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

FISHING

Grandpa Mundine 7978-ch05.pdf 10/6/11 8:17 AM Page 330 FISHING by Vicky J. Rose  When the call came from the Texas Folklore Society for papers about hunting and fishing lore, I immediately dismissed it. I never hunted and haven’t fished in years. Yet, the more I thought about it, the more I realized what an important hand fishing took in developing my attitude toward life and people. In those pre-feminist days during the late fifties and early sixties , women with children rarely worked outside the home. I was the middle child of three girls, tow-headed, with wide and trusting eyes. To keep from driving our mother crazy, she kept us busy playing with dolls in the winter, carving doll houses out of cardboard boxes and decorating them with scraps of wallpaper and fabric. In the summer, we were expected to play outdoors. Our only enemies then were snakes and the sticker-burs that infested the deep sandy soil where we lived. My older sister, with her delicate hands and tiny wrists, had an almost abnormal fear of spiders. Although she never grew to love the outdoors as much as I did, she put aside her trepidations, and we spent many hours gathering overgrown vegetables from the garden, placing them in old pots on a bench, and pretending to cook as we added water from the garden hose. We lived in a hundred-year-old house on fifteen acres two miles outside a small town. Our father was a workaholic who liked to labor alone, so we didn’t often accompany him when he checked on his cattle on other acreage he owned. He had strict ideas about what was proper for girls to do, but he allowed us to roam the land our house sat on. His only warning was that we were to stay away from the fence of our neighbors, carefully explaining that they had an old, mentally challenged son who wouldn’t hurt us, but he did not want us to bother him. Forty years later I learned another reason he did not want us close to the 331 7978-ch05.pdf 10/6/11 8:17 AM Page 331 fence—the neighbor’s son had developed a fondness for cows our father did not want us to witness. In the heat of the summer, however, we forgot our fear of snakes and spiders and with friends swam in our tank—what everyone outside of Texas calls a pond. The water was muddy and the color of an anemic orange. We scared the snakes away with our noise, but the fish often nibbled at our toes. When friends weren’t around, I would walk the two miles into town to my grandparents’ tiny house, the remnant of an old hotel. Sometimes my grandfather would take me fishing with him, something I enjoyed immensely because it let me spend time with him. I liked to talk too much occasionally, as most children do, and Grandpa would tell me we had to be perfectly quiet when we fished because we didn’t want to scare the fish away. Years later when my husband took me fishing, he asked why I was so silent. I looked at him in surprise. Didn’t this city boy I married know anything? When I repeated Grandpa’s edict, he burst into laughter, explaining we didn’t have to be that quiet. Poor Grandpa! He must have been desperate trying to shut up his little chatterbox of a granddaughter . Behind my grandparents’ house resided a family with many children. They were “townies,” and had a much more laissez faire attitude about life than I was used to. One of the girls my age often came to play with me when she saw I was in town, and sometimes we would imitate television shows. Rusty had round, slightly bulging eyes and brilliant, even, white teeth. A stout girl, she would jump behind the steering wheel in my grandfather’s old truck and play Green Hornet. She always wanted to be Kato because he got to drive. I sat on the other side and tried to pretend I was the Green Hornet, but I never could get the hang of it. Other times, she would suggest we play Gomer Pyle. She would be Sergeant Carter and yell and order me around, while I grinned sheepishly like Gomer...