Land of Bears and Honey: A Natural History of East Texas 9780292748132

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Land of Bears and Honey

LAND OFBEARS AND HONEY A Natural History of East Texas

By Joe C. Truett and Daniel W. Lay Foreword by Francis Edward Abernethy

University of Texas Press, Austin

Copyright C 1984 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First Paperback Printing, 1994 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, University of Texas Press, Box 7819, Austin, Texas 78713. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA Truett, Joe C. (Joe Clyde), 1941Land of bears and honey. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Natural history—Texas. 2. Nature conservation—Texas. I. Lay, Daniel W. II. Title. QH105.T4T78 1984 333.73'13*09764 83-26000 ISBN-0-292-78134-2 © The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Dedicated to the memory of SANDY TRUETT who first came to the Land of Bears and Honey in 1965. Sandy was an artist; she liked to portray for people the animals she saw in less-traveled places. She found in East Texas a wonderful country. At the time of her death in 1972, she was living in a cabin ten miles from Jasper, drawing, painting, and raising two boys. Would that all who find as much in this land have as much to give.

Unfinished pastel of a red-cockaded woodpecker drawn for Dan Lay by Sandy Truett in 197K.

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Contents

Foreword

ix

Acknowledgments

xiv

Preface to the Paperback Edition Preface

xix

1. The Virgin Forest 2. Grass

xv

1

22

3. Land of Bears and Honey 4. Tooth and Claw 5. Wings

40

56

71

6. Home Is the Hunter

89

7. Wilderness Trilogy

107

8. Legacy

136

9. When the Stars Begin to Fall References Index

165 171

149

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Foreword By Francis Edward AbernetJiy

FOR YEARS I hunted a long sand ridge in Sunny Dell Pasture in Tyler County. It was covered with huge post oaks that had been there since the beginning, and the mast from that patch of woods was prodigious. Although big bucks walked the ridge, nothing grander than a forked horn ever honored me with his presence; but I watched a world of does nosing through the leaves looking for acorns, and listened with flared nostrils and backed ears as a snuffling sound turned into an armadillo. Once I watched a bright ribbon of red-and-yellow killafella undulate through a shallow pool of dried oak leaves, searching for skinks. Once the dry leaves rattled and I slipped off the safety and got ready for a herd of wild hogs to come by, and it was a tribe of twenty or thirty fox squirrels. My jaw still drops when I think of that sight. And then another once I went on a cool October Saturday to entice a mess of squirrels to a stew I had planned, and the great ridge was bare, scraped down to white sand. Not a stump or a laurel, not even a clump of rosinweed stood. All that remained was piles of wood debris, neatly pushed up in long windrows. The land, once rich in leaf and life, was desolate and no birds sang. I left the ridge and followed the remains of the old logging road that led through the clear cut to the valley lands below. I passed and tried to make out where my Leanin' Tree Stand had been, where a buck deer had run under my ten-year-old son, who had looked on in amazement and never thought to shoot, by a platform stand that was more comfortable than productive, even to the ever-faithful Red Oak Stand, multiscarred with the marks of lixj

my climbing hooks. It was all gone, a world of woods I had known and loved and had been comfortable in. I talked to a man who worked for the lumber company that owned the land and his question in answer to my question was, "Do you pull weeds in your garden?" I do, sometimes. The land from his point of view was the company's garden to be planted in neat, cultivatable rows of slash and loblolly pine to answer an ever-expanding population's ever-increasing demand for lumber to build with. The oaks and hardwoods were weeds, and the life they nurtured—the possums and coons, the good Gods that hammered on the dead limbs, the Betsey bugs that crawled beneath the bark of fallen logs—was not as important as the needs of man, "the crooking of whose finger turns the mightiest pachyderm into billiard balls." And perhaps they are not. Perhaps the growing needs of man and the growing population of mankind will require so much of the Earth Mother's life and energy that she can suckle no more. Perhaps if the birth rate continues to rise and infant mortality continues to drop and life expectancy increases every decade and we make a fetish of sustaining every form of human life—perhaps we will cover the earth like the squirming larvae in a fly blow and consume all meat and matter that falls within reach of our maw. Then a discussion of what to do about chinquapin trees and chicken snakes will be academic. Anything that feeds will rob us of food to eat and anything that takes up agrarian growing space—a big white oak, for example—will be pulled as a weed to make way for foodstuff. Sterile pine plantations and other fastgrowing woods will be cultivated for the little lumber we might need to supplement a world of plastics and synthetics. I shall stop this peregrination before I work myself into a frenzy, but in a way this is what Land of Bean and Honey is about. It is about the natural history of a piece of land—East Texas—and the changes that have taken place under the laws of nature and under the hand of man over the past 150 years. This 150 years isn't much time in earth history, really just the blink of an eye. Over geologic millennia the face of East Texas

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has undergone many changes. It has been under ocean's water, has grown luxuriant tropical ferns, and has watched as northern beeches inarched down to invade its territory during the Ice Ages. But that took hundreds of thousands of years. What Joe Truett and Dan Lay are talking about is this blink of time's eye, in which the land of bears and honey, this bounty of woods and wildlife, melts away under the heat of multiplying humanity. Land of Bean and Honey is beautifully written. It is dramatic and poetic literature, and it is much more than a simple ecological study and report. The authors tell a sad and moving story with wisdom and with a deep understanding of the land and the life it nurtures. It is a tragedy, too, the tale of a great giant brought down by inevitability. They tell a complex story simply, directly, and with deep feeling—but not with sentimentality. It is as it is. I came to East Texas from the parched plains of the Texas Panhandle in the Dust Bowl thirties. The green of it was a balm to eye and soul, and I quickly came to love it with unabashed chauvinism. East Texas in the thirties, however, was not what it is now. We were in the Depression and East Texans were living on subsistence farms, planting every inch they could plow, and eating anything they could shoot or catch and put into a pot of stew. When I started hunting in East Texas in the thirties the woods were sparse, and seeing a deer track was a natural wonder. World War II marked the end of those lean years. East Texans left their farms for the armed forces or for the big money at the shipyards and war plants, and few returned to a rural life after the war. Forests took over the fields and the game came back to the land. The forests took over the fields, but the lumber companies took over the forests. In their favor let me say that in most cases they cut only to meet the demands of their own sawmills and the market. But by the late sixties the market demanded more lumber, and businesses survive only when they can supply the demands of a population's market. They cut what timber was ready and then in preparation for future demands began clear-cutting and planting quick-growing pine plantations. The future will be asUi]

sured of some lumber, but the life that lives off the rich mast and decay of hardwood forests will suffer in the sterile pine fields. Four of us have a lease called the Little Sanchez in Nacogdoches County. Its three hundred acres of bottomland lie in a big bend of the Angelina River. The bottomland timber hasn't been cut since the thirties, and the big pin oaks and white oaks have joined their crowns together to shade out the growth below. In places the bottom is clear and open for several hundred yards in all directions to welcome the river's flood as it cuts across the bend and fills the oxbows and soaks and feeds the roots of the grand old trees. Wood ducks nest in hollows near the river's banks, and cat squirrels scamper nervously through the treetops at the water's fringe. Last summer I watched the growth of two hissing balls of white down that over several weeks became buzzards that gawkily hopped and then flapped away to fulfill their sentinel destinies on high. The Angelina hems the woods' edge and usually runs tobacco brown, fed with runoff from East Texas red-dirt hills and creek banks; sometimes it is almost clear. Bream socialize in the brush piles, and drum croak at dusk in the quiet water of the deep bends. Kentucky bass lie on the slow side of a down log and flash out at passing spottails. Ops and blues cruise the bottom of the riverbed, fattening on crawfish. Generations of life are born and die and the river flows on. We fish and hunt, and camp and cook, or sit on our high bank at sundown sipping bourbon and branch water and considering what the people in downtown Houston are doing. Sometimes when I'm floating along down the river beneath trees that shake hands above the water and hear the cicadas singing to each other from the willows and smell the wet freshness of it—sometimes during these holy times I feel so close to the woods and the water that I become the river flowing forever and the sweet willows that always grow beside it. And I consciously think that there is nowhere and nothing in the universe that I had rather be. Then, one day last winter—while the river ran low and cold and almost clear, and the trees were almost bare and the woods Ixii]

were gray except where a magnolia squatted or where pine saplings grew in a clearing where an old giant had fallen—we saw the powder-blue spray marks on trees, and we knew that lumbermen had been in our woods, eyeing and calculating, figuring board feet, considering interest rates and how much hardwood the market would bear. And we were troubled. But, of course, the woods were not ours. They belong to a lumber company. We claim them only because we pay a usage lease and we walk among them and hunt and fish under their branches. And we know and watch the life that swarms and scurries and slithers among the reaches of this rich bottomland. But we felt threatened and intruded upon and quickly frightened that a comfortable and habitual way of our lives would go with the fall of the great ones that protected us for a little while from the outside. It is now summer and the woods are rich and green, and they haven't come back yet, the lumbermen. We haven't heard yet the sound of chain saws whining or dozers chugging or the splintering crash of limbs as big trunks sag to the leaf-black floor. And we still go, squeezing our pickups down the tight, brush-lined, tworut road to our camp on the high bank—and always to the good sound, the universally blessed sound of fresh running water. The saplings grow thick in the light let in along the road, and the briars and muscadine and berry vines hide from sight some of the trees of the big woods beyond. But a once-in-awhile glance picks up the alien blue blaze hidden among the green, and we wonder if the hour has come round at last for the lumbermen to begin weeding their garden—our garden in the Little Sanchez on the Angelina.

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Acknowledgments

Dr. James G. Teer, Dr. Fred S. Guthery, and, especially, Dr. Jack M. Inglis gave critical review and encouragement. Mary Schlentz helped with thoughtful review and many suggestions. Additional comment and support were received from Dr. Francis E. Abernethy, Mason Cloud, Dr. William B. Davis, Dr. James G. Dickson, Dr. C. A. McMahan, and Dr. Wendell G. Swank. Jeanne Brahmsteadt typed the original manuscript and offered useful suggestions. Judy Landrum typed portions of manuscript revisions and prepared artwork for the maps. Jean Erwin assembled the final manuscript, with the usual last-minute changes. Families of the authors patiently endured the time spent in preparation of the book. Sam and Jed Truett spent long hours on their own while the manuscript preempted family time. Mr. and Mrs. R. A. Truett waited years for the work to become a reality. Lula Mae Lay went along with the project with humor and grace and this was not taken for granted. LGL Ecological Research Associates, Inc., and staff members of Bryan, Texas, contributed understanding, encouragement, and technical support. The manuscript received proficient and friendly editing from outside editor Christine Gever and in-house editor and manager Holly Carver. Some will go unrecognized—those who served through example, professional skills, or personal touch.

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Preface to the

Paperback Edition

MUCH HAS HAPPENED in the decade since this book first made its way into the hands of readers. World events by which we measure change have come quickly. Indeed, rapid change has come to permeate our lives. Among the hills and bottomlands of eastern Texas, changes in the landscape also have accelerated. There is a certain pattern in the kinds of alterations on the land—who owns the land has made a major difference. We believe that managers of the National Forests, our biggest chunk of public land, have made a turnabout from long-term policy. Silviculture, the farming of the forests for wood output, no longer dominates decisions; management for diversity of plants and animals is wrestling for the wheel. Hardwoods have come of useful age in streamside stands left years ago for wildlife. Redcockaded woodpeckers are coming back in places. Those who plan the future for the public lands look at 1930s maps and talk about what used to be; they speak hopefully of oaks and hickories coming in where pine beetles left holes in solid stands of loblolly. But on private lands, economics calls the shots, even more than in the past. Following years of government-subsidized conversion of hardwood stands to pine plantations, some timber industries now show a sudden interest in managing for hardwoods, but only because the value of hardwood pulp for fine paper has escalated. Indeed, the increased value of hardwoods now allows owners more profitably to manage bottomland acreage, which is often too wet for pine but fine for oak and gum. Current plans of industry call for cutting hardwood stands every 40 years or less—before [xvj

the trees produce acorns or hollows sufficient to support much wildlife. Timber corporations see, more than ever, that closer management is the price they pay to maximize their profits. Some hire wildlife biologists to manage hunting for the remnant game populations on their lands and to help them deal with public opposition to their timber management practices. Many now use herbicides instead of fire to kill the hardwood trees in stands reserved for pine—people grumble less if they can't see smoke. One company seeks legislation to prevent Japan from horning in on its hardwood-chips-for-paper industry. All employ methods to intensify their harvests—cutting trees on shorter cycles, using smaller parts of trees, enlarging monoculture stands. The profit motive not only drives companies but more and more has come to dominate the lives of individuals. Where once our universities taught students responsibility to society, they now train them in the methods that will help them locate jobs. Jobs command a kind of worship, and in the workplace employees take as gospel truth the printouts from computers that have been programmed to forecast short-term profits. Profit seeking tempts the small landowner to put pressure on the land. He or she wants to graze a cow or horse, build a rental property, or sell the trees to meet a payment on a car. Hard times amplify these pressures. Each human generation is still larger than the last. Sons and daughters slice family holdings into parcels that grow smaller over time, and a night flight over rural private acreage shows a growing sea of homefront lights. Grandaddy made his living from the land with relative impunity, but he had lots of land and simpler tastes. Five acres in our time cannot feed a growing family and have oak trees, deer, and quail to boot. But the family living on acreage it owns has a better life than most. Being near the land benefits both people and the land. However, we see a growing tendency for most people to live separate from the land, and this bodes ill for both. [xvi]

A major impact of this separateness arises from the economic motives of the absentee landlord. Many owners live in cities, acquiring pieces of the country as inheritance or for investment. They mid it easy in this circumstance to scalp the land for money— they send someone else to cut the trees or build the condominiums, the check comes in the mail, and nothing changes on the map. People, like the land, suffer when the two are disconnected. Fifty years ago, the variety that people need was met by trees and birds of different kinds and a hundred moods of weather. Now, dangerous city streets, posted land, and unfamiliarity with snakes and bugs keep us from places where natural diversity can still be found. We entertain ourselves indoors—at a dozen shopping malls, by an endless retinue of "products" built to sell, and with television shows that titillate with constant change. As we harden our addiction to the constructed scenes that come at us with accelerating frequency, we lose interest in the slower-moving natural world. Our urge to know the different kinds of plants and animals, and even our ability to see that they are different, fades. Plants are green, animals are usually brown, and they are harder to spot in the woods than they are on the television screen. For these reasons, East Texas land increasingly represents to people only income. It yields pleasure to the extent that it provides commodities that build and fuel the world we have built— wood fiber, beef, and residential lots. Managers produce commodities more efficiently in large-scale operations that focus on a single product. The result is increasingly evident: ever larger tree farms, hay pastures, and housing developments. Wood and beef are increasingly the products of choice for East Texas lands. Once the owner or the manager settles on a product, plants and animals that interfere with its production become weeds. East Texans come from a long line of fanners, and they know what to do with weeds. Nonetheless, despite the increasing tendency for land to be managed only for commodity production, we have been encouraged by the emergence of individuals who want to curb the im-

[xvii]

pact of the marketplace. Some hold jobs with land resource agencies, others work with industry, and some hold no professional affiliations. Many are young, but some are old. They hold in common a conviction that farming for material gain is not the only legitimate use of land. Under guidance from such people, management of public lands for more diverse ecosystems has assumed greater priority than it previously enjoyed. Many of these women and men recognize the need to reconnect house-bound people with a more natural landscape. Some work to preserve or restore ecological diversity on public lands; some try to increase the public's access to land; some teach. Informal communications networks have arisen to connect these stewards for the land with one another. Public attitudes are changing, partly from the efforts of these dedicated people. Taxpayers' objections to using tax money to purchase lands for public enjoyment are fewer than they might have been during the last generation. Old-timers build birdhouses and let odd corners of the back pasture grow up to trees and shrubs. The Federal Endangered Species Act, despite unwarranted abuses of its authority, holds strong against attempts to rescind it. The information media tell us that few politicians, sports stars, or other public figures believe we are growing too fast and consuming too much. We do know that these notions are important to some people, and throughout history changes often started with convictions at the grass-roots level. By their very nature, people always will be motivated to some degree to enhance and display their material well-being. Most people, including land managers, will find it tempting to use economic income as the final measure of success. Perhaps this can change—it has come as a surprise to us, for example, that writing this book was one of our most enjoyable, though least economically rewarding, ventures. We thank the many readers who appreciated the first edition. Your letters and words helped more than you may know. If readers of this second printing find it to have been worth its cost in wood, we will have been amply rewarded. [ xviii J

Preface

For when I shall have brought them into the land which I sware unto their fathers, that floweth with milk and honey; and they shall have eaten and filled themselves, and waxen fat; then will they turn unto other gods, and serve them, and provoke me, and break my covenant. Deuteronomy 31:20

RAIN COMMENCED near the Georgia line and the road became mud. The traveler pulled his hat low and kept on, boots sucking at the ground. Water leaked through his coat and trickled down his back. Houses stood by the way, some with other travelers on verandas, waiting out the rain. But the man did not stop. It was over. Lee had surrendered to Grant at Appomattox. Night came and the rain slacked. The traveler halted to build a fire, using tinder carefully protected in an oilcloth. Steam rose from the legs of his pants and his jacket. He stood before the fire until his clothes dried, then sitting with his back to an oak, he slept. Twice he awoke to rebuild the fire, once at a barred owl's hoot and again near dawn when the chill reached deep. He was far down the road when the Alabama sun burned through to warm his back. Cotton fields, choked with weeds, flanked him on left and right. The road hardened in the sunlight; he stooped to scrape the last mud from his boots. Blue jays screamed beside a farmyard where white-haired children stared [xix]

between pickets. Cardinals repeated, mile after mile, "Sample! Sample! Sample! Sample!" Days later he rafted the flooded Mississippi, then sloshed onward for two more miles before reaching dry ground. Uphill and down, daylight to dark, smaller streams came and fell behind. Late one evening he reached the Sabine River, and camped on the east bank. The fire felt extra good that night. He was nearly home. At daybreak he swam the river. Climbing out of the bottomland timber, he stopped to scan the ridge ahead. Deer watched from a rifleshot away. They danced over the hill and out of sight as he approached. The odor of hogs lay heavy in a baygall; their vacant bed of pine needles was heaped high beneath wax-myrtle bushes. A turkey gobbled ahead; then a flock of them thundered away like Yankee cannons. Halting to rest beside a spring seeping from the hillside, the man spied a bear track oozing with water. Near dusk he paused on a high hill. Ahead across the pale green of bottomland timber he traced the course of the Angelina River. Near at hand, on a familiar ridge, a thread of smoke curled above the trees. Drawing a deep breath, he moved on, more slowly this time. Little had changed. He was home. A century passed, and a boy was growing up in Angelina County. His roots were deep in the pinewoods sand and bottomland clay. His great-great-grandfather lay under the red oaks on the ridge, where you could still dimly see the crossed sabers on the gravestone. Great-grandfather and Great-grandmother were there, too, and Grandma. Grandfather was still alive; he puttered around the house and in the woods. Grandfather loved to talk. He talked mostly about bears and wolves and panthers, and about the fantastic shots he had made on deer. He talked about the old days and how good it had been back then.

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When the boy was young, Grandfather took him into the woods. They hunted squirrels and looked for the rare sign of deer. The man showed the boy where the beech trees bore nuts for the gray squirrels, and where razorback hogs came for acorns in the fall. He pointed to the tracks of raccoons in the bottomlands; to the white geese in fall, winging their way south over the treetops. Soon the boy walked away from the old man. His legs grew long and he ranged far afield, filling his days and his head with the things Grandfather had taught. Often he wished for bears and panthers. He flinched at changes in the woods. Log trucks hauled away the beeches, and bulldozers leveled the hickory grove where fox squirrels had come in October. Bermuda grass pastures grew in their places. He shifted his hunting grounds to other woods. One September morning he packed his clothes, kissed his mother, and took the long road to college. Those first years were hard. Homesickness consumed him at times, usually with letters from home but sometimes unaccountably. Hours in the woods looking for a squirrel to stir from its nest had taught him patience, and he waited. Two years passed. He packed once again, this time for the first trip home. The bus traveled a day and a night, and when he got off, his father and mother were there at the station. He saw tears in his mother's eyes as she came up for a hug. His father's hand gripped his. "Welcome home, John." And "My, you've changed!" They drove the final leg that spring morning, down the narrow highway to the turnoff. They came out of the trees and in view of the home place. How different it looked! The house was tiny in a huge space. Trees in windrowed piles reached to where the hills dropped to the bottomland. Cattle munched between windrows. Not far away the bottomland itself was covered with water. The new dam, of course. There were no tears. The boy had learned well.

[xxi]

Plants and animals determine the quality of land. But quality, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. To a farmer, high quality is more corn and less crabgrass; to a rancher it may be steers, not deer. A child, concerned with the frenzy of anthills and the mystery of cocoons, is unimpressed with cornfields and registered beef. There is only one thing invariably true: for each person quality means a different sum of things, and each will choose, from those things that are available, different ones of them to appreciate. To maintain for everyone the highest quality in land, then, is to retain options for choice. Our great-grandparents could choose among beavers, bears, and bluestem because they were born in a land where the plants and animals had not been culled by civilized people. But in each succeeding generation some plants and some animals faded out; the options became fewer. It is our purpose in this book to show what the options were and why they have diminished. It is our hope to suggest how some of what is left might be kept for those yet to come.

