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

by Lacy Hunter;Foxfire Students Kaye Carver Collins

  “So they started a revival meeting down there at the church below the house. One evening—it was the prettiest evening to fish—I went out there, and I fished and I fished, and fooled around and caught me a little ol’ crawdad. I cut his head off, hooked him on that hook, and had me a line—I mean a stout’un. I had me a big ol’ cane pole, long as from here to the door yonder, and I put that thing on that pole. I put me on a great big ol’ beaten-out piece of lead, and I rolled it around there.

  “I throwed that line right on over in there with that crawdad, and I went on off to church. I put the pole up under a rock and stuck it in the bank. We come on back, and he’d bit my line. He was on there!

  “I tell you what I done. I’d pull him out from under that rock, and he’d go back. And I’d get him back out, and he’d go back under. He’d swallowed the plug I had on the line way down. There wasn’t no way he could have got loose without he broke the line all the way because he’d done got it down past that tough place in his throat here. If it ever got below there, it’d pull his head off, and he’d still come out of there, or he’d come out dead. He ain’t gonna get that hook out. As long as you’ve just got him up here in the mouth, he can throw ’em out. But I know he swallowed that thing, for I had it hooked right through both his lips, and I knowed he’d have to swallow the whole hook, and sure ’nough, he had.

  “I fooled with that ol’ rascal a long time, pulling him in and out. Thedro Wood come up. He had his arm broke, had it in a sling. He said, ‘What’s the matter here?’

  “I said, I’m trying to get this big fish outta here. I’ve got a big’un under here. You watch ’im in a minute.’

  “Boy! I brought him out of there, and back he’d go. Thedro said, ‘Yea, God! What a fish!’ He said, ‘Next time bring him plumb on out in those bushes. Bring him out on this sandbar, and I’ll catch ’im.’

  “I brought him out there, and he went back in. The next time I started with him, I just took right on out through yonder just a-runnin’ with my pole, draggin’ him. Sure enough, he come out on the sandbar, and Thedro fell down on top of him. He said, ‘Come in here. I’ve got it. He’s under me here.’ Says, ‘Just reach under there and get it. He’s under there. I’m on top of it.’

  “So I reached around under there, and I finally got to his head and got right up in his gills, and I said, ‘We got ’im now’ I forgot how long he was, but boys, he was a whopping fish! And no telling how long he’d been in that creek. And everybody had fished by him. I’d been a-fishing by him for over a year before I ever knowed he was in there. Of course, I bet he’d laid right there in that same place.

  “I had my pole back in under a bank, just as far back as I could drive it in the bank. I fixed it a purpose, so if he did get on there, I meant to have him. I got a line that I bet would have held fifty pounds and tied on that cane pole! And I wrapped the line way down the pole, so if he broke the end of the pole, I’d still have him down near to the bottom of it.”

  Florence Brooks recalled, “I was fishing over there above Lake Burton, right down in the mouth of Timpson Creek. I put my plug out there, and I whipped one. I was bringing it in, and all at once, it got a whole lot heavier. I said, ‘My word, he must be an awful big one!’ He come out, and I saw that a bigger fish had the one I caught in his mouth. I had two hooks on my line, and the other fish was caught by that one. I come out with two of ’em.

  “One time when I was fishing up yonder on Burton Lake on a bridge, I saw a pretty hole way up across there, and I just drew back and threw my hook under there. I hooked something, and it broke loose. Since Lawton was fishing above there, I just thought, ‘Doggone it, he’s caught my fish!’ And I swear, I liked to have caught a deer in the nose!

  “It was in that water covered up, all but its nose sticking out. I thought it was a rock. When I got it in the nose, it jerked loose and got out of the water and left there. It’s the truth! It tickled Lawton to death. This was last summer. I knew it was a big one, but I wasn’t sure if it was a fish. I told Lawton that if I’d have got him good, he would have jerked me in! I don’t want to catch me another deer!”

  Buck Carver explained, “If you ever slip up to a hole and hook a rainbow or a brown, either one, and hook him pretty hard, you might as well forget about that rascal if you lose him, because he ain’t gonna bite again that day.

