Fishing Stories

Fishing Stories

Like many boys growing up in the south, my brothers and I learned fishing, hunting, and how to shoot a gun from our grandfather. My earliest memory of shooting a gun was shooting a 410 shotgun into Grape Creek after feeding cows when I was about 6 years old.

We grew up on stories about hunting in the Richland Creek and Grape Creek bottoms and fishing in the Trinity River.

He loves to tell how he shot a deer with an SMLE (.303 caliber Lee-Enfield rifle he owns, made in 1916) and it blew out 6 inches of spine killing the deer nearly instantly and how another time he had to drag a deer across a slough near Richland Creek after killing it.

My folks still love to tell one story about me hunting when I was about 14. One of my grandfather’s workers took me hunting. It was about 35 degrees outside and raining. He had me posted in a brush pile while he went further down in the property. Later on, he said he saw a nice sized buck behind me, but I never shot it. I don’t remember even really looking around. I was so cold and miserable a deer could have walked out in front of me and probably would have just let him go on by!

He would tell us about fishing and running trotlines in the Trinity River while we fished together at his lake. A number of times he told me about being thrown into the Trinity River before pushing me and my brothers and friends off of the fishing pier in his lake!

My grandfather got us into trap and skeet shooting starting when I was about 12 or so. We would go out on Sunday afternoons and blast away. We got pretty good at it and we still enjoy shooting skeet. Now if any of you know my grandfather you know that he loves to pull pranks on people.

One time we went out, I had to be about 13, my brother Jake about 10, and my brother Joe about 8, we went out skeet shooting and he decided to let us shoot his daddy’s Long Tom shotgun. It is a single shot, break open shotgun with a 40-inch barrel. It is light, with a butt pad that looks like a cutdown lace-up boot and kicks like a mule. According to my grandfather, his father shot 7 duck with it in a single shot with witnesses!

Now, I being the oldest, had been shooting it for a while but that day, he decided to let Jake and Joe shoot it.

The results were inevitable. When Jake shot it, he immediately dropped it and grabbed his shoulder. When Joe shot it, it nearly knocked him down. Papaw and I got a good laugh at it.

The humor of the prank took a different turn when shortly afterward, he has the trap thrower on the ground and Papaw got his leg a little too far forward and it whipped around and caught him in the shin! He rolled on the ground, holding his leg in pain while us boys laughed at his misery. Thinking back at this as an adult makes me think, ‘Wow! We were horrible people!” But it was still funny.

With that Long Tom shotgun, my great grandfather would hunt duck and squirrel to put food on the table. They would slaughter hogs and deer having the kids partake in the cleaning and preparing. They then passed the skills onto their kids then onto us.

The hunting and fishing, cleaning animals for food is something that my grandfather passed down to us and that we have passed onto our children. I remember cleaning catfish in the backyard at my grandparents’ house on the concrete slab that their TV antenna was anchored. Now, as an adult, I have had my boys help me clean crappie, bass, and dove under our carport. They have helped me make ground venison.

These memories and skills are worth passing on from generation to generation lest they be lost to time.

My boys now are too young to hunt (in my wife’s opinion) but I have taken them out to look at the deer. They have both caught fish and been there when I have shot dove. As they grow older, I hope to pass on the love of the outdoors, hunting, fishing, and camping.

My boys love animals. They could watch Wild Kratts and documentaries about animals all day long. One of the things we have been teaching about hunting is that we don’t kill just to kill. When we kill an animal, it is to put meat on the table and about population control. I was surprised how they have grasped how we don’t have many alpha predators that if we do not hunt, the population of animals like deer and hogs grow out of control to the point they hurt the land. They have seen the destruction that hogs cause.

I’m sure many of you have your own hunting stories that have been passed down from generation to generation