Foxfire 11: Wild Plant Uses, Gardening, Wit, Wisdom, Recipes, Beekeeping, Toolmaking, Fishing, and More Affairs of Plain Living

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Foxfire 11: Wild Plant Uses, Gardening, Wit, Wisdom, Recipes, Beekeeping, Toolmaking, Fishing, and More Affairs of Plain Living Page 29

by Lacy Hunter;Foxfire Students Kaye Carver Collins


  “We had a lot of fun. My boys are about as bad to hunt as I was, but they don’t take the hard hunts that I had to take. Now you can ride. They’ve got Jeeps, and you can go down to mule trader’s country [flat-lands], and you don’t hardly have to leave your car to catch something. But here you got to hit these mountains and pull ’em. Boy, I’ve tramped all over. I don’t believe they’s many trees in these mountains within four miles of here that I ain’t looked at, or seen, or been in.”

  HUNTING FOXES WITH DOGS

  Bell Jones told us how he became interested in raising foxhunting dogs. “I’d go with [my daddy] to look after the cattle, and I got to liking the woods; and later, my brother and I would go out together and rabbit hunt around the farm. Finally, we got to going back in the woods with the dogs at night possum hunting, coon hunting. Finally, we got to running foxes a little bit. [I] had some old dogs—called them pot-licker dogs—you don’t never hear tell of them no more. [They were something] like what the black and tan is now. That was a nickname for them. I think it’s from licking pots. They used to claim that if you had pot-licker dogs, you had to take a pot with you when you went hunting, and if he wouldn’t leave you, you rolled the pot off down the hill and sent him after it to get him away from you—get him out from under your feet. So we kept on at that until later on [when] we began to get us in some more fox dogs that would run better. [That] kinda done away with them old pot-licker hounds. The boys around Clayton began to get in some Walker dogs, and we got ahold of a few of them and got to mixing them. We run them dogs for several years and raised a few of them. They was a mixture—half ‘n’ half—and they run a fox so much better. They was so much better than the pure old pot-licker dogs and run so much longer.

  “So then we [Bell and his brother] decided, after we both got grown, that we’d get us some thoroughbreds—them mixed-up ones was better than the ones we’d had, and thoroughbreds oughta be even better—so we went over in Kentucky and got four (three of them was littermates and one of them was unrelated). And we bought a fifty-acre tract up here on Black’s Creek after we had both moved to Mountain City. We both lived here. We lived about a mile apart, so we kept our hounds together. We bought these together—bought that land—and put in a kennel up there. Then we started raising thoroughbred dogs and training some of them. Then we went to advertising them in Chase Magazine and Hunters Home and we got a lot of calls for dogs. Finally, they got to wanting to send their females to breed to our stud dogs, so we went over to Wheeling, West Virginia, and bought a stud dog. [We] give three hundred dollars for it. That was high for a dog then. His name was Wheeling Steel—named him after Wheeling, West Virginia. We advertised him as stud in magazines. They’d send us females here from a lot of different places, some from Oklahoma, Texas, and Ohio. They’d send them here, and we’d charge a twenty-dollar stud fee.

  “Now, in training them, if it was possible, we took the mother of them, and we didn’t take any other fast dogs. Usually, she would be broke down [and] old. Naturally, these puppies would follow their mother. Usually, after two or three times carrying them out, they would begin to run pretty good, and then we’d take them with our own pack. But we had to see that they didn’t have to run the first race or two with too fast a dog if we could possibly do it, ’cause if you break them down to start with, they’re never no more good.

  “Ten months old was the best time to start training, we thought. Start them off right, and they would usually make good dogs—good tough dogs. But you could break one down by running them too hard too young, just like anything else. Like riding a colt too young—you’d ruin it. A lot of hunters has ruined good dogs by running them too young. We ruined one of the fastest ones I know of. He was might’ near nine months old, and he could run with any of them; he did one night, and that was it—never would run another lick. But he led that pack part of the time, that first night. He was after a red fox, and after he come in, he was so weak that he couldn’t get up, and he never did run no fox after that. One of the main things was to get them dogs to where they would come back to you. You had to train them to that, and that was a hard, hard thing.