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1. The Virgin Fbrest

ONE MORNING several years ago, two men slid a boat into the Angelina River at Bevilport in Jasper County. A granite marker under a nearby sycamore marked a time past when bigger boats had bustled upriver from Beaumont. But now the water slid by quietly; only the call of a pileated woodpecker came from down the river. The men started the motor. It sputtered and the boat moved to midstream. They headed downriver with the current. Less than an hour later they swung the boat toward the righthand bank. There, where a sign tacked to a dead cypress told them they were entering a State Wildlife Area, they nosed the boat into a hidden waterway called Bee Tree Slough. They cut the motor and took up paddles. Around the first bend they emerged to a vista of snags standing in the still water. Wood ducks squealed and rose above the trees. Deeper they wound into the forest, into the place called the Forks of the River. It lay between the Neches River and the Angelina, just above where they joined. Dam B, twenty miles downstream, kept its waterways flooded. The Forks was wild country. Endless sloughs snaked among cypress and tupelo gum trees; oaks lined the banks. Alligators sank beneath the water; a few years before, deer hunters on one of the sloughs had shot a gator that weighed over twelve hundred pounds. Legend said ivory-billed woodpeckers still lived there. Toward noon, near the confluence of the two rivers, they found an ancient black gum tree. It towered above its neighbors, catching the attention of the boatmen when they were still two hun(1)

dred yards away across an open slough. They paddled over to look. It was big. They climbed ashore and measured it with the tierope of the boat. The trunk was nearly five feet in diameter. It was easy to see why early loggers had missed it. Sloughs separated it from easy access. Federal ownership of the land surrounding Steinhagen Lake above Dam B gave it final security. They walked around the black gum and looked up at the branches, spreading seventy-five feet above their heads. The tree had probably sprouted before Cabeza de Vaca landed on Galveston Island over three centuries before. They speculated about bears foraging below it in earlier years for the fallen fruit or stretching to sharpen their claws on the bark. About passenger pigeons in its crown, and generations of squirrels in the cavity of a broken limb. Gray squirrels commonly bear two litters a year; the one cavity may have yielded a thousand young since its beginning. The men knew of another place, not far to the north, where other trees held secrets older than the first plowed ground. It was in Sabine County a few miles west of Hemphill, beside the highway. There, in a ten-acre park protected from loggers, stood a grove of perhaps the oldest pines in East Texas. Years ago, one of these men had discovered the grove of old trees. It was like finding a story of the past, that other men had forgotten. He returned again and again, to look and listen. This man had worked years in the twentieth-century pinewoods, measuring, recording. In his work he looked especially for a small, rare bird called the red-cockaded woodpecker. It was scarce because it needed old trees in which to drill its nesting place. Red-cockaded woodpeckers had found the trees by the roadside. One spring he banded four of them, and began to study their habits. He soon saw many other animals living in the holes they had left. There were flycatchers, sparrow hawks, flickers, starlings, and bluebirds. Pileated woodpeckers had enlarged some of the

[2]

The Forks of the River.

holes and in these bigger holes lived wood ducks, fox squirrels, flying squirrels, other woodpeckers, and even a colony of honeybees. The younger forest across the fence from the park had promised homes only for people. The men stood a short while longer beneath the black gum. One took a photograph of his companion standing beside its trunk. They climbed into the boat then and pulled away from the bank. The sun had started downward; they cranked the motor and slowly wound their way back to the Angelina River. The First People In time forgotten a village people lived on a piece of high ground between two rivers that would later be called Neches and Angelina. In the red soil they grew corn, melons, beans, and squash. [3]

These people lived there generation after generation. The white men who found them later called them the Hasinai, and their tribe the Caddo. The forest was their home. To the north and east of the village, the woods lay open on the hills, and the trees were often small. There were many places of grass without trees. To the west the grass country grew even larger and the woolly bison lived there; often they came as far east as the village. On the hills to the south, stretching for a long day's travel, grew the trees with long needles. These woods opened to the sky, and a hunter could race for a half day through them without touching a branch. They made a singing in the wind, and smelled like summer sunshine. Down beside the river hovered the dark woods. They made the voices of the small birds loud in the midday shadows. In the harvest season, nuts tumbled from far above, splashing in the quiet pools and thumping on the ground, and one could find many baskets of them in a day. The trunks stood far apart, ringed high from the river's floods and sometimes so big three men could not touch hands around them. South beyond the trees with long needles, in the country where the two rivers came together, the dark woods crept out upon the hills. In them the ground was soft like a bear's skin, and one's feet sank into the leaves. And beyond that, it was said, nearer the southern land-without-trees and the endless water, the branches hung thick about one's face as well as high above, and the ground filled with water when the rains came.

Owl's Eye left the village early. The pine trees stood far apart and black in the chilly damp. He struck out on a course taken by the rivers, moving swiftly to keep warm. Just as the sun began to melt the gray of morning, he came across a trail that angled in from the west. He took it, knowing he could follow it and trails like it to the village at his journey's end. Tall grass laden with dew leaned over the trail. Soon he was wet from ankles to waist.

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He made good time, stopping once to rest and to drink at a spring. The trail crossed and mingled with others. Tracks of deer marked them all. He could see far ahead, and now and again he saw the deer looking at him between the tall pine trunks. Big brown squirrels, brothers of the little gray ones that lived in the river woods, raced up the trunks to disappear in holes left by the woodpeckers. Then, shortly after the sun began its journey downward, he looked back and saw a bad sign. It was dark blue toward the home of the winter wind. But it was not the blue of sunny skies; it had a somber hue. He knew he must prepare for a cold night— the north wind was coming fast. The norther was upon him when he left the ridge and its open forest. A trickling stream led to a thicket of wax-myrtle. He stopped there, beneath towering bay trees, beside a downed pine log. He broke off a limb knot and pounded at the base of the log until it splintered. A thick, resinous odor wafted in the wind. He laid out a small hickory bow, a board of mulberry wood, and a ball of dead cypress bark. With a quick twist, he wound the bowstring once around a short, straight stick. Placing the lower end of the stick into a hole in the mulberry board, he held the upper point in a notched chip of wood in his left hand. Then with his right hand he drew the bow back and forth, back and forth. Soon the board began to smoke at the point of the stick. He pressed the cypress bark against it with the toe of his moccasin. The tinder smoldered; then there came a glow. He held his face near the smoke and blew softly. The fire soon wanned his hands, and the black smoke boiled up from the pieces of pine heartwood stacked close together. Leaving the fire, he snapped wax-myrtle branches from nearby shrubs, binding them together with small vines. He leaned the green bundles against the big log, and made a cozy shelter on its south side. It was dusk when he opened his leather pouch of parched corn. Through the night the log deflected the north wind. Owl's Eye slept, waking now and again to put more pine on the fire. [51

The morning dawned clear. The north wind blew cold and dry. It pushed at his back as he moved up on the ridge to resume his journey, and soon he was running down the trail. Behind him, beside his nest of wax-myrtles, the old log smoldered. The wind swirled, ashes scattered, and then a flame caught. The wind fanned the blaze higher. Sometimes Owl's Eye left the ridge to travel nearer the river. There he crossed creeks lined with giant cypress trees. The bottoms of the larger streams were sometimes thick with cane, and sometimes so open he walked without touching a leaf. In these open bottoms, oak and hickory branches laced together a hundred feet over his head. Their massive trunks were mud-stained to the height of his chin. Mosquitoes swarmed up from still pools. He saw the tracks of a big cat in the mud bank of a stream. He kept watch to the sides and frequently glanced behind. One could never tell when the cats might lie in wait or follow. The tracks he saw of bears and wolves concerned him less. The sun had again started its downward trek when he reached the village clearing. Dogs barked; children streamed from straw huts, their black hair whipping in the wind. They saw it was Owl's Eye, then pointed toward where he had come. He looked back; a pall of smoke towered in the distant sky. That night he and others of his age talked of hunting, and how they would take their bows and throwing sticks out tomorrow if the fire came nearer. It would be easy to get the game that fled before the fire. They had done it many times before. Owl's Eye watched the flickering campfire, seeing in his mind how the woods fire would go. When fires came from the northwest they kept coming where the pinewoods were open and the grass stood tall and dry. If the wind should stop, the fire might die down to low, wavering blazes in the night, but in the morning the wind would again urge it on. The rabbits and deer would race before the fire, without a place to hide. He moved his fingers along his hickory bow. The dogs would sniff out burned carcasses of small animals, which perhaps might not even need more cooking, but the deer

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would not be caught by the blaze. The bears would mostly be safe in the bottomlands, which would not burn, but bears should be hunted earlier in the year anyway. Owl's Eye dozed. . . . The Settlers Many years after Owl's Eye had passed from the land, there came to the village rumors of men with pale skins and hairy faces. The grandchildren of Owl's Eye saw the first ones; they came from the west, on the backs of noisy beasts with heavy feet. After they had passed, the children ran to stare in wonderment at the huge tracks shaped like clamshells. These men seemed preoccupied with the squash, corn, and beans that grew in the fields. They sifted the dirt through their fingers, as if it inspired a vision that could be seen by them only. Then they moved on. Generations passed and more of them came. A few stayed, to learn the language of the Indians, and to tell of their own gods. They built stone and log houses, and told stories to each other with marks on thin sheets of strange bark. Then one day, there came one from the east, who hurried westward, looking to the Indians like many of the rest. But not known to them he carried a message that would be of inestimable importance to their people. His name was Stephen Austin. Austin crossed the Sabine River and entered the province of Texas for the first time Monday morning July 16,1821, on the old San Antonio Road from Natchitoches, Louisiana, to Nacogdoches, Texas. Only two days earlier he had received the letter he had long awaited—permission from the Spanish government to form a colony in Texas. That night in his journal he described his sudden entry, four miles west of the Sabine, into "a rolling country thinly Timbered soil about the color of Spanish Browne, & in some places redder." At Nacogdoches four days later he wrote: 'The general face of the country from within 5 miles of the Sabine to Nacogdoches is [7]

gently rolling and very much resembles the Barrens of Kentucky, except that the growth of timber is larger and not so bushy— Black jack and Black Hickory, Mulberry is the principal timber, but it [is] all too low and scruby for Rails, or building, except on the Creeks where the timber is very good and lofty—the grass is more abundant and of a ranker and more luxuriant growth than I have ever seen before in any country and is indicative of a strong rich soil, the appearance of the Corn through the country proves to me beyond a doubt that the red soil is nearly if not quite as good as the black. The soil generally is a very red the richest is a pure Spanish Browne." Austin traveled on west beyond the East Texas woodlands to found his colony, but others quickly followed the settlers' way he had blazed, to stop within the forest. They poured across the Sabine after 1821, each eager to find his place in the virgin country. Soon they spread over the countryside. Not the least of these was a man named 0. M. Roberts, who came to Texas twenty years after Austin. Like many, he followed Austin's route. He said of the Redlands: The face of the country is bolder and more broken than that south of it, and it is overgrown with a rather low, well-branched forest of hickory, blackjack, post oak, red oak, elm and other trees whose foliage is a very rich, dark green color." It was not by accident that Roberts stopped in the Redlands, in San Augustine. The young town at that time was the legal and political center for a large portion of the surrounding country. Roberts was a lawyer. Practicing law in early East Texas was not easy. As well as requiring one to administer justice where laws were few, it called for a measure of physical hardihood. When it was time for court at some distant county seat, Roberts, a dozen other lawyers, and the judge would bring out blankets, slickers, and tie-ropes and mount their horses in the red dirt streets of San Augustine for the journey. On one such trip, having been the youngest in the party, he'd "had the honor of being selected to swim the Neches

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River on horseback to bring over the ferry boat from the opposite side." Roberts had a settler's eye for countryside and a lawyer's dream of empire. During his journeys he kept notes about the soils, trees, streams, and farms. Years later, when he sat as governor of the state of Texas, he published a book from his writings. Perhaps more clearly than any other document it portrayed the East Texas woodlands as they appeared to the settlers. He wrote of the piney woods: "Immediately above and north of the level Gulf prairie, in southeastern Texas, lies a body of longleaf pine, over one hundred miles in width, on the Sabine River from about Sabine Town [east of present-day Hemphill] down that stream, thence west, diminishing in width for about one hundred miles. This lies just below the old San Antonio road as it passes through eastern Texas, where it is in the shape of high, rolling ridges or undulating plains, and becomes more and more level as you go southward, until it reaches the level Gulf prairie, which it joins. . . . There is other timber than pine upon, and adjoining, the numerous streams of this region. The timber grows rapidly, with long, slender, pliant branches, and is intermixed with evergreens and vines,—especially the Muscadine vine,—indicating the prevalence of a great deal of moisture. The numerous and never-failing streams furnish water-power to saw up the pine, cypress and other trees, into lumber." There was a piece of hardwood country within the pines: There is about the middle of this pine region, a very fertile belt, which may be denominated the Magnolia belt, about twenty miles wide running westwardly from the Sabine River. . . . It is not an unbroken strip, but is run into by the pine at different places, so as to make it irregular in form. It is overgrown with a magnificent forest of mammoth white-oaks, beech, sugartree, elm, water-oak and magnolia, with innumerable evergreens and vines, presenting, even upon the ridges, the appearance of a rich bottom adjoining a river. This forest grows on a deep, coarse, sandy loam, frequently

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with no firm subsoil for many feet in depth, so that, when very wet, a cane can be pushed down by hand ten feet, in many localities. . . . there are in this belt, however, spots of black, stiff, limy soil, just such as is found in the richest prairies, which is often covered sparsely with scrubby pine trees. These spots diminish in size, as you go from west to east." Governor Roberts had watched settlers skirt the sterile soils of the longleaf pine country to lodge their farms in the fertile redland and the hardwood hammocks. To the settlers, there was little charm in the stretches of sterile pinelands; they called them "pine barrens." Westbound traveler Amos Parker wrote in 1834: "Immediately after leaving the town [of Nacogdoches] we came into pine woods again; to all appearance, the same we had already passed over—rolling, sandy soil; the trees straight and tall, but standing so far apart, that a carriage might go almost anywhere among them. The grass grew beneath them, and we could see a great distance as we passed along. And thus it continued, for about twenty miles, with hardly a house on the way. I thought, we never should have done with pine woods. We had traveled about three hundred miles from Natchez; and two-thirds of the way had been pine woods; and here they made their appearance again. To ride a short distance in them, is not unpleasant; but to continue on, day after day, is too monotonous—there is no change of scenery." Another piece of woods the first settlers hesitated to invade was the Big Thicket, although some perched their houses at its margin. The early botanist Dr. W. L. Bray called it part of the loblolly belt: The forests of the loblolly belt are the densest in Texas, with a very thick undergrowth of shrubs and small shadeloving trees. The 'Big Thicket' of Hardin County, famous as an almost impenetrable forest, is of this type. .. . half-swampy flats grow a jungle of hardwood, with some loblolly, undergrowth, climbing vines, and often palmetto thickets, in which this species [palmetto] attains the unusual height of 10 to 12 feet, with a trunk rising 3 feet above the ground. . . . Oaks are especially abundant

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Prairies, plains, and woodlands of nineteenth-century Texas. Based upon Governor 0. M. Roberts' depiction of 1881.

[HI

and of excellent growth throughout the area, except upon sandy knolls and ridges, where loblolly makes a pure stand. . . ." Gideon Lincecum traversed a part of the Big Thicket in Polk County in February, 1835: This day passed through the thickest woods I ever saw. It perhaps surpasses any Country in the world for brush there is 8 or 10 kinds of ever green undergrowth, privy, holly, 3 or 4 sorts of bay, wild peach tree, bay berry, &C, and so thick that you could not see a man 20 yards for miles, the soil is pretty good and the water the very best."

When the first settlers came, they wanted fertile soil; good water; a variety of timber for houses, furniture, and fences; and grass for their stock to graze. They did not find all four in all places, but they did in many places: the virgin country came as near paradise as any had seen. The Lumbermen When the lumbermen came, they wanted timber. The best timber was longleaf, and it grew in the piney woods. The longleaf stands seemed a logger's dream come true. The trees stood tall and straight with few branches and little underbrush, and seemingly all about the same size —just right for sawlogs. It was hard to believe.

One June afternoon in 1907, Professor Herman Haupt Chapman stepped down from the train at Doucette in Tyler County. His Yale University students had found much to amuse them on the long train trip from Connecticut, especially at New Orleans. But Chapman was glad the train ride was ended. He was anxious to get his students into the woods before the best part was logged.

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Chapman was a forester. At Yale he taught the management and use of timber. He had a fascination with longleaf pine timber, because he knew it to be the basis for a vast industry in the South. From the train window he had seen miles and miles of cutover longleaf country on his way to East Texas. Longleaf timber seemed made to exploit. The trees stood far apart and there was no brush to hinder the sawyers with their long crosscut saws. Teams of mules and oxen found it easy to snake the downed logs between the standing trunks to waiting railroad cars. Chapman knew the short history of the industry in East Texas. Born a struggling babe with the river traffic, it had awaited the coming of rails late in the last century to burst into its greatest vigor. By the turn of the century it was in full swing. Longleaf forests now fell at an astonishing rate. To learn to manage timber wisely, Chapman knew, one must first view the woods in their virgin state. Only then could one gain insight into what made the trees flourish. What he wanted to find for himself and his students to study was a virgin longleaf forest. Not by chance had he selected Tyler County. He had been invited to come by a recent graduate of Yale, James Stanley Joyce. Joyce, son of a wealthy lumberman, and now husband of the famous Broadway actress Peggy Hopkins, managed the family's Trinity County Lumber Company mill. He and two partners, lumberman Hoxie Thompson of Willard and his brother Captain Lewis Thompson, had just the year before bought a fine tract of virgin longleaf near Doucette. Joyce sent Chapman there. Chapman thought he knew what they would find. The trees would probably occur in large stands of even-aged trees. He knew that fires swept through from time to time, and suspected that the trees would have grown back in large blocks. He wanted first to locate nine forty-acre study plots, one for each of his two-man teams of students. Each plot needed to have all trees on it about the same age, and the ages needed to be different among plots. From the train window the forest had looked [13]

uniform, mile after mile, but he was sure he would be able to find tracts of timber to represent different age classes. The initial search brought the first surprise. None of his students could find a uniform forty acres. On close inspection each plot showed openings, different-aged trees, and other irregularities. Much of the timber was diseased and old. Dr. Chapman sat on the porch after supper, smoking his pipe and thinking about how to salvage his summer of fieldwork. Should he move to some other part of the forest, hoping to obtain more uniform stands? He decided to get a horse and look. As he rode across this ridge and beyond that stream course, he gradually realized that there were no even-aged stands of trees. And except for a strip that looked like a tornado path, none of the spots of young pines was more than an acre in size. Finally, he settled on plans for the summer and wrote, "Although an extremely intolerant tree, which will thrive best in even-aged stands, the natural form of this forest constantly trends toward small, even-aged groups of a few hundred square feet." So he staked the nine forty-acre plots where the more mature stands grew, although none of the plots contained trees of one age. The students measured each tree on each plot and mapped the treeless glades. From their measurements they developed estimates of timber yield. The results at summer's end cheered the professor and brought forth the appraisal—This was a somewhat remarkable result"— that nine separate forty-acre plots gave a uniform picture of a nonuniform forest. The remarkable thing about the stands was not their yield but the size and age ranges of the trees. About twenty-five percent of them were less than a foot through—too small for saw-logs. About twenty-five percent were "young merchantable," twelve to eighteen inches in diameter. Slightly over thirty percent were mature sawlogs, with trunks eighteen to twenty-six inches thick, and nearly twenty percent were over twenty-six inches through

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—for longleaf pines, true veterans. The trees ranged in age from seedlings to over 350 years. The old trees took up a lot more space than the younger ones. Nine trees at age 350 took the space of sixty 100-year-old trees. When one of these veterans went down there was enough sunlight on the forest floor for a few hundred square feet of seedlings. The oldest trees were the scourge of the lumberman; they took space for two centuries without producing new lumber. Chapman saw that most beyond a hundred years old had red heart disease, an affliction that rotted the heartwood. As they grew older, rot consumed as much wood as tree growth produced. So Professor Chapman returned to Connecticut with a different idea of what a virgin forest looked like. Soon the stands he had studied were gone; loggers hauled them away to the sawmill. What grew up in their place did not concern the loggers, or the owners. The value of the land to them was gone.

To the lumberman. East Texas was a stand of virgin longleaf, a column of figures—board feet and dollars. It was the rumble of loaded rail cars and the whine of the saw as pitch-filled logs moved from the millpond to the mill hand, waiting with his cant hook. The pine barrens were no longer monotonous. Fire, Wind, and Rain Time passed the first decades of the twentieth century. The earliest East Texans, the Caddoan tribes, had vanished completely; they left hardly even a memory. The first settlers were no more; they rested in the soil they had plowed year after year in spring as the geese winged north. The lumber barons were old or dead; their grandchildren planted loblollies row on row and watched the price of pulp and interest rates on housing. There came searching among the hills and valleys a strange

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kind of people. They measured plants, watched birds, and scribbled in notebooks. They spent much time in libraries, leafing through volumes of information. Their work often seemed to no useful end. They called themselves ecologists. These people seemed determined not only to find every kind of tree and bird in the woods, but also to learn why it was there. They sought the plan of the Creator of the forests. What they began to see was strange and unexpected. On the longleaf sandhills and flatwoods, the architect was fire. They saw evidence in the woods and read it in the libraries. Professor Chapman had seen it in 1907—longleaf pine thrived in the wake of fire. Forester Herbert Stoddard wrote of it in the Georgia longleaf. He saw fire kill the saplings of oak and loblolly pine and caress the longleaf. Only where fires did not go did other trees thrive. The role of fire in molding the longleaf forests captivated forester I. F. EWredge. He summed it up in 1946: "So obviously significant has been the incidence of fire in the propagation of pure longleaf pine forests that many experienced ailviculturists in the South believe the original stands of this type are the result of thousands of years of periodic fire history—fires which that hardy, deep-rooted, well-armored species could withstand from infancy on, but which killed out or kept out the more prolific and faster starting slash and loblolly pines and hardwoods that otherwise might soon have dominated the scene. "Even after man's misbehavior with fire in the woods has been brought under strict control, Mother Nature will continue to fire the woods on hot, dry summer days with bolts from the sky, just for the hell of it." But in other places fire did not figure in the plan. Trees other than longleaf thrived there, and the woods were thicker. They were the hammocks, the loblolly belt, and the Big Thicket flatwoods. Prostrate trunks littered them here and there and mounds of root-heaved soil humped the forest floor. The ecologists looked again to the old diaries, which rang with tales of adversities other than fire. The stories began with the Spaniards.

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Late in fall of the year 1690, the Spanish Aguayo expedition camped near present-day Robeline, Louisiana, on the old San Antonio Road, across the Sabine River from Texas. During the night a storm swept down from the north. Snow and sleet fell for hours: This caused ice to form so thickly and heavily on the branches of the trees that many were broken and others uprooted as they tumbled down under the unusual weight of the ice. In twenty-four hours more than two hundred trees fell down within the camp and more than a thousand in the surrounding country, killing many mules and horses as they fell." In 1845 F. B. Page passed Fort Jessup on the road from Natchitoches to Texas and saw "the enduring marks of a terrible hurricane which had occurred in the month of August previous. Its range was quite limited in a right line, north and south, but its depredations among the lofty oaks and pines of the forest were tremendous; they lie uprooted and prostrate on the earth, commingled together, as if an army of giants had battled with them individually upon the plains." About twenty-five miles southwest of Logan's Ferry on the Sabine, Page saw "the destructive effects of a tornado, which had passed some years previous. Its track was about a half mile wide, and every tree, shrub, and flower lay prostrate beneath the power of the whirlwind, which the sturdy oak of a century could not withstand." Following settlement by Anglos, hurricanes swept inland from the Texas coast every quarter century, as regularly as clockwork. First there was the "Natchez hurricane" of the 1850s, wreaking havoc between Alexandria, Louisiana, and Jasper, Texas. Samuel A. Hammett encountered the aftermath: "Presently we came to a spot in the forest where our trail was entirely obscured by fallen timber. There was an open space before us of at least fifty rods, the overthrown trees all lying towards the northeast. . . . A short distance on [we found] another running side by side with this. . . . Two immense avenues cut directly through the heart of the forest. . . . walled in by immense trees, shorn of those branches that had obstructed the path of the hurricane: great

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masses of timber piles up 10,15, 20 feet." Again in 1875 a hurricane struck; it destroyed a vast area of pine in Montgomery and San Jacinto counties. The Galveston storm of 1900 wrought more destruction; it leveled forests in the coast country west of the lower Trinity River. On many thousands of acres, loblolly pines lay uprooted almost to the last tree. Even the river bottoms had their agents of destruction. When the ecologists went into the bottoms they sought rivers with clean white sandbars. Then they knew that the water still spilled over the banks and into the flat woods beyond, working as of old to shape the forests. They found that bottomland trees seldom respected the neighboring hills, but remained loyal to the floodwaters that bathed their feet and toppled them into the river. In the lowest places along the Trinity, Neches, and Sabine rivers they found cypress and tupelo gum standing in the edge of sloughs and oxbows. Sycamore, willow, and water hickory grew on the sandy river benches up from the normal water level. Higher yet, linden, black walnut, cherry-bark oak, sweet gum, and ash flourished. Giant loblollies towered above the other trees on bottomland ridges where the floods seldom reached. It was open beneath the trees. Seedlings of the large trees were shaded out until their parents fell; then they flourished. The bushes and seedlings loving dry ground were kept at bay on the hillsides where floods could not reach.

