Big Thicket Legacy

Jude Hart

Introducing Jude Hart If Jude Hart were dropped barehanded in the middle of the Big Thicket wilderness, Iwould expect him to have food on the table for dinner and a shelter to sleep in that night. His whole life has been a lesson in survival, and he has mastered it as fully as any man I know. In a general sense, this was true of every family that settled in the Thicket, but no one knew the resources of his environment more intimately, more completely, than Jude. His father was the son of one of the original Harts that settled in Hardin County, west of Kountze. Jude was the oldest of four boys. When he was a small boy the family moved into one of the wildest parts of the Big Thicket and settled on Big Pine Island Bayou, northeast of Batson. His father died when they were young, and his mother and the four children made a living the best way they could. He never attended school a day in his life. Jude is a tall, lean, quiet, soft-spoken man, easygoing and friendly. He can talk or listen equally well. When he talks he is utterly relaxed and watches you as he talks. When he is finished, you somehow feel that, although you have learned a great deal from him, he has learned a great deal about you, too. It is impossible to think of Jude Hart without thinking of wild hogs, for he has hunted them, handled them, worked them, and depended more on them than on any other animal for his livelihood. He knows them like he knows his cur dogs, which, he says, are equal partners with a man in the woods. "They don't work for you, they work with you," he said. "A hawg don't bite," he said. "When he's fightin' and hits a dog or a horse or a man, he just opens his mouth a little bit and throws his head sideways and up, and that's the way he cuts. When he gets as high as he can go, he jerks his head and cuts another slash comin' down. A hawg is a dangerous anima\." Bill Brett agrees: "A razorback boar from two, three years on up, outside the grizzly, brown, or Kodiak bear, is the most dangerous animal on the North or South American continent. Now I mean panther, jaguar, whatever. Idon't believe there's anything more dangerous. Two years ago Clarence McNeely's brother, up on Village Creek, had one hit him, knocked him down, and they took seventeen stitches in his leg and nine or ten stitches in his arm." Jude himself wears a scar from a tusk of a boar that cut him recently. He was on his horse, working a bunch of hogs in the same area and in the same manner that he did half a century ago. Ufe has changed very little for Jude. Agood blowing horn is a valuable possession, and each person has his own preference for size and sound. Jude uses the left horn of a longhom steer. "I use it because I hold my horn in my left hand so Ican keep my right hand free. The hollow is not more than two to two-and-a-fourth inches across, and their horn is fairly straight. They're easy to blow and the sound carries a long way." The last time we visited Jude it was late in the afternoon, and we sat on the porch and talked with him and his wife until twilight. We noticed thirty-five or forty Rhode Island Red chickens come across the yard and fly up in a sweetgum tree at the side of the house, one or two at a time. Iremembered Addie Moye's story about his folks bringing a few chickens when they came to Texas and the care and attention given them on oxcarts, rafts, and ferries, only to have them eaten by varmints before they got a pen built at the Big Thicket homestead. Iasked Jude about it and he said, "They wouldn't last one night in that tree without a cur dog around. They're better than a pen." JUDE HART ver since Iwas five years old, Iused to ride behind my daddy a hawg huntin', and from then on I just kept a-ridin', and we had lots 0' hawgs...