  “But we had a lot of fun at [foxhunting], and it was good sport. I thought about it lots. It was the only one good sport that I know of that I never knew of nobody gambling on. And I guess they were twenty-five, thirty, or more hunters in this county that foxhunted, and I foxhunted with all of them nearly. They’d come and go with me and my brother, or we’d go with them. But you never did want to get too many together. If you got too many strange dogs together, they didn’t run. They’d stay split up. If you had a pack and I had a pack, and we carried them together (a pack was about four or five; if you had four or five good dogs, why, you had a pack), you had just about what you needed. But if you go and put three or four more packs in there, why, it wasn’t never no good. You done better when you jest went out with two packs.”

  WILD HOGS

  The following is an interview with Eldon Miller on hunting wild hogs as told by the interviewers, Barbara Taylor and Sheila Vinson.

  One of the most exciting events that has happened to us was the day we were invited over to Eldon Miller’s to see what a wild Russian boar chase was like. Eldon had one he had caught some time ago fenced in his pasture, and periodically he likes to “catch” it again, both for the sport of it and to keep the dogs trained and fit. He claimed that both the dogs and the hog seem to enjoy all the excitement. In fact, even though the hog would scream as though it were the end of the world each time it was caught, within a few short days he’d be back at the fence pawing the ground and snorting and teasing the dogs on the other side into a frenzy.

  PLATE 145 Eldon Miller training his dogs with a wild hog

  Before we went down to the pasture in search of the hog, Eldon explained each dog’s job. The hold dog, for example, was a seventy-pound bulldog named Caesar. “I could put him on one of you, and he’d catch and hold you, but where he catches, it’ll hurt.” The hold dog locks his jaws so he can hold for hours—if necessary, for days. Eldon said that a hound, on the other hand, won’t hold long. “He’ll turn loose and fight that hog.” The hold dog is the main key. He tries to bring the hog to the ground, and then the hounds move in for the kill. The latter are also called bay dogs. If Eldon had not been there to pull the dogs away, they would have killed the hog while the bulldog held tightly to one ear.

  Another key dog is the leopard cur. He protects the hunters from the sharp tusks of the wild boar by staying between them and the hog. He also stays on the job night and day to keep captured boars from jumping the fence, escaping, and roaming free in the community. Eldon said, “The fence don’t mean nothin’ to th’ wild boars. They could jump it.”

  The average size of the wild boar is anywhere from two hundred twenty-five to two hundred fifty pounds, and that’s a big hog. They are very dangerous. They could seriously harm a human with one slash of their tusks.

  Frank Rickman shared his feelings about why he hunted hogs in the mountains. “After World War II, the mountain people used to live out of the woods. One of their main cash crops was wild hogs. While I was in the army, the government passed a law that you couldn’t free-range animals in the mountains. The old mountain people had hogs and stuff in there and had nobody to catch ’em because all the young people was gone. The hogs multiplied and sorta got out of control. When I come back, there was a lot of them, [and] I got hung up on catching them. I never have wanted to really kill nothing; I just always wanted to manhandle it and show it that it could be manhandled. That’s the reason I’ve wanted to catch them hogs. I caught eighty-something big boars one time in a little over a year right out of this country.

  “I helped destroy them, and it hurt my feelings because I’d seen the mistake I’d made. When I caught all them old boars, I didn’t want to catch the sows and the pigs; I wanted to catch them old hogs that had them big teeth and stuff. When I done that, all the hunters come in and they killed all the pigs, sows,
and mama hogs. Then I seen I’d made a mistake.”

  FISHING

  “I’d like to see just one more speckled trout.”

  I am not a native of Rabun County, but my mother’s family is. My family moved here when I was eight years old. One of the first things I came to realize about this county is the natural beauty that it holds. There are mountains and fields that have never been touched by human hands, and the numerous streams and lakes add to that beauty.