People love their comforts and trees their gentle rain. But the vigor of both men and forests arises from the wellspring of adversity. Without strife, perhaps neither the people nor the trees of East Texas would have flourished as they did. Epilogue After the funeral was over, John climbed into the Studebaker beside his mother for the drive home. The car pulled slowly away

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from the cemetery. As it gathered speed the houses and trees began to blur in the edge of his vision. When at last they pulled up in front of the house, John said something about going for a walk. He climbed out of the car and went inside to his old room. He knew the family friends and relatives would be coming soon, like they always did after funerals. Opening his suitcase, he found an old pair of Levi's and a blue cotton shirt. He pulled on the pants and traded his scuffed town shoes for boots. The bedsprings squeaked when he sat down to lace the boots. The room smelled musty. Grandfather had moved into it shortly after John had left over three years ago. His mother had swept and cleaned it, probably just yesterday. The bed quilt, pieced with old feed-sack prints, and the rug he'd stepped on with bare feet so many winter mornings were properly straight. The smell was old. It reminded him of the steam wafting across the living room when Mom used to iron Grandfather's shirts. He pulled hard on the bootlaces. One broke and he tied it together impatiently. He stepped off the back porch into the yellow midday as the first automobile dusted up in front. The car door slammed behind him and he hastened to reach the fringe of young loblollies crowding in at the pasture edge. When the house faded in the closeness of the pine thicket, he slowed. The road wound down the hill, exactly where he remembered it. People didn't use it any more; it was posted and fenced out at the highway. Rain had deepened the ruts into little gullies where the sand had been washed off the red subsoil. He stepped across a ditch, noticing the pebbles perched on their toadstools of clay. They cast stubby shadows in the autumn noon. The gum trees and pines along the road weren't very tall. About three years old, he knew, but still they were tall enough to hide the heaps of mangled woods on both sides. This whole stretch had been bulldozed the year he'd left for college. The sweet gum leaves moved in the breeze—red, purple, gold. When he came to where the hill sloped off more steeply into the

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bottomland, he stopped. He knew the hill and the way the road turned just before it dropped off, but everything else seemed different. The woods that lay below him were flattened; a few trees stood spindly and naked above the slash. The lay of the land looked odd without its cloak of forest. It shoved up into strange ridges, and sloped more steeply than he remembered. Far down the hill the road plunged into the lake. To the north, the water stretched away to the horizon; far ahead and to the south tiny speedboats flashed across its surface. White spray trailed them. John sat down on a red oak stump at the brink of the hill. He moved his hand and felt the rippling marks left by the chain saw. The sun felt good on his back. It was one of those brilliant days, and you could see forever.... Grandfather's bottomland was gone now. It had been about this time of fall in those earlier years when they always went into the bottoms after squirrels and hogs. The first one of those trips, John hadn't been much taller than the bib on Grandfather's overalls. In the bottoms then, loblollies grew so tall a cat squirrel could hide in a clump ofpinecones and you couldn't dislodge him with number 6 shot. In good acorn years, great cow oaks drew the hogs like flies. On a still morning you could hear the old sows crunching acorns and hickory nuts a quarter mile away. Grandfather had never talked much about the woods; you had to know what he liked by seeing what he did. Along about October he'd scoop the ashes from the year before out of the smokehouse, getting ready for the slab* of bacon and coils of sausage that came with the first hog hunts. John had secretly watched him lean on his shovel and look out beyond the back pasture, across the bottomland timber. "Black gum," he'd say aloud to himself, looking at the first red leaves of fall. The sun coming through them got your blood going; northers and snow geese hovered just beyond the far horizon. Grandfather shuffled his feet when he walked, as if he liked

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the sound of leaves rustling against his overall cuffs. Every time he came to a tall cypress, he'd look up it as if measuring its worth for aflat-bottomed riverboat or shingles for a shed. He kept his eyes going, looking for a squirrel or a bee hollow in the forks of tupelo gum and oak. His death hadn't really been unexpected. Last year, when John had made his first trip home from college, he'd been appalled at how the old man had aged. It was not so much his body, which had always been wizened; he seemed to have given up in his head. At the time, John had wondered how much it had to do with the water, creeping up the hillside. The old man had stopped going outside, John's mother had said. Had refused to take his early-morning walks with old Midge. Those walks of several miles each day, down the hill and into the bottoms, went far back in John's mind. You could see Grandpa's shuffling tracks in the wet sand after rains, paced by the round print of his walking cane tip—a twelve-gauge shotgun shell. Neighbors wagged their heads. "He'll have a heart attack down in that bottom one of these days," they said. But he'd died in his rocking chair, shut off from the view of woods and lake.

"Be still! Over there, cross the slough. Hear it? It's old Midge abayin'! Sounds like she's over 'bout the Buck Pond. Bet she's got a coon up one o' them 'simmon trees!" Away up yonder somewhere, if there was a Heaven, Grandfather would be shuffling his way through the brown leaves, amongst mud-stained trunks. "Be still! Hear it?" The lake water glimmered. John huddled on the oak stump, and the sunshine kept on. He sat until the far lakeshore turned from a gold thread to gray. A chill breeze rustled. He stood for one last look across the lake, then turned homeward. The sweet gum leaves hung like pale stars in the roadside dusk.

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2. Grass

LOOK INTO East Texas' past and you'll discover a thing even more astonishing than pine trees four hundred years old and a hardwood mother of a thousand squirrels—prairies once were common where only trees now stand. If you've traveled from San Augustine in the Redlands to Liberty on the lower Trinity, and thought all the openings in between had been carved from forest, listen to what Gideon Lincecum saw along that route in 1835. He crossed the Angelina River at Old Zavalla into "pine barrens interspersed with prairies." Several days southwestward he approached Liberty and found a "large sand Prairie on the east side of the Trinity River, about 3 or 4 miles from Liberty." North of Liberty and east of the Trinity he had "passed through a great deal of fine Prairie land. . . . These prairies surpass any thing for beauty of scenery I have ever seen, the soil is as good as it can be, in the greater part of the prairie. . . . All through it is scattered, here and there, at various distances, islands of timber, some of these are sandy and dry, but a great many of them are wet, and the timber on any of them is unfit for use, except it be for firewood, there is some ash and lynn on them out of which fence rails might be made." Two years later Gustav Dresel crossed the Neches River south of Zavalla: "Having left the forests of the Neches River behind, we came into a fertile prairie where the most excellent grass sprouted from black earth and the most diverse flowers grew exuberantly in between. Here and there the wide plain was broken by groups of trees." The party camped that night in the edge of a prairie near an Indian village and the next day "penetrated the

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gloomy primeval forest." They continued southwestward, approaching Carolina on the Trinity River after several hours "partly through forest but mostly through prairies." For presumably rational reasons, early settlers called at least forty-six places in the southeast Texas forests "prairie"—Mustang Prairie at Crockett, Nevill's Prairie in Houston County, Tarkington Prairie in Liberty County, Shawnee Prairie in Angelina County, and so on. Today, though plowed fields and mowed pastures abound, hardly a vestige of land remains that would not have trees if left alone. Through the ages, the greatest dramas of Man the Hunter took place on a stage of grass, because large beasts abounded there. In Texas, mastodons, mammoths, giant bison, and bizarre horses and camels greeted the first man to appear on the prairie's horizon. Here in the grasslands this man pursued them, hurling spears with stone heads. Here in later years his descendants ran the buffalo, first on foot and then from the backs of white men's horses. Here the white man delivered the final coup, and the great hunts ended. Why grass had more big animals than forest is simple: in prairie and meadow, all plants grow low to the ground. They stand no higher than a bison's or an antelope's reach, capturing all the sun's energy and storing it for the grazers to crop. Primitive men perhaps did not understand the connection between short plants and large beasts, but they undoubtedly recognized the consequence. The tonnage of meat on the hoof was far greater on the grass than under the trees. These men strode from the forest and onto the prairie, looking over the grasstops for the shaggy herds beyond. . . . Before Cattle The buffalo calf sought his mother in the cool of the morning. Dew glistened in the sunlight and wet his legs and belly as he pushed through the grass. There was her scent, familiar among [23]

the many odors of dung and belch. He moved alongside her warm hulk; his nose pushed under her flank, butting upward to start the milk flowing. The cow swallowed her cud and began licking the calf with strong, slow sweeps of her head. Toward noon a breeze stirred and the air freshened. Low clouds rolled in from the north and rain began to scatter over the prairie. The small herd of buffalo moved uneasily. The wind quickened and the drops of water came harder, lashing the brown rumps. The animals moved away southward, increasing their pace as the wind blew colder and faster. In the gray rain of evening they disappeared over the horizon. The days came and went, and prairie miles dropped behind the young buffalo. His mother's odor was strong within him, pulling him into strange country where tall trees loomed near. Daily they passed the scent of other buffalo, the odor where prairie chickens roosted, the musk of antelope, and the taint of wolves passing. But now when the wind blew, it came from the forests, bringing new sensations. He smelled the resinous dryness of the pine hills, the damp mold and leaves in the low places. The grass was so tall he sometimes could not see the other buffalo around him, but his nose thought they had become fewer as the days had passed. The men faded back into the trees. They huddled briefly in a whispering knot, then went deeper into the woodland to a small creek. Up the little valley, the springs that spawned the creek trickled from the sand against a hill. The water seeped around roots of wax-myrtles, over black ooze, through moss, and beside ferns fading brown with winter. The youngest of the group came last. He tried to step exactly as his elders and in their tracks. His eyes traveled ahead and to both sides, as his grandfather had taught. A sunbaked log bridged the creek, its surface sticky with resin. Heartwood of the great pine, the fire stick. There were empty shells of crayfish in the clear waters. Work of the little man, the ring-tailed one. He bumped into the bronze back ahead of him. The men had stopped. He stood in silent embarrassment.

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For once he was not berated. All eyes were on his uncle, Buffalo Man, the most respected hunter of the woolly ones. Buffalo Man drew with a stick in the sand beside the creek. Sweat and bear grease were strong in the young man's nostrils as he squeezed in to see. The uncle spoke slowly, savoring the time of his importance. The creek bubbled where it rolled over a small dam of bay leaves against a cypress root. Down the valley the creek grew larger as other creeks joined it. Years it had run thus, through thickets of cane, past knees of cypress. Years hence it would be found, by those who would name its destination the Ayish Bayou, after the ones who sat now on its bank, drawing pictures in the sand. "They are coming down with the wind." Buffalo Man moved the stick. That's a good thing. They are quick to smell, but slow to see. You," he pointed his stick at the three best bowmen, "come with me. We will wait for them here, where the meadow comes into the woods. There is a trail cut into the bank where they cross the water." He put his hands at his waist to show how deep the trail was. "They crowd in there. We will wait for them behind the trees." Of the four remaining, he directed three to a less-used crossing he knew of. Then his eyes sought his nephew. "You will carry the fire," he said. "From where we saw them, go through the woods ten long bowshots up the wind. When the sun is here," he pointed high in the western sky, "the grass will be dry, and will quickly burn. Go across the wind, to the sun, and fire the grass every stone's throw. When you near the opposite woods, then you may put an arrow to your bow. Perhaps some will turn back to the fire." Buffalo Man looked keenly at the youth for disappointment, but saw none. The group dispersed. The time came soon. Having kindled a fire in the wooded valley where the wind would carry the smoke deeper into the woods, the young hunter laid out the fire sticks. He liked their smell. It was the smell of the baskets he had carried as a child. In them he had fetched water from the spring. The pitch-filled sticks caught

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quickly from the fire, and the smoke rose thin and black. The young man trotted toward the slanting sun, stopping at intervals to torch a clump of grass. It caught quickly. Fire leaped ahead under the breeze from the north. He looked back and saw smoke billowing skyward, white and thick in contrast to that of his torch. Two times as he ran, the grass exploded near him and bevies of quail arose, to skim away over the grasstops. Once a flock of prairie chickens flushed from behind him; his heart leaped and for a moment he faltered in his pace, for the wings sounded like swift and heavy hoofbeats. When he reached the far woods, he hurled the dying torch into the grass and put the sinew string to his bow. Then, leaving his bow and arrows on the ground, upwind of the fire, he climbed an oak. Riven by lightning at some past time, it stood spare and leafless at the forest edge. Thirty feet up, he wedged himself into a crotch and looked across the prairie. To his left and upwind from the smoke, a low rise lay in the plain. Short grass grew upon it, and looking southward from its summit were five of the wind-chasers, the antelope. They stood grouped in alarm at the sight of the smoke. As he watched, one turned and moved away. The others followed and in seconds they flowed northward, in a gait that consumed distance at an astonishing rate. He switched his view to the south, to where the black humps had dotted the prairie that morning. Beyond the grass in the distance, he saw the treetops converge; they met where his uncle and the others would be waiting. Yellow splotches in the woodland border heralded winter. Smoke billowed high over the grass. The buffalo could not be seen. He leaned back to wait. Soon he began to fidget. Had they gone in the hours before the fire? In the distance he saw the flames and smoke move. Gray bodies leaped from the grass at a point near the woods on his side; another flock of chickens. He saw the heavy birds veer from the smoke with strong wing-

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beats, low over the grass. Two stragglers seemed confused; they plunged into the pall of smoke. As they burst through to his side, they veered, set their wings, and sailed toward the distant wood. The young buffalo was nipping off the heads of yellow flowers when he noticed a restlessness among the animals around him. He drifted over to move against his mother. She had stopped feeding; she flared her nostrils when the breeze shifted. In a sudden gust of wind he found a strong and pungent shock among the earthy scents of growth and decay, nutriment and excrement. The animals came together; none grazed now. Weak eyes turned northward; nostrils dilated. The sun darkened and suddenly a thick pall swept down upon them. They started in alarm and, falling in behind an old cow, moved away. The calf dung to his mother's side as they swept through the grass. The trees on either side of them converged. The wind shifted again and cleared the air. The herd rumbled onward. They were very near the woods. The trees loomed almost overhead when a great confusion arose. His mother halted and he saw some of the animals running past in the direction from which they had come. He caught the man scent from the woods, heightening his fear. Then others wheeled back, and soon he frantically pursued his mother across the plain, toward a cloud rising high into the sky. His nose was filled with smoke and he could smell nothing else. The string that kept him at his mother's heels snapped. He charged ahead in blind terror. A roar engulfed him and searing pain smote the tip of his nose and his lungs. He ran faster. Dark spots hovered like gnats on the edge of the young man's vision. He blinked and still the little flies danced. They became tossing forms on the crest of the plain. Even as he turned his eyes to them, he knew the buffalo were coming. Later he could not think how he reached the ground. He only remembered trying to fit an arrow to his bowstring as he raced across the smoking ground toward the line of fire. In his mind he

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saw the birds flashing through the screen of smoke. His heart pumped and the ground blurred. The fire came closer. When he felt the first heat, he stopped. The flame wavered to his right, and a great shadow emerged, noiseless in the sough of fire. The young brave stood petrified as the animal stopped and shook its head. Long strings of saliva flew from the nose, curving and glistening in the wind. The horns shone like obsidian. Three more animals dashed from the fire in quick succession, then all raced away with tails high. The youth raised his bow, but they were gone. His chance had passed. He did not know if there would be another one soon; it was not always that the buffalo could be found this near to the village. This was only the second time since his childhood that he had seen them. He watched them go, and he was lonely in his misery. He pulled his eyes away. Overhead, the hawks were circling, gathering for the feast. He had seen them come to fires before, to feed on the little animals caught by the fire or grasshoppers driven from cover. A sound jerked his head around. Unbelievably, another of the great beasts plunged down upon him. Smaller than the ones already gone, it left a trail of white smoke. Careening onward, it raced past less than three bow-lengths away. This time the feathers of the youth's arrow came smoothly to his ear, then were gone, flashing toward the brown hide. The buffalo became smaller and smaller. At last it stopped, seeming to look ahead. Smoke curled from blackened clumps of grass; heat waves shimmered above the ground. The animal appeared to waver in the distance. Then it toppled, sending up a little puff of black dust. One leg reached high and then was still. The young man heard his own breath, a sigh above the whispering fire.

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The earliest whites frequently saw bison in southeastern Texas; they called them "cattle." Probably the first to report them was, interestingly, a Spaniard named Cabeza de Vaca, or "head of the cow." De Vaca was shipwrecked on the Texas mainland near Galveston Island in 1528 and lived there for six years: "Cattle come as far as here. Three times I have seen them and eaten of their meat. . . . They come as far as the seacoast." After de Vaca the record was silent for a century and a half, mainly because few were there who could record what they saw. Then the Frenchman Sieur de La Salle ventured into the region. In 1685 his chronicler Joutel described the area surrounding their Fort St. Louis, near the mouth of the Lavaca River on the Texas coastal plain, as a prairie "affording pasture to an infinite number of beeves." La Salle and a few men journeyed northeastward from there, and in what is now northwestern Harris County, they "were favored in crossing [probably Cypress Bayou] by a way beaten by the bullocks." Somewhere south of Alto in Cherokee County they "met with two bullocks, which Monsieur La Salle's Indian killed." A short time after La Salle met his untimely end in East Texas at the hands of his own men, the Spanish priests arrived with their chroniclers. In the early 1700s Fray Espinosa, living with the Hasinai Indians in the vicinity of present-day Nacogdoches, found buffalo to be "distant more than 40 leagues. . . . There are buffaloes to the north and northwest, a little more than two days' travel. . . ." The Hasinai frequently traveled to the buffalo country for meat and hides, Espinosa said. The prairies immediately to the west and northwest of the East Texas woodlands were well stocked with buffalo even to the mid 1800s. Stephen Austin's party traveled from Nacogdoches to San Antonio in 1821, approximating the route of present-day Highway 21, and first encountered buffalo about halfway between the Navasota and Brazos rivers where they "killed a buck and a buffalo." Traveler DeWees in 1822 encountered "vast herds of buffalo, a thousand to be seen in one day" in tall grass in the Brazos River bottom just below its junction with the Little River.

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In the spring of 1842, a naval officer adventuring inland from the Texas coast while his ship was being repaired encountered buffalo in what is now Anderson County, near the Neches River "Our camp was in the center of a little thicket; in front was . . . another dead island of timber . . . to the right and left nothing but the boundless interminable prairie. . . . Breakfast was certainly not finished, when a strange sound in the distance to our left caused us ... to leap to our feet, and cast our eyes around. . . . It was a herd of buffalo, indeed at least four or five hundred in number, dashing along like the wind, and roaring like so many devils broke loose. . . ." Somewhat west of the timbered country, in the Texas prairies, Ferdinand Roemer in the summer of 1845 traveled for a day up the Brazos River from the mouth of Tehuacana Creek: The whole prairie was covered with countless buffalo trails, crossing in all directions, reminding one of a European grazing ground. During the course of the day we saw more herds, numbering three to four hundred, some of which we were able to approach so near, that had it been our desire, we could easily have shot several." Tales of the last hunts in the prairies are appalling. George W. Reighard of Dodge City recounted: "In 1872, when I went down into the Texas Panhandle with a buffalo hunting outfit. . . . I killed a little over 3000 buffaloes in one month, which was an average of about 100 a day. . . ." William Blackmore, English sportsman of London, hunted along the Arkansas River in 1873 in the Kansas prairies:". . . there was a continual line of putrescent carcasses, so that the air was rendered pestilential and offensive to the last degree. The hunters had formed a line of camps along the banks of the river, and had shot down the buffalo, night and morning, as they come to drink. In order to give an idea of the number of these carcasses, it is only necessary to mention that I counted 67 on one spot not covering four acres. . . ." By 1885 the final slaughter was over in Texas; the last wild buffalo was gone. William T. Hornaday wrote the requiem: "Proba-

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bly the most gigantic task ever undertaken on this continent in the line of game-slaughter was the extermination of the bison in the great pasture region by the hide-hunters. Probably the brilliant rapidity and success with which that lofty undertaking was accomplished was a matter of surprise even to those who participated in it. . . ." It is likely that East Texas buffalo were migratory, and that the last ones were killed on the plains. They were probably members of a great herd whose homeland was the southern Great Plains. In the vastness of these prairies, they shifted to some extent northward in the springtime and southward in the fall, but also into and out of marginal areas to east and west, perhaps depending on rainfall and the subsequent growth of grass. Some have depicted the herd as a great fluid mass, the center of which was usually in the tall grass prairies of Texas, Oklahoma, or Kansas, but which slowly shifted with the seasons and the weather. The fringes probed into the arid regions to the west and into the woodlands to the east. But others think many of the buffalo in the East Texas woodlands might have stayed there all year, while their prairie brothers moved with the seasons. The vast herds of wildebeest in Africa today move seasonally across the grasslands; in the nearby woods small bands of them stay put. The truth may lie somewhere in between, but who's to say? Certainly there will never come a time again when we can see for sure, when bison cross the plains in hordes and graze in tree-rimmed glens. They've been replaced by other beasts, ones trained to fence and tether, more fitting companions for civilized men. The White Man's Buffalo The sun hung blood-red in the branches of a post oak tree. Behind the dusty caravan, the prairie stretched westward. In front and below, a vast thicket of cane rippled in the wind like waves, and

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in the midst of that tossing sea, trees showed where the river's course snaked southward. Captain Alonso de Leon gave the order to make camp on the hill overlooking the bottomland. The year was 1690. A haze of smoke almost extinguished the sun as it sank toward the western rim of the world. The smoke had been with them for three days, and de Leon thought there must be tremendous fires burning the prairies beyond the horizon. He glanced northward, as he had many times since the smoke arrived. He rode around the camp, seeing to it that their horses and cattle, destined for starting herds in this new land, were settled and under guard. Cooking fires flickered in the dark when he finally unsaddled his horse. The breeze continued and de Leon was thankful. If the wind lay this near the river, one could be sure of mosquitoes. Later, he sat near his men in the firelight, eating the flesh of a young bison killed that morning. Another river to cross; this one looked especially formidable because of the cane stretching across the bottom. But the aspect of the country was changing; a more benign environment seemed in the offing. Just today they had passed many large clumps of trees on the prairie, and this river floodplain, despite the barrier it afforded, appeared luxuriant in its forests of cane and trees. According to his estimate of the distance they had traveled, they must be nearing the land of the big trees. A few more days of travel should bring them to the place where they would stop and build the mission. De Leon recounted in his mind some details of their journey from Mexico. They had crossed the Rio Grande del Norte less than a month ago. Since then grasslands with scattered clumps of brush had greeted them, day after day. Tree-lined watercourses were welcome relief from the monotonous, sometimes thirsty, miles between. Their course northeastward had intersected, rather than paralleled, most of the major rivers, so by now they were seasoned at fording waterways. The last hundred leagues of travel had en-

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countered many herds of the humped wild cattle of the prairies. These had supplied much meat and had let the expedition conserve its own stock. What lay beyond, he was not certain, but it was said to be good land, gentle in climate and people, for which he was thankful. During the night a storm awakened them. Lightning flashed and thunder cracked. The frightened cattle stampeded and the guard, scared at least as much as the stock, sought refuge under a tree. The rumble of hooves quickened, was masked for seconds by thunder, and then faded. Men shivered in the darkness, unable to reclaim sleep. Morning came quietly. In the gray before the sun, a meadowlark called. De Leon rolled damply from his blanket and ordered a fire built. He stood, shivering, waiting for the smoking wood to burst into flame. The cattle were gone; the prairie horizon out beyond the clump of oaks was disturbingly smooth. In the other direction fog rolled across the bottomland. The canebrake was impenetrable to his gaze. The fire at last roared and it dried the men as they ate breakfast—more bison meat. The sun rose above the fog into a sky of brilliant blue. Smoke of the night before was gone—consumed, like the cattle, by the midnight storm. De Leon ordered the men to find and gather the scattered herd. They mounted the few horses that had been tethered and the hunt began. By midafternoon the riders had found most of the stock, but some cattle and a few horses were missing. Unwilling to delay longer, de Leon gave the order to move on, and the expedition fought the cane to the river. Here there was some confusion, as usual, as the cattle were forced into the water to swim. Finally, however, the expedition crossed the stream and pushed through the thicket beyond. De Leon, with the setting sun at his back, forced the tired men and animals well away from the river before he gave the order to camp. Behind, at the margin of the Trinity River bottomland, a few

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cows and horses moved out into the dusk to feed. They grazed steadily, filling bellies gaunted by miles of travel, stuffing themselves with grass. The grass stretched away to where the ground met the sky, and far beyond, nibbled only by the buffalo. . . .