  “One time in my life I caught one over here in Kelly’s Creek. One of the biggest ones I’ve ever caught. It was about sixteen and a half inches long. It was awful broad.

  “Anyhow, I was up on the side of the bank, and I dropped my hook in. It had a red worm on it. That fish hit the hook, and I got him about five foot out of the water, and he splashed off and went back in. The hook tore out. I went on up the creek. I was gone about two hours or two hours and a half. I didn’t think he’d bite again that quick, but he took it so fast when I dropped it in there the first time, I figured he must be pretty hungry. I come back down on the other side of the creek where I could get down in the water with that fish. That thing hooked up again. I scrambled around and let him wrestle around over that hole and finally got ’im out. He was about a pound, pound and a half, and there in the roof of his mouth was a big ‘ol tore place where I’d hooked him the first time. That was the quickest I’ve ever got one of them durn things to bite again, and know it.”

  Minyard Conner informed us, “I’ll tell you a fishing story that happened while I was fishing last summer. We was up yonder at the creek, and there was just so many people, I couldn’t get in. I had on a pair of wading boots, and they had just thrown a stockard in there about twenty inches long—one of them stripers. He was as long as your arm. He’d swim in there, back and forth, and everyone would throw their hook at him. Well, there wasn’t no place for me to stand, so I decided I would wade the river. There was laurel on the other side, and I went over there. That fish had come down and around over there, and everybody was throwing their hooks at him.

  “I said to myself, ‘Directly he’ll come up here, and I’ll snag him.’ He swam up that channel, and I saw him coming. I placed my hook in the water in that channel and gave it a yank and caught him on the right side of the head. He like to have jerked the pole out of my hand. He went round and round, and everyone pulled their hooks out of the water so I didn’t tangle him up with none of them. He just run everywhere, and I guess there must have been over a hundred people standing there fishing. After a while I slung him out and stuck my finger in his mouth and said, ‘Whoopee!’ And it was all over.”

  Leonard Jones related, “I used to go fishing, and if I had any luck and come home, my wife, Ethel, would say, ‘Well, did you buy them?’ Well, one time I went and caught one or two cats, real good ones. They’s some fellow there that had four more real good ones. He said he’d take a dollar for ’em. I just give him a dollar and strung them up with mine. Ethel said, ‘Well, where’d you buy ’em at?’

  “I said, ‘Every time I catch any you always accuse me of buyin’ them.’ I guess it was two or three years before I told her that I bought them. I wouldn’t tell her. That’s the only ones, though, that I have bought, but she always accused me, if I had good luck, of buying ’em.”

  Melvin Taylor reminisced, “We were out in a boat. We were up early in the morning. We saw [a] fish, but there was something wrong with it. I thought at first he had a shad hung in his mouth, but I think his floater was busted. You know, when he runs, he bails that water and takes off. We’d come up on him, and when he saw the boat motor, he would go out of sight and come up way over on the other side of the lake. First thing we’d see was a break of water, so we’d crank up the boat and run on over there. We’d see him dig off again, so we had run him around the lake about thirty minutes or longer, and I told Wesley [my son] if we ever run him into shallow water, we might get him. So we went way on the other side of the lake, and we saw him jump. When we got back over there, he took off again.

  “Wesley said, ‘Daddy I’m glad it’s early in the morning. Ain’
t nobody around. They’d think we were drunk or crazy one.’

  “We went on over there and sure enough, he went in, broke water, and went out to shallow water. I told Wesley, ‘If we slip up behind him so he can’t see us, we might get him.’ So that time I saw him, his head was at the other direction. I told Wesley to get a net and both hands. ‘Boy! It’s a big one.’ I couldn’t see the fish. I was paddling and Wesley he was a-looking. He was bent down, had the net in the water. About that time Wesley came falling over backwards in the boat with that fish in the net. Wesley told me, ‘He ran that way, and when he seen the shallow water, he whirled around and run right slap into the net, headfirst!’

  “That’s how we caught that one. Wesley said, ‘How are we going to tell how we caught it, Daddy?’