  When I go fishing, I get a feeling I can’t describe. There is nothing like grabbing your fishing gear and going to spend a day trying to catch one of nature’s most beautiful inhabitants. It doesn’t matter if I catch a fish or not; I just love trying. That is the fun for me.

  The individuals interviewed for this chapter enjoy fishing too. They do it now because they want to, but during the Depression many had to fish in order to have food on the table. Years ago, they had to fish with equipment like cane poles, string, pressed-out lead for sinkers, and, in some cases, pins for hooks.

  People have told us about the time when there weren’t any limits on the number of fish you could catch in one day and of the times when you didn’t have to have a license to fish. That was before there was a danger of some of the native fish becoming extinct. Now the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) puts limits on the number and kind of fish you can catch. The designated limits vary from state to state and can change from year to year. The DNR also stocks the streams here; the fish are raised in a hatchery and released into streams and lakes, adding to the population of that body of water. People say they can taste and see the difference between native and stocked fish. Doug Adams, former president of the Rabun County Chapter of Trout Unlimited, told me, “Stocked trout can develop the same coloring and markings as a native trout within approximately seven months of release into a stream.” The one difference is the color of the meat. Native trout have a pink color to their meat almost like that of a salmon, whereas stocked trout do not have the coloring. Their meat is whitish.

  Fishing has changed a great deal since the early to mid-1900s. But many secrets and techniques of previous generations are still applicable today and have been passed down to younger generations.

  My granddad Buford Garner was an avid fisherman. He took my brother fishing many times and passed on his knowledge to him. My brother, in turn, passed that on to me. I never had the chance to go fishing with my granddad, but I feel that in a way I learned from him. And I’m proud to carry on his fishing knowledge.

  —Robbie Bailey

  TYPES OF FISH

  There are numerous species of fish in the streams and lakes of North Georgia and western North Carolina. This chart lists the most common by type, family, and common name.

  BASS

  Black Bass White Bass Sunfish

  Largemouth—Bigmouth, Striped Bass—Rockfish Bluegill—Bream

  Bucketmouth, Black, White Bass—Striped Redbreast Sunfish—

  Green, Green Trout and Silver Bass Yellowbreast Sunfish,

  Smallmouth—Bronze-back Shellcracker

  Redeye—River Trout, Shoal Bass, River Bass Warmouth—Rock Bass, Redeye, Goggle-eye

  CRAWFISH

  Crayfish, Crawdad

  NATIVE VS. STOCKED FISH

  Stock, stocked, stocker, stockard, or hatchery fish are fish that were spawned and raised in a hatchery on processed feed, then stocked in a stream or lake. Wild, native, or original fish are fish spawned in the stream or lake and raised in the wild on natural foods.

  There are no written records of when fish were first stocked in Rabun County. Doug Adams told us that brown trout were first brought to North America in the 1880s and released in Michigan. In the 1890s they were brought to the New England area, and the South received them in the early 1900s. The Chattooga River was the first body of water in Rabun County to receive brown trout, and rainbow trout were stocked shortly after the brown trout. According to Perry Thompson of the Lake Burton Fish Hatchery, there is no documentation of when trout were first stocked in Rabun County, but the DNR started intensively stocking trout in the late 1940s to early 1950s.

  L. E. Craig explained the differences in appearance of native versus stocked fish. “You can tell the difference between the native rainbow trout and the stocked rainbow by the color. The native will be kind of a brownish color with a pretty rainbow down his side. The stocked ones will be just as black as tar when they put them in the creek. They’ll have a white streak instead of rainbow colors. The stocked brown trout will be kind of black-looking. Their spots won’t show up.”

  Buck Carver emphatically stated that stocked fish were not fun to catch. “When they went to stocking with them blamed pond-raised fish, that took out all the fun of fishing for me! That took all the sport out of it! They bring them out of the fish hatchery and throw them in the river, and you stand there with your pole and catch ’em out just as fast as they throw ’em in it. Anybody can catch a fish when you step up to the bank and put the hook in the water. They know something’s coming for them to eat. They seen it around them ‘raring pools’ so many times, they don’t think about getting hooked. They’re not wild, and they’re not skittish.”