The expedition led by Alonso de Leon was probably the first to introduce European cattle as permanent residents to Texas. By this and later expeditions, the Spanish sought to establish missions among the Caddoan Indian tribes to forestall the invasion by the French of the frontier they claimed. The Spanish had visions of permanence; the expeditions were therefore amply supplied with livestock. In addition to the approximately two hundred head of cattle brought to the Nacogdoches missions by de Leon in 1690, three hundred more were brought by an expedition in 1722. By that time, natural increase had added to the mission herds so that "thousands of cows, bulls, horses, and mares" populated the area. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the mission herds, including those near present-day Nacogdoches, were well established. Cattle purposely or accidentally released thrived at points along routes of travel from Mexico to present-day Nacogdoches. Diego Ramon's expedition in 1716 encountered wild cattle in the thick underbrush of the Trinity River bottom, approximately where de Leon had passed and where Highway 21 now crosses. During the years 1774 to 1779, settlers in this same place on the Trinity River lived partly by hunting the wild cattle that abounded between the Trinity and Brazos rivers. By the time Texas was opened to Anglo-American settlement in the 1820s, wild cattle were already widespread. They roamed "from the Louisiana line on the east to the uppermost breaks of the Brazos on the West." One "Captain Flack," an Englishman, hunted wild cattle in the canebrakes and at the prairie edges of eastern Texas prior to the Civil War. He roped them on moonlit

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prairies and ran them through thickets with dogs, collecting meat for plantation owners.

It was near the end of the Great Depression that a noted historian leafed through an autobiographical manuscript by an East Texan named Solomon Alexander Wright. Among the pages were reminiscences of working with cattle in southern Newton County during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. To the man who read, they told of an empire in the making: "I will give you a little sketch of how Father worked his range. . . . Father had complete control of the range. What cattle he didn't own himself, belonged to his brothers, sisters, nephews and nieces. He charged them fifty cents a head for branding calves, and one dollar a head for gathering and delivering steers. . . . "After nearly all of the cattle were trailed out of middle and West Texas to Wyoming and Montana, there was a mad scramble [in East Texas] to get cattle to restock the range. As a result, stock cattle went sky high. This was in the early [eighteen] eighties. Up to that time stock cattle had been selling in East Texas for five and six dollars a head, calves thrown in. Now prices soared to fifteen dollars a head, counting calves. . . . "A Mr. Childs came from the Panhandle country down home to buy cattle, and Father sold him one hundred fifty head of scattering cattle. That is, cattle that ranged off in other people's ranges. Nearly every farmer in East Texas had from a half a dozen to a hundred head of cattle. Father's cattle were all Mr. Childs could buy in the lower ends of Newton and Jasper counties; so he went up country and bought about seven hundred head from the fanners. When he drove down to our place [near present day Buna] on his way to Orange to ship them, I got a job helping to trail them. There is a noted swamp country in Southeast Texas called the Big Thicket. It extends west across the lower ends of Newton

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and Jasper counties, down into Orange County and crosses Hardin, Liberty, Polk, Tyler, and Montgomery counties. Before it was cut off and drained, the Big Thicket was maybe fifty miles wide in places and a hundred miles long. It is low, wet and very thick and brushy. A chain of marshes cut it in two south of our place. The road from up country to Orange ran east of the marshes, through the Big Thicket. Trailing nearly a thousand head of cattle down this road without losing some of them was not likely. We trailed them through the marshes. It was about ten miles through them, water six or eight inches deep. Both cattle and horses would bog about half way to their knees every step. Here and there in the marshes are thickets of short-leaf [probably loblolly] pine saplings growing on little rises of ground. The water was not over these island plots, but the ground was full of water and was boggy enough to bog a buzzard's shadow. The first day we drove about fifteen miles to Oliver Clark's place. . . . "It was about five miles from Oliver Clark's place to Orange Prairie. We finally got out of the marshes, and on the second night we penned in the shipping pens at Orange. "Orange had become our regular delivery place, instead of the open pinewoods across the Sabine River. There were only two or three houses on the whole route of thirty miles to Orange, and no suitable place at all to pen a herd. We got so that we'd start early, trying to make the drive in a day—really a two days' drive. . . . "During the spring of 1884 . . . I was with my brother Clark Wright on Tarkington Prairie between the San Jacinto and Trinity Rivers. This was considerably west and out of the woods for me. There was so much brushy, timbered bottom country around Tarkington's Prairie that the owners of cattle there made a practice of selling off their increase at a year old. Cattle older than yearlings had a strong tendency to hide out in the swamps. The 'swampers' would come out on the prairie to graze only at night. Before the owners took to selling yearlings, while they grew big steers, the cow hunters would do a big part of their work on moonlight nights. They would take advantage of the wind to ride

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up close to some bunch grazing, tear into them with ropes, each man roping and hog-tying his steer. The next day—sometimes not until a second or third day had come—they would drive a bunch of more or less gentle cows to where the steers were tied down, untie them, and let them loose. The steers would be so stiff from having been tied down that they could not run and would drive along. "When the time came to gather yearlings that spring of 1884, I hired out to George Allen and John Tarkington, the principal owners of cattle on Tarkington's Prairie. My brother Clark owned several hundred head, but did not have anything to do with the roundup. Frank Isaacks was boss. The hands besides myself were Frank Donahoe, John Harman, Sam Evins, Jim Booth, Walter Stetson, and Hamp Barwick. Tarkington made a regular hand, and George Allen rode some too. Chum Ritter was cook. "Allen lived on the west side of the prairie, at the edge of San Jacinto woods. The big pen was about half a mile from his house. On the north side of the pen was a clump of sweet-gum trees amid which we camped. When the gathering was over, we had about two thousand cattle under herd—about fifteen hundred yearlings, a hundred or so head of steers from two to ten years old, most of them as wild as snakes, they having got away from previous roundups, and about four hundred cows. Some of the yearlings were not weaned; we had to keep some cows, anyway, in order to be able to manage the yearlings. They were as wild as jackrabbits and could run nearly as fast. . . ." The man reading these stories of cow work in East Texas was J. Frank Dobie. To Dobie, Sol Wright and his family and neighbors were actors on a greater stage than East Texas, one that stretched away to the east, west, and north. They were participants in a destiny, the merging of cattle and grass to create a tradition, a life-style, and a romantic episode in American history that defies extinction. They were a chapter in the story of cowboys.

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The European cow was a grass eater. As it advanced upon the virgin continent, it found limitless horizons of food, grazed here and there by buffalo, freshened by fire, but strongly void of other appetites that could handle the tough fiber. It ate and ate. And its numbers grew like those of mice in a granary. In Alonso de Leon's time, its increase was dampened by Indians and settlers with a taste for wild cow meat and by the natural hazards of a wilderness infested with bears and wolves. Only the buffalo competed for its food, and these faded soon after white people moved in. In Sol Wright's day its numbers were thinned to populate vacant grasslands to the west and north, and to fill vacant plates in the east. And still its numbers grew. In the twentieth century, as before, the fortunes of cattle continued to follow the fate of grass. When the century opened, the grass was not nearly as good as before. It had been grazed nearly a hundred years by too many cattle. And it was to get worse before it got better. People crowded into the countryside; small farms sprang up everywhere corn and peas would grow. These farms carried many people through the Depression, but pushed range cattle out of the best grasslands. The piney woods still had grass, though, and cattle, for their timber was soon cut and their soils were too poor to farm. Many people abandoned their farms after the Depression. Old people passed away; young ones moved to the city to work. Fences fell, the old fields grew up to weeds and grass, and cattle moved back in. The cattle in the piney woods stayed there. But the post-Depression years became bad ones for grass and cattle. The pasturage of abandoned farms was short-lived; within twenty years loblolly pines and other trees had invaded the fields, and the grass withered. Woody invaders crept also into the piney woods, shading the grass there. Fires no longer kept the hardwoods out; Smokey Bear had moved in. Winter-starved cattle had long before mowed down the bottomland canebrakes. And finally, landowners began to fence range cattle out of many places that had been free range before.

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Midcentury passed and the plight of cattle commenced to improve. Bulldozers growled in and pushed over trees. Grass moved into the clearings. Cattle moved in also. Sometimes the grass and cattle were not kinds seen before in the woods. Today woodlands fall to the bulldozer faster than ever. Ranchers plant new kinds of grasses where prairie and forest alike used to grow; they bring in new kinds of cattle. Some say grass and cattle are the new destiny of East Texas lands. Whatever the case, the reverence of man for beast is much the same as it was. The cow is the white man's totem, his buffalo.

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3. Land of Bears

and Honey THE LAND of bears and honey existed, literally, for the early travelers and settlers in eastern Texas. Bear meat was eaten by settlers, crews of loggers and railroad workers, and slaves. Bear fat was standard cooking oil, both for white settlers and the Indians before them. The supply lasted about a century and a half after the first settlers arrived. Honey was the sweet of the wilderness, as it had been for thousands of years before in another wilderness. Travelers could find hollow trees with bees and honey near most camp sites, and settlers robbed bee trees for Sunday afternoon sport. There are some wild spots left, but they contain no native bears and little honey.

On the high ground between the upper Neches and Angelina rivers, a small band of Hasinai Indians rode southward on tired horses. The year of the White Man was 1723. A cold north wind had cleared the sky of clouds. It swept away the red dust raised by horse hooves and hurried long Vs of geese southward. The hunt had been good and much bear fat and many skins rode with the Indians. They made good time toward their village on the Prairie of the Mounds that lay between the two rivers. An ancient man led them, scanning the open forest for sight of game or men. It was not always, the old man thought, that they had moved

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so swiftly. He faintly remembered the day of his childhood when the first horse came, brought by a party of strange Indians from the west. Or was it a story told to him by his grandmother? He could not really remember any more. As the procession crossed a sand-bottomed stream, a rider shouted from the rear. The old man turned his horse. The dogs, having followed behind as was their custom when the hunt was over, nosed eagerly among wet black gum leaves at the creek's margin. Their interest signified bear. Noting the position of the sinking sun, the old man sent the party onward; he alone followed the dogs upstream. The trail was old. Scent lingered only in low, wet places, and the dogs moved slowly. Around a bend in the creek, they climbed the bank to the base of a fallen beech. Suddenly one dog tucked his tail between his legs and ran, snapping at his back. Puzzled for an instant, the Indian then caught a faint sweet odor, and the story was plain. Bees boiled from a hollow in the prostrate tree. Clearly the bear had found the bees too, and perhaps had secured some honey before moving on. These bees were even newer to his people than was the horse he rode. They had come to this country close on the heels of the Spanish priests and French traders. He remembered his first encounter with them, and later, his first taste of the golden honey. His stomach rebelled at the thought; too much of it had made him deathly ill. The dogs now avoided the tree but sought where the trail of the bear led away. The high ground would not hold scent, and they could go no farther. The old man called to them and faced homeward in the dusk. They fell in behind. Visions conjured up by the fatigue of days of hunting rode with the lone horseman in the deepening gloom. Columns of horses bearing bearded white gods rode the wind. Honeycombs hung from the sky, tended by bees the size of eagles. Bears and Indians marched in a procession of red dust to be swallowed by the western sun.. . .

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Fray Isidro Felis de Espinosa called for another pitch-filled pine knot for the fire. He pulled his cloak tighter. The north wind fanned the blaze and swept the black smoke low to the ground. Trunks of pines materialized from the darkness, and in the west, the tops of others hung black against the twilight sky. Fray Espinosa had grown fond of this wild land on the northern frontier of New Spain. Its Indians were gentle like children, unlike those of the fierce tribes to the west. They responded well to his teachings, although one could never be sure whether they came to the mission in earnest reverence or in anticipation of the social gathering. Only a few hours past, the men had returned from a successful hunt, and there was much excitement in the village. He turned his back to the fire, spreading his hands behind him, and tried to penetrate the darkness with his eyes. When next the fire died Espinosa did not replenish it. The blackness was now complete; the wind made a soft sound in the pines. He turned, and by his feet on the worn pathway, felt his way to the stone hut where he lived. The Indians had offered their straw beehive houses, but convention directed that he construct after the pattern of his countrymen to the south. A candle made from boiling the berries of the wax-myrtle plant flickered inside. The room was warm, partly from the sun's heat that lingered in its walls and partly from the fire in the sandstone fireplace at one end. Fray Espinosa took his turkey quill pen from a small pouch of deerskin and filled its tip from a bladder of pokeberry ink. He wrote slowly in Spanish, forming the letters carefully. "In the winter, these Indians are accustomed to kill a great number of bears toward the north and they bring home a great deal of bear fat rolled up in moss and loaded on their horses. After rendering it out they keep it in pots for seasoning for the whole year. These bears live on nuts and acorns which abound in this country. They are not seen in the Texas [Hasinai] country and the region thereabouts except when the crop of nuts and acorns to the northward has been short on account of the ice and the snow. Without boasting, I may say that, accompanied by a

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number of Indians who, with their dogs, had treed two bears, I killed them both with my own hands at one shot, and from behind the protection of an oak, I succeeded in hitting another bear in the head when he was coming down a pathway alone. After taking their share of everything, the Indians left me enough bear's fat to supply me for many days. It is certainly true that they need nothing else for seasoning when they are supplied with this. . . ." The candle burned low and Espinosa pinched its wick between thumb and finger. A large bear stirred from his rest beneath a tangle of windblown red oaks. Slowly shifting his head back and forth, and lifting his nose, he tested the evening air. The new-fallen oak and hickory leaves rustled when at last he left the windfall and descended the hill. At the edge of the bottomland he plunged into a canebrake, following one of the arbored tunnels maintained by generations of bears. Smells were dank and close. Black mud squished beneath his feet, and when he stopped, swarms of mosquitoes settled on his thick fur. Stale scent of other bears, of deer, and of raccoons lay on the wet soil and clung to cane leaves. Soon the ground rose and the cane thinned. A faint but certain smell drew him onward; he pushed out of the last clump of cane and into an opening under giant chestnut oaks. There was a noise of leaves at the far edge of the grove. In the darkness he saw dimly a female bear with two young ones, drawn as he had been to the feast of fallen mast. Each contemplated the other the female with cubs pressed against her, and the old male with drool of anticipation drying at the corners of his mouth. At last he lowered his gaze and his nose; there was no danger, and acorns lay thick and tempting. Soon all four bears fed noisily, rooting among leaves and crunching acorns far into the night. Once a deer snorted at their smell and drifted away to find acorns elsewhere. Later a mother and three young raccoons approached warily to eat the acorns that had fallen near the edges of the cane.

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At daybreak, having left the sow and cubs hours before, the old bear headed back for his bedding place on the red oak ridge. He waded a shallow slough where big-buttressed tupelo gums stood; their fruits had filled his belly before the acorns fell. Emerging from the bottomland, he brushed through low blueberry bushes dimly reminiscent of juicy mouthfuls in the summer moonlight. A sudden bark brought his head up and around. Fear surged through him. Sounds of heavy footfalls and the swish of brush against bodies broke his paralysis, and with remarkable swiftness for an animal so large, he reversed direction and headed for the canebrake. Frenzied yipping and shouting signified he had been seen. The old bear was cunning. He knew Indians and their dogs, for they had chased him before. His fear and his remembrances from the past urged him directly to where the cane was thickest and the sloughs deepest. Soon the pursuit lagged far behind. He crossed the recent passing of another bear. The odor made him bristle slightly; it was different from that of the sow and cubs, and reeked of trespass. Shortly the confident barking behind him changed to a confused, searching yelp, and there was silence. The bear stopped. A distant clamor of renewed excitement started him on his way again, but something was different. The noise was moving away, in a new direction. The bear paused on a low ridge and rested on leaves lumpy with new-fallen acorns. The following night as the old bear moved cautiously homeward, a fearsome odor floated to him over a brown slough. Moving back and forth to catch the scent, he came to its source. His ears heard nothing, his eyes saw only a dark hairless form stretched beside a cypress, but his nose recorded every detail. The air stank of sweaty men and excited dogs. It smelled of the bear whose trail he had crossed earlier, and of blood and flesh and intestines. The old bear hurried away.

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A hundred years after Fray Espinosa cooked his winter food in bear grease on the high ground overlooking the Neches River, Stephen F. Austin and party passed very near his camp on their way to San Antonio. They ate game meat and wild honey as they crossed the country of the red soil, ambitions of settlement in their heads. Bears were still plentiful in East Texas then and for several decades afterward. Settler John Wright found bears so plentiful in the Jasper County area in 1832 that many times "the dogs would get after a bear and break up the cow hunt." In 1839 friends of historian Gustav Dresel hunted in the Navasota and Trinity river bottoms; ". . . they returned home after three weeks . . . [with] the fat of seven bears." In 1842 traveler William Bollaert and his party were "fed at a farmhouse with bear's flesh" near Montgomery. Near Huntsville, they reported: The overflows in the rivers and creeks have drawn the bears out, who have been feeding and fattening on the mast in the bottoms. We killed . . . a fine black bear." Following the Civil War, Bear Man's Bluff on the Neches River in eastern Hardin County earned its name from the abundance of bear meat always available there for loggers who rafted down the river. By 1880 bear numbers were noticeably diminishing: "Bears are fast disappearing as the cattle eat up the cane-brakes that they inhabit, to the great discontent of a few old remaining bear hunters, who now are left to fight their cane-brake battles at their chimney corners, to the shuddering astonishment of the younger folks," wrote Governor Roberts in 1881.

Vernon Bailey, chief field naturalist for the United States Biological Survey, took down his file labeled TEXAS and glanced out the window. Office buildings across the street stood dim in the swirling snow, but a warm security settled on him. It was a good time to be alive. The country was young and vigorous. Here in Washington people gossiped excitedly about the aggressive poli-

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cies of the president. Bailey himself was pleased, because Theodore Roosevelt evinced a fierce love for wildlife and wilderness, reflected in the rapid moves he made to preserve land for parks and public forests. Bailey's job—to survey the nation's wildlife and forest resources—had been created by presidential decree. Bailey lost some of his cheer as he reviewed the notes of his field biologists—Ned Hollister, Harry Oberholser, James Gaut, and others. He penciled BEARS-EAST TEXAS at the top of a page. Two decades, he guessed, and the bears would be gone. He wrote, pausing frequently to consult his notes: "At Wharton in November 1904 I secured the skull of a bear killed the previous year by a Negro who said there were still a good many in the thicket near there. . . . Mr. W. D. Victor has an apiary with a large number of hives located at several points in the dense woods and thickets bordering the Colorado River below Wharton, and the bears have caused him much trouble and considerable loss through their fondness for honey. During the past ten years he has killed eight or nine bears, mainly for the protection of his bees. . . . "In November, 1904, an old bear hunter, Ab Carter, living on the west edge of the Tarkington Prairie, in Liberty County, told me that there were no bears at that time in Liberty County west of the Trinity River, but the active part taken by Mr. Carter in exterminating the bears in that locality makes his statement of peculiar interest. Forty-nine years ago he was born on the ranch he now owns, and his principal occupation, like that of his father, has been keeping hogs and killing bears. To a man with several hundred hogs running in the woods, bear killing was the most important part of the season's work, but it was not until about 1883 that the extermination of the bears began in earnest. At that time Mr. Carter and a neighbor each got a pack of good bear hounds and in the following two years they killed 182 bears, mainly within a radius of 10 miles from their ranches. This reduced the number of bears so that later not more than ten to twenty were killed annually up to 1900, when Mr. Carter killed the last two of the vicinity. Two years ago he killed the last of his

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bear dogs, and now keeps only hog and wolf dogs, while his hogs eat acorns in safety over 100 square miles of magnificent forest and dense thicket. . . . "In the Big Thicket of Hardin County black bears were common in many parts of the thicket in December 1904, but not so abundant as they were a few years ago. I had no trouble in starting one almost every day, but could not get a pack of dogs that would hold one till I could get to it. ... The bears in this region rarely tree for dogs, and unless the dogs keep one fighting on the ground he travels faster than a man can run through the jungle of palmettoes, brush, and vines. . . . "In several places in the heart of the Thicket I found cypress trees gnawed by the bears as high as they could reach, 6 to 7 feet from the ground. . . . One, which was about a foot in diameter, had been bitten lately and at different times previously, for at least eight or ten years. . . . One old-field pine about 14 inches in diameter had been well bitten at the usual height, but in this region cypress seems to be the favorite biting tree, or 'measuring tree', as called by the hunters." Bailey put his writing aside to leaf through the handwritten notes of his field biologists. Ned Hollister had recorded in 1902: "Sour Lake. Hardin County: Bears are still common here—two or three are killed every year and one was reported as having been seen with two cubs during my stay. Rockland: Black bears formerly here but now rare at least." Harry Oberholser noted that same year: "Not now found [in the vicinities of Jasper and Conroe] except very sparingly. A few are said still to inhabit the 'Big Thicket' 15 miles south of Conroe. Long Lake, Anderson County: [Bears] not at all of common occurrence, but formerly much more so." James H. Gaut wrote: "Liberty County, 1905: A few bear still inhabit the region in the vicinity of Cleveland but are not numerous. . . . Hardin County: In the most dense parts of the Thicket bear still abound in considerable numbers. . . . About ten miles NE of Sour Lake the tracks of a yearling were seen. . . . Mr. Mike Griffin saw tracks of an old female and two cubs in the [47]

Green Briar Thicket three miles west of his place and Mr. Jeff Parker claimed to have chased an old bear a few days later. . . . Mr. Ben Hooks who resides at Kountze made a hunt there April 7th with a pack of good bear hounds and captured two adult females and a yearling. . . ." Bailey stood, shelved his notes and looked outside. The winter evening seemed suddenly cold. A year later in East Texas, a Kansas newsman, less trained in science but no less eloquent, burned a coal-oil lamp late into the night. He wrote by the flickering light, determined to get the story right before the experience of the week past dimmed in his memory. He began: "The Big Thicket of Texas is known throughout the South wherever there is a man who enjoys the chase of big game. It is now recognized as one of the few refuges for the black bear." The details came back to him. "In order to understand thoroughly how the bear in the Big Thicket are hunted and killed, it is necessary to consider the two master hunters, Henry (Bud) Hooks and his brother Ben. In this particular hunt another important factor was Ben Lilly of Louisiana, who was engaged in hunting specimens for the United States Biological Museum and who on this occasion killed his 118th bear and let it be known that he has never had to climb a tree and has never had any hairbreadth escapes. "While the writer was in the thicket, there were two bears killed. The first one was shot by Mr. Lilly in the first day's hunt after a chase of only about half an hour. The second was killed within one day of a week later. . . . The hunting party on this [second] occasion was composed of ten people and eight dogs. . .. Ben Hooks and Mr. Lilly were in charge of the drive. The other members of the party were posted where the bear might cross the trails. The drivers, with the aid of Dandy [the "start" dog], were supposed to find the bear and start the chase. . . .