  “‘Well,’ I said, ‘we’ll just have to tell the truth, son.’

  “He said, Ain’t nobody going to believe you.’

  “And I said, I know they’re not. We’ll have a lot of fun out of this.’

  “So we fished around a while longer, but wasn’t doing no good. We went over to Jack Hunnicutt’s bait place about daylight or a little after, and there were four or five men buying bait. We came in, and they asked us what we caught him on. We told them we caught it on one of Jack Hunnicutt’s smiling night crawlers. They said, ‘Sure ’nough, how did you catch him? What kind of outfit did you have?’

  “‘To tell the truth, we didn’t have him on no line. We just run him down and caught him in the landing net.’ Boy, they just punched one another and was laughing and going on, you know, and we come on and showed him around. We had more fun out of that, and they rode me and Wesley about that for two or three months. That’s the way we caught that fish.

  “Everybody said, ‘Well, that’s not no fun to catch one like that.’

  PLATE 155 Jake Waldroop

  “And I told them, I tell you what. You try running one down with a motorboat and catching him in a landing net. You’ll find out it’s a pretty good sport.’

  “That was really an experience. That one weighed eight pounds and ten ounces—that’s a nice one. You don’t get many that size in this country.”

  Jake Waldroop recalled, “Yeah, a fish has taken my hook off before. You just have to go out on the bank and tie you on another one and go right back after ’im.

  “I was a-fishing up there on Kimsey Creek one time, and I had caught me a big brown trout. He was about sixteen inches long. I got him pulled out and put him on my string, then went on and throwed my bait in. I seen another coming at it, and he struck at the hook. I pulled, and I had him, and I said, ‘That’s the biggest fish I’ve ever caught in my life.’ He just took off right down the river with me, and I just had to let go. He got down in some muddy water, and there was a sandbar there. I finally got him out. I had caught him by his tail. He wasn’t as big as nothing, but he had more power to pull because of where he was caught. The hook had missed his mouth and caught in his tail. That hook is just as sharp as anything that can be made.

  “We had a big fish on Kimsey Creek, a big old rainbow. We fished for that fish for three years and never could catch it. One time it rained all night, and the next morning, while we were getting breakfast, a big old crawfish came crawling out the camp door. Al jumped up and got him and put him in a box that we had. He said he was going up the creek and catch that big trout that morning. I had to round up the sows and feed them. While I was down there, I heard Al yell. You never heard such in your life! So I went back to the camp and he said, ‘He got away’

  “I said, ‘No, he didn’t. What’s that you’ve got covered up over there?’ He had him covered up in some leaves. He uncovered him and took him out, and he was twenty-one inches long.

  “He said, I put that crawfish on and started up at the head and come down, and I felt him [on my line]. I let him chew on it a little bit until I got him.’

  “He had already swallowed that crawfish plus two more and two big chubs about five inches long. He had all that in him when Al caught him. He was a greedy one.

  “We played a trick on a man one time. His name was David Rouse. Frank Long and I were up there at our camp, and David came along. He was camping down at another camp, and we told him to go get his stuff and come on up there with us. He said, ‘Do you want to go fishing?’

  “We told him we were planning on going. So he said he would be back directly. He came on back in, got supper, and got ready to go. There was an old log laying out in the water. It would go down, then back up, down, then back up. I got my hook caught in it. It looked just like a fish when it went down and up, so we thought we would have some fun out of him. We told him there was a big fish down there at the river that he ought to get out of there. He went and put a number six hook on and went on down to the river. He pulled and pulled trying to get that big fish out. He said, Oh, I got him.’ He pulled ’til the end of his pole broke off. That old man died believing he had a fish at the end of his pole. We never did tell him no better.”

  Talmadge York told us, “A bunch of us, we’d take ol’ man Will Zoellner, and we’d camp. We’d set up at night ’til twelve or one o’clock listening to him tell these big ol’ fish tales. He said he caught ’em so old the fish had moss on their backs back in them streams. Course we believed all that back then.