  Andy Cope told us it would take an expert fisherman to catch a native fish. “There are not many native fish anymore. They’re very few and far between. There are a few speckled trout deep in the heads of the streams, but so far back it’s hard to get to them. To go out camping a night or two in the woods and to catch some of those speckled trout, now, you can’t beat that, but as far as having a mess of fish to take home, that’s a rare thing. That probably won’t happen unless you’re a very special trout fisherman. Just anybody can’t catch them like that.

  PLATE 146 Andy Cope

  “I don’t think that the native fish taste any better than a fish grown in a pond. The Game and Fish Department used to feed the hatchery fish liver, and that’s what made the stocked fish in the lake mushylike. They don’t feed them that anymore. They feed them pellet feed now, made from grains and fish meal.”

  Lawton Brooks stated, “A wild game fish is harder to catch and will put up a big fight when you get ahold of a good one. He’s wild, and you’ll have something on your hands. He does everything he can to break loose.

  “There’s a few wild trout but not too many because they have so many roads to nearly all the streams. They’ve got to putting them old stock trout in streams, and the wild trout are just about gone. You’ve got to get a way back to get you a mess of wild trout.

  “I don’t like to catch them stock fish too good. It’s kinda interesting but not like it is to get one of those wild fish. A stock fish is one that game wardens dump in the water. Stock will bite anything you throw in to ’em.”

  Florence Brooks won’t eat a stocked fish. “Native fish got a pretty color, and their meat is firm. Sometimes you’ll catch these stock fish, and they’ll turn white-spotted before you get ’em home. Their meat’s real soft. They keep ’em in these big vats, and they feed ’em chicken feed before they turn them loose in the lakes. The native fish don’t do that. They just eat what they can catch, and they are stronger, firmer, meat and all. The minute those stock fish that I’ve caught turn white-spotted, I throw ’em away. I don’t like them white spots.”

  According to Parker Robinson, “Fishing is my favorite sport. I really love to trout fish, but it’s hard work. I’d rather catch them than the others, but it’s rough. This day and time you have to get off the road a little and out away where people don’t fish so much. I go down the creek kind of in the roughs, and I catch some pretty nice trout. Natives [trout] are smart fish, ’specially if they’ve been fished after. Rainbow is the best eating trout, I guess.”

  Talmadge York explained to us, “German brown trout were brought here and stocked. Same way with rainbow, brook, bream, and bass. They were brought in and stocked in the lakes. They used to stock some brown trout here, raise ’em over at the hatchery and stock ’em, but they didn’t do well in these sm
all streams.

  “Brown trout are sharp fish. They can see you a long way off. They’ll put up a fight, and they’ll get off your hook after you’ve caught ’em. Brown trout have big red spots on them, from their tails to their heads, about the size of dimes when they get to be about twenty-three inches long. Just as red and pretty as you’ve ever seen.”

  L. E. Craig said, “And a lot of people call a brown trout a speckled trout. Brown trout are, but they’re not the original speckled trout. I can tell one just as quick as I see it. The brown will be kind of black-looking. Their spots won’t show up. A brown trout is pretty, and if you ever see a big brown, it’ll have red spots on it.”

  Willie Underwood reminisced, “The first rainbow trout in this section here was shipped here in a barrel when I was six or seven years old. Now there are rainbow in nearly all the streams.”

  KINDS OF TROUT

  “Mountain trout spawn in February and rainbow generally in the spring [February to April]. You ain’t supposed to be fishing then,” Parker Robinson said. “You take these mountain trout here. Now they’ll have a winter coat on them. They don’t have scales on them. It’s right along now, the beginning of February, when they begin to lay eggs, and they’re getting a thick coat on them. If you catch two when they’re like that, and let them be against one another and they dry a bit, it’s just like glue. You can hardly pull ’em apart, and you can hardly get that coat off of there when you’re trying to clean them. I never would eat ’em when they had that coat on them, that spawning coat that mountain trout have.”

 

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