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"The writer was given a position on the ... south side of the 'Hurricane*. The Hurricane is the hiding place of the bear. At some remote date a tornado had broken down all the heavy timber for about half a mile in width and two miles in length. A dense undergrowth took the place of the timber, and a bear may pass within ten feet of a hunter without being seen. The hunt always begins at the Hurricane. . . . "It was about 7:30 o'clock when the hunt began at the Hurricane, and it was nearly an hour later before Dandy lifted up his voice in the welcome though discordant notes which signaled that his quest had been successful. The trail was a hot one, and in a few minutes the deep and infrequent baying of the old dog became almost a yelp, which told that the quarry had jumped or left his lair. This was the signal for releasing the pack, and Dandy's baying had an accompaniment which ran almost the entire gamut of dogdom. . . . "The bear had run toward Black Creek, just as Bud Hooks and Mr. Lilly thought, and there he encountered John Salter, a bear hunter of some distinction. The animal had stopped frequently on the way to fight the dogs, which are always troublesome, though cautious, and when he had covered the three or four miles to Black Creek he was pretty well tired out. Accordingly he climbed about twenty feet up the trunk of a big pine tree, where he was safe from the dogs. Salter, from his stand, heard the dogs in the thicket and made his way toward them. There he found the bear hanging on the tree, while the dogs barked spitefully below him. "The hunter brought his rifle to his shoulder and fired, and down came the bear, and the dogs at once pounced upon him. The shot was their cue and the bear was supposed to have received a mortal wound, but he shook them off, stopping only to knock one or two of them over, and again made off as fast as his legs could carry him. Salter had evidently fired too quickly or had become exhausted by his long run to the dogs, and so his aim was spoiled. The bear ran about half a mile, when he again took refuge in a tree and Salter again missed his shot. This time the bear turned

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north toward the Buck Pond, stopping every now and then to fight off the dogs. "When the writer reached the Buck Pond, riding slowly, he stopped, and far ahead he heard the yelping of the bear pack. At the risk of smashing a kneecap or two he spurred the horse to a gallop. The barking came nearer and nearer. The dogs were in front of the rider, and in the thicket to the left of the Buck Trail. Tying his horse, he swung his rifle across his arm, first making sure that there was a shell in the chamber, and ran toward the thicket, where the sharp barking of the dogs indicated that the bear was at bay. When within a hundred yards of the place away went the bear with the dogs at his heels, the hunter catching only a glimpse of the animal as he plunged deeper into the thicket. Following as fast as possible, the writer got a little nearer than before, when the bear again broke away from the dogs. He ran only a short distance and again stopped. This time the hopeful bear hunter, hot and perspiring, made a half circle, and when opposite where the dogs were barking he came in full sight of the object of his search, only about thirty steps away. He was standing with his forefeet on a log and was looking back and snapping at the dogs, who were behind him at a safe distance. It was the act of a moment to bring the gun into play, and in an instant a .44 calibre Winchester ball struck the bear full in the shoulder. . . . "The passing of the North American black bear is only a question of a few years. The Hooks boys and their friends killed sixteen in the Big Thicket in one year by persistent hunting, which was a big record. Mr. Lilly, who has spent the greater portion of his life hunting, says that there are only a few bear left in the Big Thicket and that there are but forty in all the Southern bear territory, including Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Arkansas. . . ." Fog rose from the Neches River and spilled over the banks into the bottomland. Night paled and a barred owl hooted one last time. Water droplets collected on twigs and branches and fell one by one, pattering on fallen leaves. Under a willow oak on the west bank, where the ground was a little higher than it was

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across the rest of the bottom, a form stirred. Hairy and black in the fog, it was at first a huge bear, but, upon rising, became a grizzled man wrapped in a bearskin blanket. Ben Lilly shook the dampness from the blanket and called his dogs. They came from rest under a fallen hollow cypress, three of them, scarred and gaunt. He pitched them each a piece of hard, dry meat, and took one himself. He listened to the drip of falling moisture. Then, with nothing left to complete his morning routine, he picked up his rifle and headed away from the river. Remembering familiar faces and places, he felt some regret. Red autumn leaves and bright green of April, moonlight on an August river. His friend Ned Hollister with the Biological Survey. He would surely miss these things, but the bears were nearly gone. Bear hunting was his life. "Where could a person find more bears?" he had recently asked Hollister. "They've about give out here. I speculate that only about fifteen are left in Texas east of the Brazos." "A strange man," Hollister thought. "He exterminates what he loves." Then he replied, "West, in the mountains." Lilly's strides consumed the miles, for he was a walking man. He wore thick boots with "holes cut in them to let the water out." Possessed of prodigious strength, even at his present age of over fifty, he packed his bedding, rifle, and food lightly. He traveled southwestward. It was Christmas Day, 1906. A huge tract of brushland near the Texas coast between the Colorado and Brazos rivers was reported to still have bears, and stopped Mr. Lilly temporarily. He hunted from a camp near Bay City and killed several bears, some as far south as Matagorda Bay. Then a letter tempted him back to Louisiana, where, for a short time, he served as chief huntsman on a bear hunt with Teddy Roosevelt. He left after the hunt, again headed westward with his dogs and a determined stride. He was never to return to East Texas. But he found bears aplenty during his last years in the mountain wilderness far to the west, where he would become another legend.

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The wind died soon after dark. Spring peepers challenged the coolness, and a sudden howl lifted from the blackness. Distant barking answered. Smells, stirred and diluted earlier by the north wind, strengthened and lay not far from their origin. The bear stopped at the edge of the open, where the dark was less intense. Long she stood, shifting her head at new sounds, lifting her nose when a breeze stirred. Urgings in her stomach broke the wait. She moved into the clearing and onward, a darker shadow in the darkness. Her course was direct, and she soon reentered the black thicket. A mile farther she slowed, then meandered, searching. The hunger pangs and other familiar sensations led her to a downed tree. She moved uncertainly, sniffing at its stump and then among short sections of its trunk that lay near. She pawed into the hollow end of one section, and crunched the dry honeycomb extracted by her sharp claws. Moving then from one section of the log to another, she tested each with her nose. Some were split, and open to her searching nose, but none contained the sticky sweetness she sought. Soon she moved on, hunger biting deeper. As she traveled, she unconsciously sought the smell of other bears, but none came. The cold season had come and almost gone, and there were no young with her. She had smelled none of her kind for a very long time. A yellow orb came to the sky and followed her through the trees. Her noiseless bulk drifted in and out of the shadows. Moist air drifting down a shallow ravine in the flatness brought her nose up. Hunger overcame caution; invisible smells drew her upwind. A quarter mile farther, fear stopped her at the edge of a moon-bright meadow. Her nose looked for danger, then led her eyes to a low rail fence, beyond which gray buildings slept. She moved and was over the fence in seconds. A delicious, sour smell engulfed her, and dark forms scattered before her like rats. Swiftly she pinned one in the soft mud, biting it before a sound

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came. A larger shadow charged into the moonlight, grunting loudly and aggressively. The she-bear was upon the sow instantly, teeth biting deep just behind the ears. A squeal rent the night. Dogs barked. Points of light flickered as the sow kicked feebly in the mud. Shouts brought the bear upright; fear pricked her consciousness. Uncertain, she wavered between flight and the feast that would still her hunger. There was a flash in the night, and thunder. A sting lashed her side. She was into the woods in seconds. Two hours and four miles later found the old bear gorging on honey. Hundreds of bees stuck on her fur in the moonlight; thousands filled the air. Overturned hives lay about. Honey dripped from her jaws, covered her face, and dribbled from crushed honeycomb onto the ground. Before the sky paled in the east she left the bees and honey behind, at a gait that consumed miles by sunrise. A long throaty bawl alerted the bear where she lay licking her side. She stared, noiseless and unmoving. Another bark, closer, sent her through the brush and downed timber in the opposite direction. Fear ran beside her, and soon the barking, now a din of many voices, lay far behind. She slowed, keeping to the thickness, and to the trails she had followed many times before. A puzzling smell caused her to stop where morning sunshine crossed a narrow opening. Thunder exploded in her head and pain flashed. Numbed for an instant, she fell, then regained her feet as fear pumped renewed vitality to her brain and muscles. She streaked blindly across the opening and into the woods beyond. She became very tired. It was hard to stay on the trail. Logs and brush pulled at her. Suddenly the dogs were near, she could hear their barking change tone, to a higher level. She bristled and rushed ahead with a last reserve of energy. The ground dropped away before her; the forest opened. The river ran brown and muddy. She hesitated. A large leaning tree stood near, and she tried to pull herself up the trunk but could not. Her legs would not function. A furious confusion of bodies

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Big Thicket country, last stronghold of East Texas bears.

and sound burst from the thicket behind. The old bear backed against the tree to face the dogs.

The lower portion of the Big Thicket was apparently the final stronghold of native bears in eastern Texas. An old female and two yearlings killed in Liberty County in 1919 and a large bear killed in Hardin County in 1928 were two of the last authenticated records. East Texas bear hunters had claimed their victory. The land was safe for hogs and honey. In the 1960s convincing reports of bear sightings in East Texas were again heard, to be viewed skeptically by most old-timers. The reports had basis in fact; several bears killed by astounded

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hunters and midnight traffic were proof. Tags in the ears of some showed them to have been trapped in northern states and recently released in nearby Louisiana parishes. The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department quickly changed antiquated hunting regulations to afford bears more protection. But, ironically, this same agency trapped at least one wandering bear and hauled it back to Arkansas from where it had come. Even should people leave bears alone, we do not know whether sufficient wild country, wild honey, and hardwood trees are left to make a comfortable living place for them. Continuing reports of bears seen in sites remote from throngs of people suggest maybe.

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4. Tooth and Claw

AT FIRST GLANCE there seems an odd thing about the historical record. The most able predators in East Texas—the big cats and the wolves—are scarcely mentioned. They were there, and clearly hazards to livestock, and even to people sometimes. But they take a poor second in written accounts to bears, deer, turkeys, and even pigeons and woodpeckers. A look at what we know today about these animals gives a clue to why few people wrote of them. They are hard to observe, and even in places where they are common, people seldom see them. On the East Texas frontier only people whose main concerns were hunting, trapping, or protection of family and livestock were likely to see wolves and cats frequently. By the time folks came along who had a bent and the time for recording what they saw, the predators were more secretive and far fewer than before. The long-tailed cats—the mountain lions, or panthers, and the jaguars—disappeared early. The wolves lingered on, and naturally it is about these that we know the most. The Story of the Red Wolf Fbr centuries in the Old Worid, stories about wolves drew children closer to the fireside on dark evenings. Wolves even came into Paris, in the early days, and ate people. After Columbus, these stories followed the ships of settlement westward across the ocean, and lo, wolves roamed the wilderness of America also. The settlers stood face to face with legend, and the stories grew. East Texas had its own contingent of wolves. Scientists called

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them red wolves, and knew them to be different firom the timber wolf of the North or the lobo of the West. Their howling fed the local folklore, and only in recent generations have they faded from scary stories at bedtime. But the real story of Texas wolves is in many ways more compelling than fiction. It began commonly enough. . . . Spanish travelers and missionaries in early East Texas made little note of wolves, perhaps because they were concerned with the more visible and useful aspects of the frontier. There is little doubt wolves were there; Anglo settlers who came later encountered them. Audubon in 1837 noted on a hut in Galveston M. . . a badly-stuffed skin of a gray or black wolf, of the same species I have seen on the Missouri. . . ." Traveler Gustav Dresel in 1839 camped in the woods northwest of Houston: "My dog ran away three times into the thicket. . . but always returned as soon as the wolves began to howl." The twentieth century came to find wolves still around, but apparently diminishing in number. Sol Wright traveled down the Trinity River from Dallas in 1903: "Few people lived in the river swamp at that time and the timber wolves would howl at night." Between 1902 and 1905 U.S. Biological Survey biologists Gaut, HoUister, and Oberholser encountered them. "Wolves are quite common on the Tarkington and Dayton Prairies east and south of Cleveland," wrote James Gaut. The residents reported wolves very often killing their fine hog dogs. . . . Wolves are numerous in the [Big] Thicket and do considerable damage to calves and pigs. . . . they are very sharp and hard to trap or poison. Their howling could be heard every few nights on the south side of Black Creek near Mr. Mike Griffin's place [near Sour Lake]." Hollister also found them near Sour Lake: "Wolves are reported as being abundant at times and destructive to stock." Harry Oberholser thought they were less numerous near Jasper "The timber wolf is said to have been common in former years, but is now rare." Biological Survey Chief Naturalist Vernon Bailey summed it [57]

up in 1905: 'The black wolf is reported from a few localities in the timbered region of eastern Texas, but in most cases as 'common years ago, now very rare or quite extinct'." Then for half a century, science was pretty much ignorant of what was happening to East Texas wolves. Government trappers pursued them relentlessly in these years, but local people knew more about the success of these trappers than did the government. When science finally did take a look, it found a surprise. Perhaps the first scientist since Bailey's Biological Survey to seriously examine the status of wolves in East Texas was Dr. Howard McCarley. In 1959 he wrote: "From time to time animals have been reported to me as red wolves. In all cases where it was possible to do so the skins and/or skulls were examined and measured. All such specimens proved, on examination, to be coyotes. A considerable number of official predator control trappers have been interviewed and in all cases it was found that the distinction these men made between wolves and coyotes was not objective. In general they referred to any large Canis as a wolf." What happened? Two Canadians at the University of Toronto, Douglas Pimlott and Paul Joslin, read McCarley's report and wondered the same thing. These men were experts on timber wolves in Canada; they had thought that wolves were still common in some places in the southeastern United States. Upon learning of McCarley's report they took an interest in this mystery and quickly gathered all the information they could. They knew that red wolves had once been found in the southeastern United States from central Texas to the Atlantic Coast. Several museums had skins and skulls of this wolf, which was larger than the coyote but usually smaller than the timber wolf they knew. Different color phases of the red wolf were common— black, red, tawny. They also knew that for several decades the red wolf had been exterminated east of the Mississippi River. But they thought, because of reports made by other scientists, that there were quite a few left between central Texas and the lower Mississippi. One of their best sources was Dr. Victor Cahalane, a biologist who in 1964

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published results of a recent questionnaire he had sent to state and federal biologists, inquiring about wolves in their regions. On the basis of his survey, Dr. Cahalane wrote: "In the south, a sizeable breeding stock of the red wolf is maintained in an area from the Gulf Coast of Texas north to eastern Oklahoma and eastward across Arkansas and northern Louisiana and to western Mississippi. Estimates of the red wolf population vary widely, from about 1,800 to more than 5,000 animals. The bulk of these are in Texas, with up to 3,500 wolves (according to one authority), and Arkansas which has about 1,500. Louisiana is believed to have 100 to 200 wolves, while Oklahoma and Mississippi contain much smaller numbers—probably 50 or less." Whose word was to be taken, Dr. McCarley's or Dr. Cahalane's? To understand how Pimlott and Joslin reacted, we must first see what makes a wolf different from a coyote. A wolf is usually bigger than a coyote, but not always. Adult red wolves weigh forty-five to eighty pounds; coyotes are normally smaller than forty pounds. Wolves usually look different from coyotes. Their heads and nose pads are wider, and their hair is coarser. But without having the animals together for comparison, most people could not tell one from the other. To make the problem more confusing, coyotes can interbreed with red wolves. The offspring tend to be intermediate in appearance and weight. Scientists have found that the only sure way to distinguish wolves from coyotes is to measure their skulls or listen to their howls. It has been known for years that the bones of wolf skulls are different in size from those of coyote skulls. In fact, the original delineation of wolf distribution had been based on scientific examination of wolf and coyote skulls from different places. The method of listening to howls to tell coyotes from wolves had been perfected by Pimlott and Joslin themselves. So it is clear why these two men believed McCarley and questioned Cahalane's report. McCarley had measured skulls. Cahalane's information had come from many different people who thought they knew what a wolf looked like.

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The two Canadians feared that there weren't nearly as many red wolves as people in the Southeast thought. Further, they knew that red wolves—different from their own timber wolves— had never lived anywhere but the Southeast. This meant that the species might be nearing extinction. Their concern led them to carry out a series of surveys in the mid sixties in all areas of the Southeast where wolves were thought to live. They had developed the method for their surveys—they drove back roads at night and played recordings of wolf howls. Both wolves and coyotes answered, but from experience they knew which were wolves. What they found dismayed them. They could locate wolves in only four places: two areas in the Mississippi River bottom in Louisiana, one area in north-central Louisiana, and several counties in southeastern Texas. They now had further evidence that McCarley*8 suspicions were correct—there weren't many wolves left. A flurry of scientific inquiry commenced when Pimlott and Joslin announced what they had found. Scientists can smell a story as quickly as news reporters, however slow they may be to get it in print. Some set about looking for more skulls to measure. Two taxonomists named Lawrence and Bossert quickly rounded up a few red wolf skulls, measured them, and decided they were no different from skulls of timber wolves. They published their findings in 1967. Wolf biologists gasped in dismay. But not for long. John Paradise of the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife in Washington, D.C., was slower but more careful. Together with Ronald Nowak of the University of Kansas Museum of Natural History, he combed the oldest drawers and shelves of the U.S. National Museum and other collections. These scientists ultimately found and analyzed nearly fifteen hundred skulls of timber wolves, red wolves, and coyotes. Not until 1971 were they sufficiently convinced of what they had found to print the story. But what a story it was. Not only did they show beyond a reasonable doubt that the red wolf was a dif-

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ferent animal from the timber wolf, they stumbled onto clues that told them why the red wolf was spiraling to extinction. First they confirmed by measuring skulls in the oldest collections that red wolves had indeed once lived throughout the Southeast. Timber wolves had lived in regions to the north. They were different critters, much as the Yankees and Confederates viewed themselves in the same area. Among these old skulls, though, Paradise and Nowak found a few that puzzled them. They were not wolf skulls; they were too small. But they weren't coyote skulls, either; they were too wolflike. In fact they looked very much like hybrids between red wolves and coyotes. Curious about these skulls, the two biologists searched for an explanation. They found another clue. All the intermediate skulls that had been collected prior to 1930 had come from central Texas. They found more of these "hybrid" skulls in later collections. In fact, when they separated and mapped the skulls according to when and where they were collected, a sinister pattern emerged. The hybrids had spread eastward from their origin in the Texas Hill Country, to engulf by 1969 almost the entire known range of the red wolf west of the Mississippi River. In the meantime, field biologists had zeroed in on the last stronghold of the red wolf—the coastal prairies and marshes of extreme southeastern Texas. During the summer of 1971 and the following winter, a Texas biologist named Dennis Russell, a Yale University student named James Shaw, and Glynn Riley of the U.S. Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife listened to wolves and coyotes answering their taped howls at night in the coastal counties. They found a few wolves left in Harris and Brazoria counties and more in Liberty, Chambers, and Jefferson counties. Only coyotes howled back at them in other counties. They finally decided that only a few hundred wolves were left in all of Texas: ". . . unless some protective measures and management plans

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are instigated very soon, we believe that this species, once indigenous to the entire southeastern United States, will completely disappear within this decade." Pimlott and Joslin wrote: "It is difficult to be certain how the factors interacted to bring the red wolf so close to extinction. It appears that wolves are more vulnerable to trapping and hunting than are coyotes, and the evidence suggests that these mortality factors have been important in the final decline of the species. "We do not believe," they continued, "that the hybridization of coyotes and wolves has been a primary factor in the decline of red wolves." But Paradise, with his hands on the skulls, did not entirely agree: "Apparently extensive habitat modification and decline of the red wolf population, both attributable to man, led to the breakdown of isolation and the formation of a hybrid swarm. . . . it is believed that a hybrid swarm occurred originally only in central Texas. "By 1969, the swarm had spread through most of eastern Texas and had moved into Louisiana. Pure red wolves continued to survive only in a limited area along the Gulf Coast from Brazoria County [east of the Brazos River] east to Chambers and Orange Counties, Texas, and in Cameron Parish."

As the two wolves moved along the levee, mallards chattered in the marsh beyond the stubble field. Overhead, clouds scudded across the sky, opening now and again for the moon to race across the flatness. The wolves stopped where the levee met the asphalt. A beam of light led a car down the rain-spattered highway toward them. They waited in the tall grass. The car passed with a hissing sigh; they crossed the road then and angled across the prairie to where the lake glimmered in the moonlight. They skirted the lake margin, looking, sniffing at odors held in the mud. The female led off into the weeds. Her mate followed. A feathered carcass lay among the smells of men and dogs. She cir-

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cled it once, and then both ate, plucking mouthfuls of feathers to get at the flesh beneath. Later they cornered a nutria that was on its way across a neck of land. He braced against a clump of bulrushes, baring his chisellike teeth as the female rushed him, but the male caught him from behind and his ratty tail thrashed about in the clay. The wolves feasted. Near dawn they trotted across a pasture that smelled of Brahmas. In a clump of tallow trees the cattle lay; one heaved itself up as the wolves moved past. They scampered ahead when it charged, but resumed their slower pace when it stopped. As they passed through a gate the male suddenly veered aside. He approached a clump of shrubs beside the rutted road. The female stopped, watching. She caught the man scent and whined but the male did not respond. Head low, he sniffed. He circled to his left. The female whined again. He moved nearer the bush and lifted his left rear leg, putting more weight on his right foreleg as he did so. Dirt spurted from the ground beneath his chest and he sprang high into the air. The female tensed, watching. When he landed there was a metallic sound. He streaked toward her, but something snapped his feet from beneath him. He fell full length on his back. The female raced away, toward the canal levee. In the distance she stopped. She could see her mate, surging again and again to free himself. Once she started back toward him, but the scent of steel and of man, and the musky odor of his fear kept her back. Finally the rattling and thumping stopped; the male lay with his muzzle on the ground and his foreleg twisted beneath him. The female moved closer. Across the meadow something moved. A dark shape crept from the morning fog, hesitated, then moved again. Then the female heard it—the growl of the man's truck. She turned and raced away. From the cover of a blackberry patch on the canal bank, she watched. The truck moved nearer; it came through the gate and 163J

stopped. The door opened and the man came out. He left the door ajar as he walked around the front of the pickup. He lifted a long object like a stick, and pointed it. There was no movement near the bush. The report came flat and final. The smell of burned powder came down with the fog. The female turned to follow the levee and the truck vanished behind her. She did not look back. Months passed. Now there were days when the wind blew warm from the south. Fresh-smelling green blanketed the prairie. Tractors awoke and began to taint the fields with their trails of exhaust. The female wolf was desperate with the mating urge, but no others of her kind had replaced her mate. At night, long after she had fed, she moved restlessly along the marsh edges and through the prairie grass. Now and again a farm dog would follow, lured by the unmated smell she bore. But a mutual fear and repugnance kept them apart. There was one part of her range that she seldom visited. It was a stretch of woods, several miles to the north. In the past year, she and her mate had hunted there; she remembered the sound of the yapping little coyotes, and their smell. Near the end of her heat period, she found herself drawn there. She did not find wolf smell, but again came across the sign of coyotes. She stopped near a clump of grass beside a woods road. Her nose twitched as she sniffed. Two nights later she noticed a coyote following her. She stopped. The wind shifted as he drew near, and she caught the smell. It was a young male. She bristled and rushed at him. He retreated just out of her reach but did not run away. By the next night she had become more accustomed to his presence. He was persistent. With fierce snaps she kept him away, but then he would press in even closer, whining and holding his head and tail high. Her desperation grew, but there were no other wolves. On the third night the coyote was back again. She snapped again at his [64]

advances, but more feebly this time. Later in the night she simply moved away. Then as the night waned and the last quarter of the moon shone through the trees, the urge that was a thousand thousand years old had its way, and her lineage set off on a new course.

