slew’s right paddle fin. After that Old Slew Fin always swam a bit to the left, and if you ever hoped to catch that fish, you had to set your hook in the right direction. Harley surely did like fishing up there on Half Mile Bend. Especially on those fall and spring mornings when the mists come up off that slough. On those mornings, sometimes the mists would be so thick that the fish couldn’t tell where the water left off and the mist began, and those fish ended up swimming in the mists. On those mornings, Old Harley’d just sit on the back porch, and when a school of those channel cats came swimming by in the mist, he’d swat the biggest ones over the head with an iron skillet. That was until Hazel made him quit. What happened was, one morning Harley and Hazel’s kids were swimming in the mist, and Harley swatted Harley Jr. over the head with that iron skillet, mistaking the boy for a big channel cat. Now, Harley Jr. never would’ve won no genius contest before that incident, but Hazel always was convinced that that iron skillet was the reason why Harley Jr. never won any ribbons at the county spelling bee. So, after swatting Harley Jr. with that skillet, Hazel made Harley go down to the slough to do his fishing. Harley found him a spot beneath a big bois d’ arc tree there at the edge of the slough to do his fishing. One fall afternoon, a couple of days before Thanksgiving, Harley was down there with his line out fishing for the family’s Thanksgiving catfish. Well, you see, it was a lot easier for Harley to catch a catfish than go out and hunt down a tom gobbler. Besides, Hazel had a way of fixing a Thanksgiving catfish...