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

PORCH HUNTING

Adron Alford and Babe, late 1950s 7978-ch05.pdf 10/6/11 8:17 AM Page 280 PORCH HUNTING by Sue Friday  I can see Grandpa, Adron Alford, sitting on the porch, reared back in his favorite hide-seat straight chair. He has on dusty field boots, frayed-at-the-hem jeans, and is bare chested because he took off his heavy denim jumper to cool off. There is a ring of sweat around his head from his hat. My sister and I, at most 3rd or 4th graders, are fighting over the swing although it is big enough for both of us. Grandpa gives us “the look” and we settle down. For amusement all summer we either read, go to church, help with light farm work, or listen to Grandpa tell stories—always about hunting or fishing or the animals involved. Today’s story is about an ol’ boy being chased by a wildcat. “And that ol’ boy ran and ran until he couldn’t run anymore and fell out on the ground!” Grandpa says, “and the old cat hops up on a log . . .” and Grandpa’s hand and arm make the arc of the wildcat jumping onto the log . . . “and looks with his yellow eyes at the ol’ boy laying there, gasping for breath, and says . . . .” And here I lose the story. I can see my grandpa clearly, see from his eyes that this will be funny, can hear his voice—and then I can’t. I have no stories of my own because then girls and women in Sabine County didn’t hunt with men. No doubt we could have and probably would have done it better and had more fun, but that’s a high horse I can ride another time. The stories I heard on that porch are ones I enjoyed then and love all over again every time I hear them retold. They were funny, mythical, fantastic, and sometimes true. They still get told on the porch. Cousin Troy Pfleider related one at a family dinner recently. A baboon got loose from a traveling show, circus, zoo, or somesuch. Of course, some mighty hunter trapped it and put it in the cage in the back of his pickup. He parked the truck at the local barbershop and invited everyone to come out and marvel. One of the older regulars came out, peered into the cage, and scratched his head. 281 7978-ch05.pdf 10/6/11 8:17 AM Page 281 “Know what this is, Uncle?” he was asked. “Don’t rightly know,” he answered, “but from the looks of his rear end he’s a domino player!” Troy’s son Joey is a logger and timber buyer. He’s as big a yarn teller as his dad and he told me about an old man who had timber he was interested in. Part of the negotiations involved sitting on his porch and trading stories. In this one, the man told of when hogs ran free in the open range. To keep them somewhat tame, he’d take a wooden bucket of feed into the woods and bang it on a trough he’d made of a hollow cypress log. The hogs would come running. This went on awhile until an ivory billed woodpecker moved into the area. They were called Johnny-byGods , as in, “Johnny, by God what was that!” Anyway, the Johnny-by-God knocked on the trees all over the bottom and kept the hogs running after what they thought was the sound of the feed bucket. They got so skinny from all the exercise that they weren’t fit to eat that year. (And knowing how farmer/hunters think, that may explain why ivory-billed woodpeckers became extinct.) Many stories involve dogs—which somehow put the soul in hunting. When Grandpa came out on the porch with his gun, his dogs would get so excited that any of the rest of us could stand there with raw meat and they would ignore us. Grandpa kept dogs that earned their keep, either by baying hogs when they needed to be found in the deep woods, treeing squirrels, or finding the coon that was breaking down the corn. Uncle George Rice kept a pack of fox hounds—just for the fun of hearing them run. Fox hunting happened at night when a group of men would go out in the...