In 1981 the team of biologists that had tried to save the red wolf in its last refuge in southeast Texas gave up. The forces of man and nature seemed to have conspired against them. Their final judgment was that the last few would quickly succumb to genocide by coyotes. But they had saved a few; these thrive in zoos and fenced sanctuaries. There is talk of putting some on islands or other places free of coyotes and other wolves. But it is hard to find people who want wolves as neighbors. Leopard Cats and Panthers In 1838 a young German businessman, Gustav Dresel, arrived in the city of Houston. James Polk, president of the United States, had recently approved Dresel's appointment as German consul for the state of Texas. In this capacity Dresel traveled in the backwoods country of southeast Texas, staying in the homes of residents and taking note of how they lived. The skills of the settlers at surviving on the frontier amazed him; he recorded with particular interest an incident he observed near Huntsville: The twelve-year-old son of planter Benton shouldered his rifle to shoot a stag or a wild turkey. He penetrated into the thicket and perceived a leopard. He had never seen any of these animals before but knew quite well that they were very dangerous. He was startled for a moment and reflected whether it would not be more advisable to turn back, when his pride induced him to face the danger. He fired. The beast was hit but not killed. It reared several times and then plunged against the young rifleman, who

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had loaded again with the utmost coolness and now sent the second bullet at the beast so well that it fell dead to the ground. The boy made marks on the trees for himself and then returned home triumphantly with the message of conquest. The leopard was skinned and the fur and the young backwoodsman were alternately admired. Henceforth his value as a man was enhanced considerably in the eyes of these inhabitants of the wilderness." Traveler William Bollaert heard of "leopard cats" (jaguars) in the vicinity of Montgomery in 1842. General Sam Houston reported them "east of the San Jacinto River." At the turn of the twentieth century, U.S. Biological Survey biologist Harry Oberholser called them "now very rare but formerly common" in the Jasper County area. Chief Naturalist Vernon Bailey reported the last verified record of a jaguar in East Texas, one killed south of Jasper in 1902.

For some reason jaguars never claimed the attention of frontier East Texans as did panthers. Perhaps it was because the jaguars were scarce, almost an oddity. Panthers crowded in at the edge of settlement in abundance; people felt their presence acutely. Sol Wright told how his father and grandfather found them in Jasper and Newton counties prior to 1850: "There were. . .a good many panthers. Father killed three. . . . Mother said Grandfather Hart had a pack of dogs that would hunt by themselves. . . . they went to them [the dogs] a good many times when they would have a panther treed." Anglos and panthers didn't last long together in East Texas, scientists say. By 1905 Biological Survey Chief Vemon Bailey thought them "very rare or extinct." Since that time, verified instances of panthers having been killed in East Texas are essentially nonexistent, though in recent years at least one carcass claimed to have been taken in the Angelina River bottom has been produced. Biologists doubted the story. A local resident of

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Angelina County said he saw one along the Neches River there in 1917. A presumably authentic report surfaced of one seen in Brazos County in 1958. If you live in East Texas, you know people still see them.

A man relieving himself off the front porch at midnight heard a faint scream away off down the hollow. The hair under his nightshirt stirred and the night air raised chill bumps on his arms. He hurried inside. "Heard it agin, Martha! Bound to be one o' them panthers. Screamin' like a woman, 'xactly like old Mr. Griffin used to say they sounded." "Close the door. Cold air's gettin' in. You ask me, it's them Langleys down th' way drunk an' yellin' at each other agin. It's Saturday night." Pause. "I always thought Old Man Griffin was a little tetched, anyway." Down the main line road where the bottom crowded close, something moved at the edge of the ditch. The driver of the old '49 Ford pickup pressed the high beam button with his foot and the tupelo gums and cypress that stood by the bridge ahead snapped into view. A pair of green eyes flashed at the roadside; a pale form with a long tail slid into the road. The driver pressed the accelerator desperately, but the critter leaped across the opposite ditch and into the dark. The tracks were smudged in the flashlight beam, but they were big. At the edge of the ditch they scratched deep into the sand where the critter had bounded across. The man climbed back in the truck. He sat behind the steering wheel and smoked a cigarette before moving on. In the old days there was a man who knew as much about panthers as anyone alive. He tracked them in the swamps and thickets, following his hounds in moonshine and rain. Not only did he have the last word of authority on panthers, he was widely

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known to be absolutely truthful and accurate in his stories. He was Benjamin V. Lilly, famed hunter and government trapper. Lilly spent his youth in the woods of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, in a time when panthers abounded. In middle age he moved west, halting for a few years in southeast Texas, to help exterminate the last bears there at the dawn of the twentieth century. He just missed the Big Thicket panthers; they were gone. Then he moved on west, to hunt panthers and bears in the mountains of Mexico, New Mexico, and Arizona. In the West, Lilly said, you seldom heard of panthers, or mountain lions as people called them there, attacking a man. But in the deep woods of his youth, people had feared panthers, and for good reason. There the big cats weren't always afraid of people, and some seemed to like the taste of human flesh. "I could relate many instances," Lilly wrote, "in which a panther ate the body of a grown man, leaving only the larger bones as evidence. In some cases, the panther dragged or carried the person away still screaming and trying to fight back. "At the time of attacks on people in the South," he continued, "settlers were scattered, and the panther had not yet learned to fear man. The panthers were often so short of food that they even ate scraps of meat and gnawed on bones thrown away from cabins in the woods. "The last panther attack that I know about directly was in the spring of 1886.1 was in my camp in the Mississippi bottoms skinning a big bear I had killed when Major Hambeiiing, who was out on a hunt, came by to bring my mail from Smeades Station, Mississippi. "'Lilly,' he said, 'I almost saw a six-foot panther on that gravel train that just passed. About eleven o'clock this morning, it sprang off the bank out of the cane and caught at a Negro shoveling gravel onto a flatcar. Another Negro saw the panther in time to holler, and the first Negro dodged. The panther's claws barely raked his jumper. The panther was leaping with such speed that it struck the ground on its side instead of on its feet. Ten men loading gravel had shovels in their hands and they beat the ani-

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mal down. The train conductor ran up with a pistol in his hand and shot it in the head. It was a young female.'" Lilly had other stories. He remembered a time in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where he was shipping hides to the Biological Survey in Washington, D.C.: There I met a very old man who was deaf, a tanner by trade. He was truthful and had a good memory. His wife kept a hotel My hides interested him, and we talked most of the night. He related at least a half dozen instances of panthers killing early settlers around his old home in southeast Texas. "One man he told about settled with his wife and two babies near the thickets. He built a cabin and was clearing land to farm. One Saturday evening he went to a neighbor's house for something, leaving his wife. The cabin had a fence around it, and she was cleaning up the yard in front. While she was burning a pile of trash, she heard one of the babies in the house crying. She went in and quieted it and brought the other one outside and set it down on the ground. She went on raking up trash and burning it. Then the baby on the ground began to cry. She quieted it and resumed her work. "Her back was to the baby when she heard it give a terrible squall. She looked in time to see a panther bound over the fence carrying the baby into the dense thicket just beyond. She ran after the panther, but it disappeared. At this instant the baby in the house set up a squalling. She rushed to it, gathered it in her arms and, carrying it, ran towards the yard fence to follow the panther. The baby in her arms was still squalling. Now the panther leaped back and came toward her. She made for the house and got inside just in time to slam the door in the face of the panther. She barred it with a large slab of wood hewn for that purpose. "When the man came, he found his wife holding the bar to the door and screaming. He did not own a gun, and he ran to the neighbor's to borrow one. When he returned, the panther was reared up with his front paws on the door. He was afraid to shoot lest the bullet go through the door and kill his wife. The panther ran off into the thicket. The man now got word to the neighbors.

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By next morning all the men in the settlement were gathered with all their dogs. Among the men was one by the name of Paine who had a pack of hounds. They hunted every day steady for two weeks. If I remember right, it waa eleven panthers they killed. They never found even a scrap of the dress worn by the baby that the panther carried off."

One day East Texans may shoot panthers again, who knows? People still kill them in South Texas, and occasionally they wander miles eastward from there to be shot by deer hunters or ranchers. It will be tough for them to come back, for they sometimes have a taste for livestock. But they seem to have lost their taste for people. . . .

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5.Wings

"I NEVER HAVE, in all of my rambles, been to a place where there was as many small animals: coons, possums, rabbits, and squirrels and birds — owls, hawks, crows, quail, meadow larks, woodpeckers, blue jays, red birds, whip-poor-wills, mockingbirds, etc., as there were at my old home. In the spring of the year you could hardly hear your ears for the birds hollering and singing. It hardly seems like real living to me to be where you can't hear hoot owls, whip-poor-wills, and mockingbirds." Sol Wright was a simple frontiersman, late last century, but he had deep feelings about his Newton County homeplace.

Many people today, like Mr. Wright, would find it dull to live where few birds sing. Fortunately a lot of the birds in East Texas adapt well; they hang on in woodlots, at pasture edges, and in cities, in places that must be a lot different now from what they used to be. These kinds will be here for a long time. But there have been, and still are, birds that are not as tough, that are more sensitive to what goes on around them. Some hide in secret spots that haven't changed much over the years. Others are gone; East Texas will not again hear their wings, or their "hollering and singing" on a spring morning. The Rogue Woodsmen who shunned the settled places to push into the peripheries of civilization in early America met with a most remark-

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able bird. A French trapper poling his pirogue along a brown bayou suddenly saw, as in a tropical fever, flashes of resplendent color wheeling overhead. A frontier fanner watched in disbelief as a flock of green-and-yellow birds settled in a woodside magnolia, leaving his corn patch stripped. An adventuring naturalist, boating down the Ohio River in a snowstorm, gaped in amazement at brilliant-hued birds "flying about like pigeons and in full cry." The bird was the Carolina parakeet. It ranged through all the eastern woodlands at first, but seemed to vanish with settlement. It was truly a wilderness bird. Parakeets came west to deep East Texas and on westward with the bottomland woods, possibly as far as the Trinity River. They were there for the first settlers to see. They were "quite numerous in the eastern part of the State [Texas] in 1853," although by that time they had disappeared over much of the eastern United States. Governor 0. M. Roberts described them: The Parakeet of south-eastern Texas gives a harsh, grating call in its rapid flight, always seen in small numbers, but never singly, dashing through and around the tops of trees, [it] is also a bird of beautiful colors of green and yellow or pale red." Parakeets were plentiful in East Texas until about the time of the Civil War. A resident of Polk County saw some until 1875, but none thereafter. Over across the Texas line near Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a few flocks of parakeets hung on until at least 1880, and some people thought remote areas of Oklahoma had a few up to about 1889. They were almost certainly extinct in Texas by then.

The year was 1890. Interest in bird study was gaining momentum in America. But recent years were ones of lament for the adventuresome student — the golden age of the frontier naturalist was fast waning. Audubon had died nearly forty years before. The great scientific explorations to the West, playthings of presi-

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dents and boon to favored zoologists, had gone stale. Scientists now clustered in museums and offices, putting together the pieces collected by the advance guard. A man named Edwin Hasbrouck sighed and took up his pen. Oh, to have been there! Born too late. Enter now the age of stuffing, dissecting, recording, and bickering over detail. With a sweeping hand he wrote across the top of the page: The Carolina Paroquet (Conuruscarolinenses)" Pausing then briefly to collect his thoughts, he skipped a space and continued: "For many years it has been a recognized fact that the Carolina Paroquet is fast approaching extermination, the last quarter of a century having witnessed such rapid diminution in its numbers and so great a restriction in its range that, in the opinion of the best judges, twenty years hence it will be known only in history and from museum specimens. In view of this it has seemed desirable to present a monograph of the sole representative of the Parrot family in the United States. .. ." Hasbrouck had steeped himself in old journals, papers, and museum material from the Smithsonian Institution. He knew his subject well. The birds had once ranged throughout the eastern United States, north to the Great Lakes and west along rivers as far as Colorado. Hardy birds, they had even been seen in New York in winter. As near as he could tell from what others had seen they were social travelers, moving from place to place in flocks and nesting in flocks. But they claimed the southern states as their favored haunts. Here in the South they lived as far west as Texas. Hasbrouck had been particularly curious about why parakeets disappeared soon after settlement. He now knew. Audubon himself had answered the question vividly. Hasbrouck carefully rephrased a paragraph he had found in the famous naturalist's journal: The orchard of a certain fruit grower was visited at the season when buds were developing into fruit, by an immense flock of Paroquets, and in a few hours was completely stripped by them; the birds working in regular manner from tree to tree, and failing [T3]

so far as he could observe to make use of any of the spoils as food. Naturally, he [Audubon] continues, such depredations were not to be perpetrated with impunity, and retaliation was meted out in the shape of death to as many as could be killed. Unfortunately for the evil doers, a habit peculiar with them is that of knowing little or no fear of fire arms and the wounding of an individual is but the signal for the practical extermination of the entire flock: returning again and again to the scene of slaughter, they fly screaming over their dead companions, falling an easy prey to the marksman who has but to load and fire at pleasure until the numbers become too few or too scattering to make it worth the while. This one peculiar trait is what has apparently led to their rapid disappearance, for the punishment, merited to a certain extent as previously stated, was not visited with a due amount of discretion — which may be said to be the rule rather than the exception in the case of an irate farmer with a shot gun. This, coupled with the shooting for sport by pothunters, etc., has practically exterminated one of the most beautiful birds that graced the American continent. . . ." Hasbrouck wrote late into the night.

In East Texas as elsewhere, the parakeet fell before the gun. Here they were especially partial to young corn, and damaged fields severely. Fanners shot them on sight. "Despite its resplendent beauty," wrote George Lowery, Louisiana naturalist, "the bird was a rogue. It ate the farmer's corn and raided his orchards, destroying almost every kind of fruit indiscriminately." East Texans made their choice. Winged beauty paled beside full pans of cornbread. They Darked the Sun Martha was alone in her cell. The last of her companions had been taken away. She now sat day after day, waiting, not knowing that [74]

they had died, that she was the only one left. She did not want for care; there was always a man to make sure she had plenty of food and drink, and to see that the place where they kept her was clean. People seemed to take an unusual interest in her welfare. Often, ones she did not know came to stare, and to converse among themselves. Four lonely years passed. There came a time when Martha began drooping. Her vitality seemed to be ebbing away. Perhaps it was partly because of her solitary, closed-away life; she was a social kind by nature, and the loss of the others had been deeply disturbing. But she was getting old as well, and who could say. One morning in earliest Call, the man came with food. Martha was not in her usual place, and he stepped quickly inside. She lay quietly on the floor. He bent and touched her with a gentle, almost reverent motion. Straightening then, he wiped the corner of his eye. The food spilled and scattered over the floor as he hastened away. Martha's death created a flurry of activity in the building where she had lived. They carried her body from the place of her confinement. Immersing it in water, they froze it and shipped it to Washington, D.C., in a huge block of ice. People were waiting to receive it. They took her body into a laboratory and the best experts came to examine it. Long hours later the autopsy was over. Martha's body was carefully prepared to preserve a likeness of her in life. She can be seen in Washington today. There is a marker. Ectvpiste* migratoriu* (Linnaeus) Passenger Pigeon Last of its race. Died at Cincinnati Zoological Garden, September 1st, 1914 Age 29 years Presented by the Cincinnati Zoological Garden to the National Museum Adult Female, 236,650 [75J

Phenomena] numbers of passenger pigeons once lived in eastern North America. They offered a particularly awesome spectacle to observers because they nested and moved about in flocks of stupendous size. Some of the accounts of their plenty are almost unbelievable. An early traveler in Kentucky wrote: "One autumn morning of 1847, before day I was wandering along the heights which overhang the town of Hartford, in Kentucky,. . . when . . . I observed that the horizon was darkling. . . . I discovered that the clouds—as I had supposed them to be—were neither more nor less than numerousflocksof pigeons. . . . In the space of thirty-five minutes, two hundred and twenty bands of pigeons had passed before my eyes. Soon the flocks touched each other, and were arrayed in so compact a manner that they hid from my sight the sun. The ordure of these birds covered the ground, falling thick and fast like winter's snow. . . ." Audubon tried to calculate how many birds were in some flights he had seen: "It may not, perhaps, be out of place to attempt an estimate of the number of Pigeons contained in one of those mighty flocks. . . . let us take a column of one mile in breadth, which is far below the average size, and suppose it passing over us without interruption for three hours, at the rate mentioned above of one mile in the minute. . . . Allowing two pigeons to the square yard, we have One billion, one hundred and fifteen million, one hundred and thirty-six thousand pigeons in one flock."

A. W. Schorger, one of the foremost authorities on the passenger pigeon, estimated that its numbers might have been somewhere near three billion, as much as half the total bird population in the United States today. Passenger pigeons were common in East Texas, but they rarely nested there. Though some reportedly remained to nest near Goshen in Henderson County, they typically nested in the northeastern states and came to Texas only in fall and winter.

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Because the pigeons congregated in huge flocks they rapidly depleted food wherever they fed. So they had to forage widely. In fall and winter particularly, when they ate acorns, beechnuts, and other mast, they wandered far and wide in search of food. They foraged over the entire eastern part of North America, wherever hardwood trees bore mast in abundance. The birds did not wander aimlessly, but often returned year after year to the same places to feed and to roost. They were long-lived, and tradition probably helped them relocate good foraging areas. That is, the older birds remembered from year to year where they fed and roosted, and led the young ones there. The pigeons returned each fall to East Texas. Texas Governor 0. M. Roberts wrote of them: "Wild pigeons . . . in large numbers visit us in the fall and winter, wherever they can find acorns. The wild pigeons establish a roost to which they return at night, after having gone during the day a great distance in search of food. They continue to come long after dark, and crowd upon one another on the limbs of trees and bushes, so as to bend and even break them down, keeping up a noise all the time that makes the woods roar." M. B. Hickman of Corrigan described a pigeon roost almost ten acres in extent that he saw near Corrigan in the fall of 1868. From this roost the birds foraged daily for acorns and beechnuts along the Neches River. Floyd Pope of Woodville remembered a large flight of pigeons near Woodville in 1875, "just out of gunshot range." In the 1870s F. D. Douglass of Anderson County saw passenger pigeons flying over in such numbers that "they darkened the sun." Here they roosted at night along Catfish Creek, breaking limbs from trees because of their great numbers. Ornithologist Henry Nehrling found them around 1880 in the vicinity of Houston ". . . occasionally common during the migrations. In September and October, 1881,1 saw immense numbers in the post oak woods, where they were feeding on acorns." H. C. Attwater saw a passenger pigeon invasion of Houston in 1873: they "darkened the sky like a cloud."

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J. G. Elaine knew a roost in Leon County, about ten miles south of Oakwood, that occupied about four hundred acres. Pigeons dispersed from the roost each day over the surrounding country to hunt acorns, but returned at night from all directions. During each of the three years he observed them there, they stayed for a month to six weeks, departing after exhausting the acorns in the region. In 1881 Nehrling found great numbers of pigeons in the post oak woods of West Yegua Creek in Lee County and at Hearne in Robertson County. Hallie C. James knew of a place in Hardin County, four and a half miles southeast of Kountze at the edge of "Pigeon Roost" Prairie, where early settlers found large nocks of pigeons roosting in trees. Other places where pigeons congregated in fall and winter were Houston County and several locations in Henderson County (Brushy Creek, Wolf Creek, south of Malakoff, near Goshen, northwest of Eustace, and at Coon Creek). Henderson County appeared to be one of the pigeons' favorite feeding and wintering areas in Texas; pigeon hunters came there from all parts of the state. George B. Thompson of Henderson County recalled: "Many times on my way to school at about 8 in the morning, the pigeons leaving the roost would darken the sky, with not a white speck of sky showing; it made twilight of the morning." Their own twilight was at hand; the winter of 1881-82 saw one of the last great Texas flights. That year enormous numbers of pigeons came to Harris County near Houston and to Robertson County near Hearne. Then very suddenly, a few years later, they stopped coming. H. D. Pickens, Athens resident, said, "I well remember that one evening the birds all flew back south never to return again, but we did not think or realize for possibly two to three years that they were gone forever." The pigeons were probably gone from Texas by 1900. They disappeared from the well-known roost on Coon Creek in Henderson County by 1893, and W. H. Coleman of Athens saw his last

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pigeon about 1898. Biologists Bailey, Hollister, Gaut, Loring, and Oberholser of the U.S. Biological Survey mentioned no pigeons in their reports of wildlife in East Texas, 1902 to 1905. Hollister's friend Ben Lilly saw some of the last pigeons in nearby Louisiana in the winter of 1902-03. Martha died eight years later. It was that sudden.

Like parakeets, passenger pigeons fell to the gun. But it is a mystery why they disappeared so rapidly, from millions to none in a few decades. It is inconceivable that hunters could have sought out every last one in so short a time. Some think that pigeons may have required large aggregations for a critical function—protection against natural predators by sheer concentration of numbers, maintenance of a "group" memory to seek out food, or perhaps provision of a social stimulus to breed—and that, once they became few, they could not last. Only stories and conjecture remain. And Martha, staring in perpetual alertness from behind the glass. Ghost Bird Legend, that brew of fact and fiction more potent than either alone, lives best in dank, dark places. In this country it loves the lowlands of the Southeast, west to where the big trees stop and east to where the ocean starts. White man has slashed at its habitat now for nearly three centuries, pushing it deeper into the swamps, but it is still there. It pushes out from time to time, to startle those who have spent their lives in the sunshine. One legend of this low country is about a mysterious bird, the ivory-billed woodpecker. At first the bird was real, winging through the dark woods as the settlers hung on the periphery. Then it became scarce, and finally disappeared. Some say. Legend says it still flies.

