The Bounty of Texas Page: 6
232 p. : ill., maps, ports. ; 24 cm.View a full description of this book.
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F. E. ABERNETHY
Spartan; the boat wouldn't hold any more and still leave us space to
sit in.
We made the second day quite well. Most of the time we were
between cut banks and in the middle of the channel. We stopped
when we got bored or tired of sitting and hunted and explored the
woods along the bottom. We met a commercial fisherman running
his nets, and he was the only person we saw during the whole trip. We
learned early not to shoot a squirrel over the water because it sank
like a stone. We trailed lines baited with squirrel and bird innards and
picked up a catfish now and then. We had a good camp on a clean bank
that second night. We ate fried squirrel and catfish, fried hot-water
cornbread, and sweet potatoes dipped in sugar and fried. Hubert did
the cooking, and I remember that supper as one of the great meals in
my life.
The river crested during that night. It was flowing clean of trash
the next morning when we shoved off. And it got wider as we flowed
along with it. Sometime during that morning we took target practice
at a huge water moccasin lying on a very distinctive looking log. We
were shooting a .30 carbine I had brought home from the service, and
we couldn't hit the side of a barn with it-nor a monstrous water
moccasin who soon tired of the sport and slid off the log to explore
more exciting fields. After six hours of floating and as evening drew
nigh, we again came alongside the very recognizable snake log. We
couldn't believe it! We speculated on coincidental similarities
among logs and whether or not logs could get out on the bank and
run down the river to get ahead of us. In the end we realized that we
had spent a good part of the day going in a circle in an oxbow or a
backwater current and that we were lost in an ocean of water and the
sun was setting. We did not panic but we became terribly concerned.
We paddled and tree-pushed around until we came to what we
hoped was the channel and very seriously began looking for land of
any description-which was what we found. Right at dusk we
located an island of mud which had obviously been under water for
many days. It was about the size of a good Mexican rug. It was six
inches out of the water at its highest, topped with squishy, ankle-
deep gumbo, and harboring a prosperous snake population that
reluctantly and with many a backward glance gave up their territory
at our insistence.<6>
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The Bounty of Texas (Book)
This volume of the Publications of the Texas Folklore Society contains a miscellany of Texas, Mexican and Spanish folklore, including information about hunting, canning, cooking, and other folklore. The index begins on page 225.
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Abernethy, Francis Edward. The Bounty of Texas, book, 1990; Denton, Texas. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc38873/m1/18/: accessed April 24, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; crediting UNT Press.