  PLATE 156 Talmadge York

  “It tickled me to watch him eat ’em. He could eat fish! Especially trout. After that, we got to going to these stocked streams. Went to the top of Wildcat one time and caught a bunch of them. He wouldn’t let you cut their heads off. He eats heads and all. He can take a trout eight to ten inches long and start at the head and never spit a bone out. Eats every bone in there. I told him one time, ‘If I eat them bones, it’d choke me to death.’

  “He said, ‘When they get about right there [bottom of the trachea], they’re gone.’ And I seen him eat six or eight trout, bones and all.

  “Another time, me and Bobby Alexander was fishing. We was wading one side, both of us fishing from one side of the river, and there was fish right next to the bank under the bushes. It was deep out there, and we didn’t want to get in over our heads and get our stuff wet. Bobby reached up to hold on to a bush, and he pulled a hornets’ nest down. He didn’t even see it. That bush with that nest hit right on me. They liked to have stung me to death. Til bet there was twenty-five stings right around the back of my neck.

  “I went in under the water trying to get ’em off and finally did. We went on up the river, and there was a man and a woman camped up there. She had some alcohol and got me down on the table and fixed my neck up with that alcohol. They liked to have made me sick, so many of them.

  “Fish won’t never give up. I got one twenty-three inches long down in Dick’s Creek up in Kay Swafford’s field. I had a fly rod, and I had a lot of line out. I was fishing with worms that day, and I was pulling my line down through there, and he hit it. It was just a small creek, and he went thirty or forty feet. That’s how much line I had out. I just run down the creek with him trying to take up line and finally got him up to the end of my pole. I thought I just run him plumb out on the bank. I started running up that bank, and the end of my fly rod hit the bank and broke it slap in two. I just kept a-running, and I got my fish. He was a nice fish.

  “I don’t know of no big fishing tales. One time a bunch of us went over to a little stream in the Glades. The season wasn’t open yet. Me and my wife and Noah Hamby decided to go too. They was going to catch enough out of there for us to cook and eat. We got down in there. Cecil was watching for Bobby to fish, and he had hip boots. The little ol’ stream wasn’t three foot wide, but it was early spring. He had his spinning rod, and he was fishing in there.

  “My Jeep was just like the one the game warden had then, and Cecil thought it was the game warden coming in there. He hollered to Bobby that the game warden was a-coming, and he took out right across the hill. His spinner caught in a bush, and he just kept a-going. He run all his line off and broke it, and just k
ept right on a-going. We drove on down there and kept hollering for him to come back. I guess it was thirty minutes before he come back, scared to death. He had on them hip boots and had a hard time running.

  “One time a bunch of us went down to this old mill. Me and Harry walked across the mountain. We went different ways for different parts of the river. We fished down [stream] and didn’t get a strike below Bull Shoulder—way down—and it was just as cloudy as it could be and thundering. It come up a rain, and we waited just a few minutes.

  “Then we started fishing back up the river where we had already fished, and everywhere we’d throw that plug, we’d catch a fish. I reckon that rain started ’em a-biting.

  “Some of the boys would take us down to the river. Then they’d take the car around, and we’d fish up to them. A lot of times we’d camp, and cook and eat those fish right on the bank. We caught several good trout, brown trout.

  “One time down on Licklog, we fished for them little catfish that wouldn’t be but about six inches long. Every once in a while, we’d catch one of them big white suckers. You can’t eat them. You have to throw them back, but you have a lot of fun getting them out. They cut up awful. We caught some of them that weighed two pounds.

  “The last few times I went in there and fished that river, it was pretty rough and deep in places. I got to where I couldn’t get over the rocks, couldn’t get my feet up over them. But we had a lot of fun back in those times.”

  APPENDIX

  Compiled by Doug Adams and Kyle Burrell

  THE BASS FAMILIES

  Bass are in either the black bass “family” or the white bass family.

  BLACK BASS

  Black bass is a collective term used to indicate any one of ten large members of the sunfish family They live in warmer lakes and ponds, as well as warm to cool rivers. All black bass build nests in which the male guards the eggs.