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Stories that the ivory-bill lives are intriguing partly because some of them could be true; even scientists find it hard to separate the real from the fiction. In recent times many have looked for it, and some claim they have seen it. Others say no, you're under the spell of the legend. The story began years ago, when the ivory-billed woodpecker was a familiar sight to people living in the low country. In the mid 1800s it was common in the big bottomlands from Texas to Carolina. East Texas had its share of them. John James Audubon in the 1830s found it "very abundant along Buffalo Bayou" near Houston. Ornithologist H. E. Dresser knew that it was "found on the Brazos River, where the timber is large; and a planter on the Trinity River told me that it is not uncommon there." Another naturalist collected some of its eggs near Jasper in the Neches River bottom. In the late 1800s it suddenly became harder to find. It was soon clear that the rapid expansion of logging was pushing it out. By 1890 ivory-bills were sufficiently scarce to attract a great deal of scientific attention. By 1926 many naturalists believed the bird was extinct, but shortly thereafter some were found in northern Louisiana, on a piece of bottomland virgin timber called the Singer Tract. These became the focus of a serious study during the Depression years, and eventually the subject of a book by ornithologist James Tanner, containing many photographs of ivory-bills and descriptions of their life history. World War II came, the Singer Tract was logged, and shortly thereafter authenticated reports of ivory-bills ceased. But the bird would not die. Bird-watchers and locals continued to report catching glimpses of it in Florida, Georgia, and East Texas. Scientists typically doubt amateurs, but were still torn between officially closing the book on it as gone with the parakeet and the passenger pigeon, and hoping some of the stories were true. Midcentury passed, and the chances it might still survive

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seemed more remote than ever, even in the face of scattered claims to the contrary. Then came a startling report from one who should know—a scientist claimed to have seen it, deep in the forests of East Texas. . . . In early winter of 1966 a young man from Virginia arrived in the Big Thicket region of East Texas with an unlikely mission. He had come to look for the ivory-bill. What made him different from others who for years had sought, and sometimes reported seeing, this bird in the dark woods of Texas? Why should he expect to find it where many had failed, and if he did see it, why should his word be taken over that of others? In terms of finding it, he had a good lead: a local woman had described a bird she had recently seen, and it fit the ivory-bill perfectly. In terms of being believed, he had the credentials: he was a specialist in the study of woodpeckers. His name was John Dennis. Dennis knew well the history of the bird's demise in Texas. Not since 1904 had there been an official record of it in the state. Ironically, among scientists, "official" usually means dead, the provision of a corpse that any doubter can view. Vernon Bailey of the U.S. Biological Survey had collected two of the birds near Gay lor Lake in Liberty County in 1904. At that time he wrote: The Ivory-bill is well-known to all the residents throughout the Big Thicket, and was reported as fairly common at every place where we inquired. Even the boys could imitate its harsh notes. The only birds we saw were between Tarkington Prairie and Trinity River, where I saw 6 in one day." Certainly many people claimed to have seen the birds after that; some of the people, though amateur, had reasonable credentials. In the late 1930s two local naturalists, Bessie M. Reid and Corrie H. Hooks, told of several sightings they had made in deep East Texas. (This was about the time that Dr. Arthur Allen, who supervised James Tanner's work, was studying the ill-fated Singer Tract birds in Louisiana.) Whitney Eastman, another experienced bird-watcher, had reported seeing two pairs and an-

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other female in 1960-61 somewhere between the lower Neches and Trinity rivers. But no one had provided unmistakable evidence—dead birds or good photographs. Dennis met his local guide, Mrs. Olga Hooks Lloyd, on December 1. They went quickly to the place where she had seen the ivory-bill, a female according to her description. It was in the bottomlands of the Neches River, above Dam B (Steinhagen) Reservoir. They did not see one that day. But late one evening two days later Dennis heard something that sounded to him like a tin trumpet. Surely it must be an ivory-bill; their call sounded much tike that. What else could there be to make that sound in these woods? Rains came the next day and he was forced to wait. He waited for a week. Then the roads dried and he returned to continue his search. His hopes lifted one day when he found two large holes drilled in a living overcup oak tree. Could they have been made by an ivory-bill? He knew pileated woodpeckers lived in the same area, and also excavated large holes, but these should not be theirs. The pileated woodpeckers usually made holes in dead trees, and he thought the entrances to their holes were usually rounder than this. But still he had scant evidence, even for a woodpecker expert. His hopes flagged. Toward noon two days later, after he had tried all morning to relocate the woodpecker holes, he came upon a wooded slough, about two hundred yards west of the river. He was tired. Suddenly it was there, right before him. The ghost bird, so hard to separate from imagination in these dark swamps. It glided from somewhere near the ground, flashed behind the trees, and reappeared for an instant on the trunk of a dead cypress in the water. Then it was gone. But he had seen the marking—the wide, white border at the rear edge of the wing. A half hour later he saw it again, looking like a "giant red-headed woodpecker" perched on a stump with wings outspread. Dennis was convinced.

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Suddenly the stories told by local people seemed more believable. So believable in fact that Dennis began to make an estimate of the ivory-bill population in the area, based on these stories and on two more glimpses he had (one from an airplane). He decided there must be between five and ten pairs of them in the lower Neches River valley. Dennis left and so did the woodpeckers. Other biologists visited the area and saw only the pileated and red-headed varieties. They failed to find even the virgin timber habitat that Tanner's book claimed the birds needed. The woods had again closed their doors on the secret. Once more the ivory-bill shared East Texas legends with bears and panthers. . . .

There is little doubt the ivory-bills were pushed out by the axe and saw. They lived in great tracts of lowland forest and swamp. Here they ate mostly the larvae of wood-boring beetles that lived between the bark and sapwood of dead limbs and dead trunks of giant hardwoods. Virgin forests had plenty of food; old trees and branches were dying all the time. New forests that grew after loggers took the old trees were too healthy; dead wood was hard to find. Pileated woodpeckers — the Indian Hens of the country folk — might have helped the loggers starve the ivory-bill. More adept than their cousins at gleaning logged-over woods, they probably made the beetle larvae even scarcer. We could speculate on and on. Whatever happened, the ivory-bill's special ability to live on the spoils of natural disaster did it no good when the disasters became man-made. Is it gone? Most think so, but only time will tell for sure. One day when we look across the bottomlands of East Texas and see nothing but pastures, pines, and blue lake water, then we can say with finality: "It's gone."

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The Woodpecker Tree The tree stood near a dim road. One could not be sure why the loggers had missed it in years past. No others its age were left. Not even their stumps; these had been blasted from the ground and hauled away. In view were other trees, pines like itself but young. They seemed to mock the old tree with their health and vigor. Sunlight fell in open spaces among the trees. Under each tree, near its trunk, needles matted the ground, and football-sized cones lay lifeless. Where the needles thinned out, tall grasses grew up. The trees stood far apart. The trunk of the old tree showed the wear of time. A blackened fire scar ran from the ground upward higher than a man's head; pocks and scabs blighted its bark. High up, beneath the first large branch, a black hole gaped. Around the hole and for several feet downward, the bark glistened with ooze. Day followed autumn day. Storms came; rain lashed at the tree and wind tore at its branches. Occasionally a deer passed near, and periodically a truck or car crept past on the road. Once a squirrel climbed part way up the trunk, then down again, stopping among the fallen cones to lick its feet. Each evening near dusk a small bird appeared from the surrounding woods. Straight to the old tree it went, and disappeared into the black hole. Each morning it left. One afternoon in late fall a pickup truck passed, then stopped. Gears ground and the vehicle backed up, coming to a halt across from the old tree. A man stepped out the passenger door. He trained a pair of binoculars on the old tree. "Hey, it's one!" he shouted over the sound of the idling truck. The motor stopped. The other door clinked open, and a man slid from behind the steering wheel. Together the men walked toward the tree. They moved around the tree, looking upward at the trunk. One wrote on a pad of paper and they talked back and forth briefly. Just before they left, one pulled a roll of ribbon from his vest pocket

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and tied a length of it around the tree, about five feet from the ground. Backing off, he took the cover off a camera and snapped pictures. Twice within the next two months groups of people came to look at the tree. Each time the people would circle the trunk, point, and talk loudly to each other. They said the same kinds of things again and again. "Look, there it is! Up there, under the branch." "See all that pitch!" "What's the bird called again?" "Red-cockaded woodpecker." That's eighty-one for my list. Oh, do holes count? I mean, there's so many people around we can't really expect to see the bird." Winter passed and the bird still slept deep within the old tree. On clear days it sometimes moved up and down in the sunshine places on the trunk, pecking here and there, after it had returned from a morning in the woods. One day in early spring, after new pitch had begun to drip from the tree where the bird had pecked, a man came through the woods squirting paint on tree trunks. He paused before the woodpecker tree. He looked up at the trunk, then he examined the ribbon surrounding it. Shrugging his shoulders, he pointed his arm and left a splash of color just above where the plastic strip encircled the trunk. Whistling, he moved on, marking other trees with a practiced aim. Another visitor to the tree that spring day was a new bird. She came in the afternoon—young, trim, with the white cheeks and the black-and-white back and wings of the resident, but without the touch of red on each side of the head. Out came the owner of the hole. There was much woodpecker conversation, and some display of upstretched wings. This was his tree. He had been hatched in the same hole five years before. He had stayed in the territory and helped his parents rear broods for two seasons. Then they had disappeared and he had moved into the hole, sleeping there every night. [85]

The newcomer stayed. One day in early May she entered and laid a white egg. When he went to sleep that night he felt its round smoothness under him. The next night he slept on two eggs; then there was a third. Each evening before dark, he pecked all around the entrance, making the pine gum flow thickly. It was safe then; snakes and other animals would seldom pass through the sticky mess. During the day the female sat on the eggs when he was out. After ten days, one egg hatched and the pair of birds, helped by two males that had hatched in the same hole the year before, started bringing soft insects and worms. The next day, when the second egg hatched, the first nestling had already grown enough to be able to reach higher for the food brought to the hole. The third egg hatched, but there was not enough food to go around, and the two earliest hatchlings soon trampled the youngest one beneath their feet. The four adults worked steadily all day, bringing food from as far as half a mile away. Still they could hardly satisfy the two remaining appetites. It was hard to find trees with good food. Old pines with dead limbs were best, but they were scarce. Young pines had to do. The adult woodpeckers worked from daylight to dark. Twenty-six days later, the birds had succeeded. Despite the scarcity of food, the two young still lived, and they flew from the nest. In the following weeks they gradually learned to find food for themselves. The older birds, all except the owner of the hole, disappeared again and resumed their endless search for new homes. It was hard times; scarcely any trees that were big enough and old enough could be found. Fall turned into winter, and again the one bird lived alone in the hole in the old tree. Spring came again, and early one morning a procession of trucks passed, filling the woods with noise and blue exhaust. They stopped not far down the road. Men climbed out. They unloaded gasoline cans and tools. The roar of a chain saw rattled through the woods.

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In the days that followed, men moved about the woods like ants. Saws buzzed. Pitch bled from fallen trees and lent a new fragrance to the air. Trucks laden with logs crept by, engines blatting. One day two men walked to the base of the old tree. One had a chain saw, and kept pumping the oil plunger with his thumb until grease dripped onto the ground. The other one said, "I ain't too sure about this one. It looks old and pitchy to me. Might make good fence posts, but it'd just gum up the saw. It's all knotty anyhow." "It's marked," said the one with the saw. His companion looked up the tree again. "Besides," he said, "I think it's one o' them peckerwood trees. You know, like they told us to watch out for. We ain't supposed to cut 'em." The man with the saw stiffened. "I heard 'em talkin'," he said. That's the dumbest thing I ever heard. Worried about some little ol' titbird." "Maybe we shouldn't cut it," said the other. He frowned, looking around as if for someone with more authority. "We might get ourselves in trouble." "It's marked," the other one replied. He yanked the starter rope ami the saw caught and idled. Leaning quickly, he brought it up. The growl changed to a roar, and his partner moved quickly out of the way.

In its span of time on earth, the red-cockaded woodpecker is old. Like an old man propped with an ancient cane, it carries on because of the old tree in which it lives. There is something in the old staff that keeps the old person going; a newer walking stick will not do. Likewise the old tree has something that is vital to the woodpecker: a new tree will not suffice. The elixir of the tree is age itself. Age and a malady called red heart disease, which strikes the center of old pines and makes a fine place for the woodpecker to drill its nest. The bird refuses to [87]

nest elsewhere, and if there are no old pines, there are no woodpeckers. Like obstinate old people, they refuse to bend, to cope with youth. When white people first came to the country of the longieaf pines, there were many old trees. Young trees sprouted in the spaces cleared of old ones by lightning and wind. Middle-aged trees waited to get old. There were many red-cockaded woodpeckers. The woodpeckers had lived there for thousands and thousands of years, because the supply of old trees was never-ending. As the years went by, the trees fell more and more rapidly, much faster than the young ones could get old. Axes, crosscut saws, and finally chain saws leveled them. At first the middleaged and older trees were cut because they were useful; houses built from them lasted a hundred years. Finally they were downed because they were useless. They grew too slow to feed the appetites of housing projects and paper mills. They took space where faster-growing young trees could be. Now the woodpeckers have to search hard to find old trees. The bird-watchers have to look hard to find the woodpeckers. And like diamonds, the harder the birds are to find, the more priceless they become. As surely as sun follows rain, the woodpeckers will thrive where old pines grow. It seems such a simple matter, then, to have the woodpeckers. Leave some old trees. But ours are the times of youth. Old people are put away; they have no use. Old trees are cut down, there is no space. Old woodpeckers die, and it makes no difference.

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6. Home Is the Hunter

THE FIRST ANGLOS to settle in East Texas came from the hills of Tennessee and North Carolina and the farms of Georgia and Mississippi. They were used to tall trees and close horizons. They felt right at home in East Texas. The food and clothes of these people had for generations come from the soil, the streams, and the woods. Many left a trail of homesteads behind them, mined of fertility by corn and tobacco, and of wildlife by squirrel guns. They kept moving west; they stopped at last in Texas. Hunting was rooted deep in these people. Some were bear hunters, but usually bear hunting was claimed by first-comers or fanatics. Some hunted raccoons and opossums, following hounds and cur dogs under the frosty moon. Everybody hunted deer, turkeys, and squirrels, and in East Texas they found a paradise. Turkeys swarmed over the countryside. Fray Juan Agustin Morfi, a Spanish missionary to the East Texas Indians, left an account of them in the early 1700s: "Along the banks of the streams and the outskirts of the woods the droves of wild turkeys are so numerous that they disturb the traveler with their clucking." In the 1830s in Jasper County, Sol Wright's grandfather "put bells on the horses and turned them out at night to graze, and in the spring, in turkey gobbling time, when he would go out in the early morning to drive them in, he could hardly hear the bells for the turkeys gobbling." Thirty years later, Sol Wright himself would see "five or six old hen turkeys and fifty or sixty young ones . . . come into the cornfield . . . every summer." Near Sils-

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bee in the mid 1800s they "came in flocks, often forty or fifty at a time." In the years following the Civil War, turkeys in southeast Texas gradually became less abundant. In the early 1880s, they were still "abundant in all the heavily wooded districts, especially common in the thick woods with much underbrush near Spring Creek [north of Houston]." But as early as 1883, some of the more densely settled counties had their last turkeys. In 1900, turkeys were "very numerous [in places], but were exceedingly hard to find unless one had a dog specially trained for hunting them." Deer rivaled turkeys in their plenty. Stephen Austin on his first trip from Nacogdoches to San Antonio in 1821 killed deer daily for food, despite his hurry. Traveler Amos Parker reported that East Texas Indians traded mainly in deerskins in the 1830s: "I hardly supposed there were as many deer on the continent as I saw." John James Audubon, on April 28, 1837, "went on a deer hunt on Galveston Island, where these animals are abundant; we saw about twenty-five, and killed four." North of Houston in 1841, William Bollaert saw parties of three or four hunters shoot thirty to forty deer in a day. Near Silsbee in Hardin County in the mid 1800s, parties of sport hunters sometimes lulled as many as seventy deer in a day. Sol Wright found deer so plentiful in southern Newton County in the mid 1800s that it usually took a hunter only an hour or two to bag one; Wright's family was seldom out of venison. But by the turn of the century, though still fairly common in some areas, deer were "getting kind of scarce" in others. The hunting was taking its toll. Only after hunting decimated the turkeys and deer did squirrels become interesting enough for people to write about. In fact it was the first organized scientific survey—the U.S. Biological Survey just after the turn of the twentieth century—and not the settlers and travelers, that left the earliest good accounts of squirrels. Between 1900 and 1905 Biological Survey scientists wrote: "Fox squirrels are fairly abundant in the pine woods at the edge of the [Big] Thicket several miles N.E. of Sour Lake. . . .

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The Thicket N.E. of Sour Lake is fairly alive with gray squirrels. . . . Fox squirrels are numerous in the deciduous timber east of Cleveland where a great many were seen at various times. . . . Gray squirrels abundant in the deciduous woods at Jasper. . . ." At the same time, these biologists talked about the less fortunate turkeys: turkeys were "said to occur sparingly and only in the wildest parts of the woods" near Beaumont. "Wild turkeys are still in the Thicket, and in some places fairly numerous. . . ." They were still "tolerably common" in the woods and clearings around Jasper but only "in the more unfrequented portions of the bottoms" along the Trinity River in Anderson County. And deer: in Liberty .County, near Tarkington, they were "only about one-fifth as numerous as they were twenty years previous." Deer were "still numerous all over the Big Thicket but difficult to find," "still fairly plentiful in the vicinity of Sour Lake," and in Anderson County "formerly very abundant but now not of very common occurrence." In 1820 the mark of the white hunter upon the East Texas wilderness was faint. By 1900 he had skimmed the cream. Within three short decades after that, he had finished off all the bears and the panthers and most of the deer and the turkeys. Then, as if fate conspired to help him sweep the woods clean, the Great Depression fell in October 1929. Hunting had been great sport before, but being hungry was serious business. Deer hounds followed the last track, and turkey hunters emptied the last roost. Squirrels retreated to their safest hollows, never quite secure from the bark of feist dogs and .22 rifles. Rabbits, coons, and possums felt the sting of hard times. Armadillos were "Hooverhogs." The Second World War brought the beginning of unprecedented prosperity, and after the war ended, the fight to fix the damage began. Programs to restock game flourished. The State Game, Fish and Oyster Commission trapped deer and turkeys in remote locations and hauled them to places depleted of game. It soon became apparent that, in East Texas, eradication of tradition in men, and not the stocking of game in the woods.

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posed the greatest task. Deer hounds languished in the shade, eager for a good run. Young men and old still shot at anything that moved. It has been a long fight. Even yet, turkeys find it risky to stand by when an old pickup moves through the trees and jerks to a stop. A lot of deer hounds still know a chase through the spring woods might end with a barrage of shotgun blasts and a few laps of warm blood. But the tide has turned. Sharp hoofprints and russet feathers are a commoner sight among fallen leaves than they have been for most of a hundred years. The change seemed to come in the sixties in many places, but not until the seventies in others. About half a human life since the Depression ended. For traditions as strong as those to die, perhaps the bearers of them had to also. . . . Home is the sailor, home from the sea, And the hunter, home from the hill. There is a final irony. The leash of prosperity pulled Man the Predator back from the land, that the land could mend. But in so doing, it severed his tie with the land, and made him lose sight of the reason for its salvation. Where the heedless hunter has died, a greater threat has taken root. The quality of the land itself, a more subtle life stream than spilled blood, dribbles away. Time will tell whether this loss will take the animals to join their hunter in the museum of lost traditions.

John left Highway 59 at Corrigan. The string of traffic fell behind. He stretched the tenseness from his back and then relaxed as the Ford Fairlane straightened out down the ribbon of asphalt. Last glimmers of sunlight came through the trees, angling across the road and flickering on the windshield. The car took the curves smoothly. At the top of a hill the sun came from behind the

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trees again; then he drifted down into the coolness of the creek bottom. It had been two years since he'd seen Jim Parker and his wife, Bev. Two years, with Jim and Bev living only three hours away. It made him uncomfortable to think how his work had interfered. Living in Houston and climbing to something he wasn't quite sure he wanted anyway. He flicked on the headlights. Thirty minutes and he'd be there. Four years they'd been together in college. They had become inseparable after that second year when John had sort of pulled up his home roots. John, the country bumpkin headed for the city. Jim, the city boy who wanted the country. Dusk deepened. As John passed a bridge, a large bird, pale in the beam of the headlights, flashed across the road. Hoot owl probably, down in the creek bottom like that. Or, as Jim would say, barred owl. Low-place coolness came in through the window. He hummed along with the car radio. He recognized the dark-eyed Texaco station there on the corner, where the old men played checkers Saturdays under the roof between the gas pumps and the store front. At least they used to, before he stopped coming up so regularly. He tapped his left foot to the music. He met a few cars now, creeping down the road at a country pace. He slowed when a glance at his speedometer showed seventy. In the distance he could see the neon Chevrolet sign that marked the turnoff. When he came to the driveway, he was singing along with the radio at the top of his voice. "James, you rascal!" John grabbed his friend's hand, contesting his grip. "Hunt!" shouted the other. They both laughed, each with the relief of knowing he needed no pretenses, no facade. "Yer gittin' flabby, boy," said Jim with an affected twang, releasing his grip. "Come in the house! We've been a-hankerin' t'see ye. Bev outdid herself on th' vittles tonight!" She had. Morning came early. John remembered his way to the bath-

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room and splashed cold water on his face. In the mirror, bags showed under his eyes. He hurried combing his hair. Three hours' sleep before a day in the woods wasn't his idea of enough, but last night they had talked late. This morning the tension was nearly gone; his thirty-second-floor office back in Houston was a diminishing unrest in his head that he knew would dissolve by noon. Jim waited in the kitchen at the pine table that was a little uneven because it had been one of his first carpentry projects. "Mornin'," he said. "Man, you look horrible! Town life's not good for you." He stood, gathering up his binoculars, sandwiches, and thermos from the table. "Switch on the porch light, will you?" He reached to turn off the lamp beside the table. "Let's take the state truck," said Jim as they stepped outside the darkened house. "I've been wanting to take another look at that country. This is as good a time as any to do it. Fawns should be out following the does by now, and we need to find out if any of those turkey hens hatched out young ones." In the glare of the bulb that hung naked under the porch awning John saw the decal on the pickup door: Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. They climbed in and Jim started the motor. The road was dark; it was too early of a Saturday morning for traffic. They opened the windows as the truck accelerated. Moist coolness came in. They barely missed a whip-poor-will that flitted up from the pavement. "Chuck-will's widow," said Jim. John said nothing; he'd learned that Jim would stick with what he'd learned in school. Except when he wanted to be local. The pickup slowed as they neared the town limits. The streets lay empty; ahead on the corner a traffic signal blinked yellow. As they approached the light, a cat scurried across the street on blurry legs and faded into the alleyway. The truck tires rippled as they hit the main section of town where the streets were still brick. A two-story building that had once handled "dry goods" and

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something else too faded to read stood beside the dim street lamp. Its windows gaped black and empty beneath the front awning. One was cracked. A blinking neon ahead past the outskirts of town became readable: Johnnie's. Jim slowed as they approached it. A couple of Chevrolet pickups and an old Buick were parked in front. A diesel semi idled by the roadside. Jim swung the state truck off the pavement and crunched to a stop on the gravel. He switched off the key. "How about coffee and a donut." He made it more of a statement than a question. They went inside. A ceiling fan stirred the air, even at this hour. The trucker hunched over his coffee beside the window. Near the counter, behind which two waitresses sat, huddled three old men. Their conversation stopped in midair and they turned to look as John closed the door behind him. Jim nodded at the three and took a table nearby. They returned the greeting, one calling Jim by name. Only after John was making his order did he notice their conversation resume. He listened, watching them with the edge of his vision. "Gonna be a good squirrel year," one said. His ears were big; brown age spots flecked his face. "Yep," said the small one across the table. "Pin oaks are gonna have a bumper crop of acorns, from what I can tell. Beech mast, too, is comin' on thick." He seemed to have no teeth, and kept rubbing his gums together. "I've got a good huntin' place this year, boys," said the one with big ears. He leaned forward, dropping his voice. "You know th' old Johnson place down there by th' edge o' th' bottom. Me an' old Eb was down there last week, an' they's as much hardwood timber there as anywhere I've seen in these parts. "This year they cut th' timber north an' east of it, an' pushed squirrels in there by the droves. It's gonna be th' best huntin' place in th' county." "Ain't that place posted?" asked the third, bald with a rim of hair above his ears. "Not to me, it ain't," said Big Ears. "I've got a key. Th' widder

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Johnson an' my old lady, they go to church together." He pulled at a thong of leather in his pocket and dangled a key over the table. His laugh was thin and soft. The small man munched his coffee. "I recollect when this whole country was hardwood timber," he said, "'cept in th' piney woods. We used to go out an' kill forty, fifty cat squirrels in a day. That's a tow sack full. Take us two, three hours to clean 'em." John wondered whether they had been talking about squirrels earlier, or whether Jim's arrival in the state truck had sparked it. At their age, like as not they talked of hunting much of the time anyway. Only the younger people seemed compelled to talk of salaries, cars, and cattle. The waitress came with their coffee and two donuts, heavy with sugar glaze. "This country's changin', that's for sure," said the bald one. "'Mother twenty years an* they won't be any squirrels, at th' rate them lumber companies are haulin' off th' hardwoods an* plantin* pines." "Well, I don't know," objected Big Ears. "Cuttin' hardwoods cain't be all bad. I've seen lots o' squirrels chewin* pine burrs, 'specially long about now, before th' acorns get ready." The other two looked at him. "Now, Jake, you know better'n that," said the small one. "How many squirrel holes or nests you ever seen in a loblolly? How many times you seen a squirrel eatin' a pine burr in th' winter?" He pursed his lips inward, making his nose nearly touch his chin. "Just because your boy's workin* for th' timber company, an' tells you pines are good," he continued, "ain't no cause for you to believe it." Jake wouldn't be bullied. "Well, I've seen plenty fox squirrels out in th' piney woods," he offered. "Sure. You got a good dog an1 a good horse, you might find eight or ten in a day," the bald one said. "But that's longleaf woods an' fox squirrels. You'll notice, too, where you find 'em. Either on a red oak ridge, along a creek, or travelin* in between. They's got to be hardwoods for squirrels. 'Course they'll chew

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pine burrs, but they cain't live all year on 'em." John listened with half an ear to Jim talk about the state's program of turkey transplanting. He gathered that there had been some success recently, and that Jim expected to see turkeys today. The darkness outside had turned gray. A few cars whizzed by on the highway. John drained his cup as Jim pushed back his chair. They threaded their way among tables to the cash register in front. A musty deer head with cracked lips gazed over their heads as they paid. ". . . squirrels 'ud be a-stirrin' on a mornin' like this." Old Jake was still talking. John pressed the bar on the toothpick dispenser, watching the round sliver of wood roll out. He put the toothpick in his mouth and turned so he could see out the window. Beside the bar, the little man was twisted in his chair, likewise looking out. 'Too early yet for fox squirrels," he argued. "A few cat squirrels rustlin' around maybe." The cafe door opened and a young man entered, Stetson pushed back on his head. A stockman, from the click of his boot heels to his beefy face. The bell over the door tinkled and the three old men turned to stare. John caught the opened door and he and Jim stepped outside. Jim pulled the truck onto the highway, picking up speed as they left the town behind. White frame houses of various sizes and shapes lined the roadside. Mimosa trees heavy with pink blossoms guarded their driveways. In front of one house they passed a fat dog lying near the pavement. John looked in the rearview mirror and saw it lift its muzzle high to smell the truck's passing. Farther on, cattle stood in knee-high grass, switching tails at early morning flies. Most of the better-groomed pastures had red-and-white cows and metal barns. The weedy pastures had weedy cows—brindle, white-spotted, long-horned, muley—and weathered gray sheds. Several miles outside town, clearings gave way to woods. Lob-

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lolly pines crowded the roadside. Several black spots far down the pavement became crows. The truck bore down on them and they took wing, leaving their gray-and-red breakfast, a smashed armadillo. In the rearview mirror, they settled back. Sunlight touched the pine tops yellow when Jim finally slowed the truck. He turned off the pavement onto a two-rutted road and stopped before a metal gate. He handed John a key. John found the right lock among the several on the heavy chain. He opened the gate and swung it wide, toward the truck. Jim eased the truck through. John looked at a set of doglike tracks in the sandy road as he pushed the gate shut, wrapped the chain back around the upright, and snapped the lock in place. Then he noticed he'd locked himself outside. Jim, watching in the truck mirror, cackled as John opened the lock again and let himself through. A half mile down the road they saw the first deer. She watched from beside a clump of yaupon until they stopped; then she turned, her tail flashed white, and she disappeared behind waxmyrtle bushes. A fawn materialized from the grass and followed her. Jim took out his notebook. "Surprising what a locked gate will do," Jim said. "I never thought this country was much for deer till I saw this place. There's not another place in the county to match it, and all because of a fence and a little patrolling by a warden. Habitat here's not much different from what it is in a lot of other places around." Around the next bend there was another deer, a buck with two prongs of velvet on each side, plunging off the road and into the pines. The antlers glowed fiizzy as he moved away. They bobbed up and down, and disappeared. This longleaf country surprises you," Jim went on. "Doesn't seem like there's much here for a deer to eat, but they do pretty well. 'Specially over in one place I'U show you later, where they had a burn a couple of years ago. You wouldn't believe the deer that flocked in to that place. Hunt. I expect this longleaf country was crawling with deer, back in the old days before Smokey Bear and railroads and logging."

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"Hmm," said John. "Maybe you're right about the burning, but I've heard that logging was the best thing that ever happened to deer." "That's true, where woods were thick and nothing grew on the ground to start with. Logging opened up the woods, and brush and stuff moved in that deer could reach. "But it wasn't true here. I've been reading some old accounts, and it was better deer country the way it was. Take the piney woods; they were so open you could drive a wagon through the trees. And there were little prairies and glades all through the hardwood country, too. Even down in the Big Thicket country, where the trees shaded the ground, there was enough underbrush to feed an army of deer. "You take this third- and fourth-growth timber right here." He paused and waved his hand out the window. "Why it's the thickest these woods have ever been. But the thick stuff is all higher than your head. It shades out everything beneath it. There's less food in reach of a deer now than there ever was before." A doe with twins at her heels bounded across the roadway. The truck started down the hill into the bottom. Trees closed over high above and the morning darkened. At the foot of the hillJim pulled off the road and stopped the motor. "I want to show you something, down the bottom a ways." Jim opened his door and got out. John looped the strap of his binoculars around his neck. Waiting between the truck and the muddy ruts of the road while Jim scribbled in his notebook, John spied a deer track. It was clean and sharp in the clay. He bent to take a better look. The track was large, probably a buck. It was headed down into the bottom. He thought back to an earlier time. His grandfather had shown him those first tracks, leading down the sandjack ridge to the bay gall. Here, look! It's a deer! First I've seen in these parts in a coon's age! Y'see how it's pointed, not stubby like a hog's. Somewhere down at the end of the tracks had stood a deer, bigger than life and poised for flight. He had looked at the track

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again. Just a mark in the dirt. There had been other tracks after that first one, then finally that day when a deer jumped up at the end of them. His little .22 had spanged aivay, seemingly impotent as the deer cleared the bushes and left an empty silence. But there was blood, a dark drop of it on the leaf of a French mulberry. A half day of tracking had given him one more glimpse of the deer as it crashed out of a loblolly thicket. Sticky blood matted the needles where it had lain. Afresh trail and lowering sun sent him home for the dog. Old Midge the hog dog strained forward at the string around her neck, not needing to see the tracks. At dusk they found the deer, unexpectedly pale in the dark thicket, belly exposed. Flies buzzed around the little hole in its side and crawled at the edges of the staring eyes. It was already beginning to stiffen. It had been a doe, in early summer. Only when his fat her skinned it and he saw the milk dripping from the udder did he think about the fawn. Many times in later years, when he stooped over to look at a deer track, there was his grandfather beside him. Look, a deer track! Just a mark in the dirt. Jim glanced at the track and they moved on into the woods. What the track meant to him, John didn't know. A number in his notebook? Jim stepped across a stream of water draining a small slough. He chattered on about deer. "What I can't understand about these people," he said, then paused to look at John. "You people, I mean." He laughed, then continued. "What I can't understand is why they like hunting so much and yet keep shooting every last deer their dogs can chase out of the woods. Why all of those old coots who play dominoes down at Jack's Texaco poach deer any time they get a chance. I've heard 'em talking about it." "It's in their blood," John said. "There's not much logic to it. It's like you being taught to say good mornin* to people and to drive on the right-hand side of the road. You never give it much thought, or wonder if it's good or bad. It's just the thing you do." UOO]

Jim stopped on the bank of a stream that meandered through the bottom. "Here's what I wanted to show you. Look at this." He pointed to a part of the creek bank that sloped off to a deep pool. A bare strip of ground about a foot wide slanted from the brink to the water below. John stooped to look. Tracks cluttered the mud at the water's margin. He straightened. "Well, I can't say that I've seen anything just like this before. I've been in the bottoms of this country for quite a few years, too." He walked down the creek, searching the mud. Jim stood with his arms folded, face triumphant. "Got you this time," he said. "No guessing. You've got to be right the first time." John looked closely at a few more tracks. "Otter! That's what it is!" He straightened to see Jim's face fall. "Okay, Daniel Boone. You win. Thought for sure I'd have you fooled. "They seem to be turning up all over," he went on. "Biologists down along the coast see 'em. Over around Dam B, and other places. "And that's not all. We're getting beavers again. I took a canoe trip down the Navasota a few weeks back and saw several. The wardens over in Jasper and Newton counties see signs of 'em." John was silent on the way back to the truck. Jim slammed on the brakes when they rounded the first bend in the road after they'd climbed out of the bottom. At the roadside stood a hen turkey with nine bantam-sized chicks. Jim jotted numbers in his notebook as John watched them through his binoculars. The hen stood watching them. When Jim opened the truck door to get a better view, she jerked her head in alarm, then set off down the roadside ditch with neck outstretched. The chicks followed, legs pumping. The hen swerved into the open woods, taking flight as she did so. The chicks left the ground one by one,

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wobbling in the air, then careening into the tall grass. "Alabama turkeys," said Jim. "Looks like this time our transplants may take. If we can only keep the poachers from killing 'em. These turkeys are a lot harder to restock than deer," he continued. "One thing, they seem to be sensitive to differences in climate and weather. Those dry-country turkeys we brought over here from central Texas never did do well. "Another thing, turkeys range a lot farther than deer. They like the bottoms in winter and the open woods in spring and summer. May have to travel ten miles or more in between. By the time they've traveled a year's worth, they're bound to cross the path of more than one old-timer with a shotgun." Jim started the truck and they moved out into the longleaf woods again. He rattled on. "Future for turkeys is probably short anyway," he said. "They need a lot of square miles of land to move around on. Prom what I see around here, the big chunks of land, like this piece we're on, are getting scarcer all the time. Every generation, land is divided amongst the kids and grandkids and pretty soon it's in little twenty-acre patches. Each person has a different idea of what to do with his piece, but everyone figures he has to do something. He can't just do nothing; it's not respectable. "And regardless of what's done it's usually bad for turkeys. Cutting oaks so pines can grow, mowing weedy pastures so they look pretty, or planting bermuda grass to feed cows. Even stopping woods fires has hurt. "There's no way of getting people to treat their land so it'll benefit turkeys. You have to talk to twenty people to cover where one turkey flock goes. Even if you could get ten of'em interested, the other ten would shoot the turkeys, just because they didn't like their neighbors or for some other logical reason." "Yep," John agreed. In his mind he still saw the turkeys taking wing at the roadside. He had not seen a wild turkey until he was fourteen. H02J

They had come so unexpectedly that he did not at first know what they were. Their heads stood in silhouette against brown broomsedge and he stopped. His mind sought its file of past perceptions and came up blank. The black eyes stared, unmoving. Even when his eyes saw they were turkeys, he sought other answers. He glanced away, then back. They still watched, frozen at attention. The flood of discovery rushed over him then; he could hear his head pounding. He counted. Seven of them. What should he do* His .22 rifle lay in his hand. The urge to shoot tightened his grip, but he dismissed it. His image of himself standing triumphant before his grandfather with a turkey hanging from his shoulder faded. Wild turkeys! Unheard of in these parts. A discovery equivalent to Meriwether Lewis standing on the bluffs of the Missouri, seeing ten thousand bison plunging down the scarp. His turkeys! He shifted his weight. A sharp "Pert!" sounded; heads flicked. The grass exploded and feathery bodies rose into the air. Confusion showered about him. The last view he had was one giant bird, sailing into the woods with wings set, skylined between two oaks. The image would remain with him for years. After that, he came back almost daily, to those abandoned old fields deep in the hammock, to look for his turkeys. Several times he saw them again. More often, he saw their tracks, or a feather clinging to the skeleton of a weed. Once he peeked from the woods and saw them reaching to pick seeds and bugs from waist-high grass. He watched them move across the meadow. One would call to the others—a low, liquid "Pert!" Of course he could not keep it to himself. He wanted to keep it secret, but also he wanted to tell his grandfather. Soon his father and mother knew also. Too late he learned the hazards of sharing secrets. One day his father broached the subject—Uncle Chester wanted to shoot

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a turkey. Would John consider showing him when they wen? At first he said nothing. He was troubled by feelings he wasn't sure were legitimate. It was like someone asking him to give away Grandfather's old bullet mold he'd found in the attic when he was ten. In the end John gave in. He did not know exactly why; he had never really liked Uncle Chester. But he had some notion that his family expected it of him, that it was the thing to do. He also felt a bit of pride that he was the one person who knew where to find the turkeys. They set out before daylight—John, his father, and Uncle Chester. By flashlight they moved through the dark hammock, John leading because he knew the way. He reached into his coat pocket. The cedar box turkey call, padded with cloth to keep it from rattling, felt smooth to his touch. Grandfather had made it for him two years ago. Would it work? Gray of morning disclosed the margin of the old field as they settled down beside a loblolly pine that stood near its center. From his frequent visits John knew the turkeys would be somewhere near. He waited until it became light enough to see the clumps of broomsedge, leaning with the weight of dew. He heard a brown thrasher buzz from the forest edge. Taking the turkey call from his pocket, he rubbed chalk on the rounded bottom of the lid. The fragrance of the cedar hung in the air. Cautiously, he worked the call. Its "Pert! Pert!" sounded sharply. Silence. The second time John worked the call, he thought he heard an answer in the distance. He waited several minutes, then called again. Uncle Chester slumped with his back against the tree. There came a rustling in the grass and suddenly Uncle Chester jumped up. A tremendous boom struck the morning; John saw flame leap from the shotgun barrel. Uncle Chester raced forth, firing again and again. A rhythmic flapping in the grass grew weaker and weaker, then stopped.

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Three turkeys lay dead. Uncle Chester picked one up. His hand was shaking. John saw that the turkeys were small, like they had been hatched that year. Uncle Chester gathered up the others then, holding them by their heads, like a bunch of turnips he'd just pulled from the ground. "I'd call that good shootin'!" he kept saying. He beamed. John said nothing. He felt sick. John's father cleared his throat. He looked at John. "Well," he said, "guess we'd better clean 'em. Taint the meat if we leave 'em too long without takin' their insides out." After that, John made several trips back to the old field in the hammock, but never saw the turkeys again. Later, he stopped going there. Sometimes John wished he had never seen the turkeys. But mostly he did not regret it, he just stepped back into his head, to where a feather clung to a weed in the dewy morning. . . . Later that morning Jim and John saw two more broods of turkeys, then six gobblers that raced single file across the road ahead of them. They were close enough that John could see the light playing on their bronze feathers, and the long tufts of beard hanging down their breasts. Jim closed his notebook with a triumphant snap as the grass swallowed them. "I'm impressed," he said. "We, I mean the Parks and Wildlife, tried for so long to restock these birds and finally it's working." He paused. "Just in time for them to make a last stand before their habitat goes." He shifted the truck into second and they wound farther among longleaf pines and yaupon bushes. "I don't mean to be a pessimist but it's probably true," he continued. John said nothing and they drove on in silence. They had lunch beside a spring that flowed from a sand hillside into a dense baygall thicket. The air was sticky and thunder rumbled. The rain came in the afternoon. They waited in the truck, talk-

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ing. In an hour it ended, and Jim started the truck to head home. "Should see a lot of deer out, after this rain," John said. They did. The last one came just as they rounded the bend toward the gate: a buck with great antlers shot across the road, seeming to clear it in one bound. John sat back. "You know, you look a hundred years younger than you did this morning," Jim said as John got back in the truck after closing the gate behind them. John had no response. Jim put the truck in gear and they pulled onto the highway that led south toward Houston.

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7. WildernessTrilogy

THERE ARE MANY today who long to escape the bonds of mechanized living, to return to the freedom and simplicity of an earlier time. Overwhelmed by the smog and plastic and human jungles of their lives, they want out. Old people retire and move back to the country. People who work in the city commute miles to homes in the woods. Perhaps the saddest of all are the young who break away, to try a rural commune or a goat farm in the hinterlands. If the Indians and settlers made it, why can't they? But they find it impossible to live comfortably on the land. Aside from the inevitable cultural shock that goes with gearing down, their problem lies with the land itself. There does not seem to be enough of it; other people crowd in from every angle. And what there is has little to aid their survival. They find they must work part-time in the city, sell handcrafts at beggar's wages, or live on Dad's income. What happened to the bounty of the wilderness? Part 1. The Sherod Wright League If you look at a Jasper County land map you will see close to its center, in the largest print on the map, the name Sherod Wright. The name sits within an irregular quadrangle. In this quadrangle there are many smaller, irregular parcels, bounded with thin lines and identified in small print by name and acreage—Van Blewitt, 126 Ac; Geo. Bean, 160 Ac; Kirby Lbr. Co., 40 Ac; and so on. If you add all the acres within the quadrangle, the total is some-

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where near 4,430. If you know something of surveying, the sum may strike you — it is roughly equivalent to a league, the old Spanish unit of land measure.

Sherod Wright was born of Scottish parents in 1795 in South Carolina. At seventeen he earned his first major assets — four cows and their calves — by substituting as a military draftee in the War of 1812 for someone who was able to pay. Thus began his career as cattleman. After the war Sherod married. He began to add to his herd of livestock in South Carolina. But he was not satisfied there; perhaps opportunity seemed better elsewhere, or perhaps the spirit of adventure would simply not let him rest. At any rate, one day he and his wife, Anna, packed their goods, rounded up the cattle, and headed west. The third decade of the nineteenth century opened to find them in East Louisiana. It was here that they heard of unbelievable opportunity farther west. The Mexican government offered to those who would cross the Sabine to settle, a league and a labor of land, about forty-six hundred acres total — free. Eighteen thirty-two saw Sherod Wright, now a man of thirtyseven, camped in the switch cane on Sandy Creek near Jasper, looking for his free land. His family was with him. His sixty cattle spread out from camp, ripping down the young shoots of cane. His hogs plowed the ground beyond the wagon, grunting and smacking. The few log cabins that were Jasper hid in the thick woods. His brother Alex had preceded Sherod, and already had a cabin and land staked out fifteen miles or so to the south. A man named Bevil had claimed the best piece of land near Jasper. Sherod did not tarry; he sent his twelve-year-old son John and the dogs out to roust the cattle from the canebrake and they moved on southward. He camped just south of his brother's land, near the present

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site of Magnolia Springs. On a hammock overlooking a creek he found an old Indian camp and a strong spring, and decided to search from there. Each morning for the next several weeks, he woke early, left his covered-wagon camp, cattle, hogs, and family, and searched the surrounding country. He wanted first to locate his league of land. Where should he place it? His camp lay about two miles south of the nearest house, that of his brother Alex. He could go south or east or west and be even farther from neighbors. He could go out into the longleaf forest on a small creek or he could find a bluff bank on the river, overlooking the lower bottoms that flooded when it rained. Sherod was a stockman. He had already come a long way with cattle as his main source of cash. The longleaf forest was a prairie of tall grasses with trees above, ideal in spring and summer for cattle and horses. It had been burned the previous winter and was lush and green in the summer of 1832. Not only were the longleaf forests unclaimed by anyone and free for grazing, they were barely grazed. The nearby river and creek bottoms were full of switch cane— ideal winter food for cows and horses. The hammock land itself, between the longleaf woods and the bottoms, was the best place to grow corn and other garden stuff. The soil there was more fertile than the soils of the longleaf, and better drained than the bottomland. Each evening, after riding all day looking over the country, Sherod felt a little more at home when he arrived at the wagon camp by the spring. One evening after supper he and Anna talked far into the night. The katydids sang themselves quiet; the fire died to hickory coals. They decided this was the place. They would join Alex's league on the north, and corner near the river bottom on the creek. Then they would run the line south and east to get as much hammock land as possible. The selection of the 177 acres for the labor could wait until they could scout more territory. A surveyor representing the Mexican government came to mark off Sherod's league. He marked the survey lines with three

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hacks on any tree he passed within reach. At the property corners he placed stakes of longleaf pine heartwood, which he knew would last years. Near each corner he slashed deep Xs into several large witness trees, and in his notes told what kind of tree each was and how far and what direction it was from the corner. He recorded distances in Spanish varas—each vara was thirtythree and one-third inches. For a measuring tape he used a rawhide rope.

The map of Jasper County shows that the Sherod Wright league is not square with the world or itself. The northwest corner on Wright Creek is an obtuse angle; the northeast corner in the piney woods is an acute angle. If, on the Jasper County map, the sum of the acreages adds to more than 4,430 acres, chances are that the surveyor's rope got wet and stretched. But that had little consequence in those days when land was free. After Texas joined the Union in 1848, surveys of yet unclaimed land were made in mile-square sections. But the most fertile lands —the bottomlands and hammocks—had already been granted to settlers, in blocks of irregular shape. It is easy to see from the Jasper County map that the longleaf forest was normally the last to be claimed: parcels of real estate there lie in square sections and regular subdivisions thereof.

Sherod Wright soon found that he was not the first to claim his land. A few days after the first norther had pushed the clouds of summer southward, strangers rode up. Sherod heard the dogs barking, and when the riders came into view his rifle was ready. His wife peered anxiously from their cane-thatched lean-to. The riders were Indians. Sherod put down his rifle; he had heard they were harmless. He found that a few of these could

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speak some English. He learned that he had claimed part of their favorite hunting territory; that they were here to lull deer and bears. They had come from their village forty miles to the west. In the months that followed, Sherod found the Indians to be invaluable allies to an unsettled homestead. He bartered pork and beef for hickory nuts, walnuts, and chinquapins they had gathered. They also sold him corn, dried venison, and bear meat and fat. The land was big and the people were few; the Indians and the Anglos became friendly neighbors. Sherod and Anna worked out of the thatched hut to build their cabin. Their oldest son John worked beside them. They cleared underbrush from the site, but left the large oaks and magnolias for shade. Sherod snaked logs from a thick stand of young longleaf on the nearby sandhills. The trees stood tall with little taper, some less than a foot thick and just right for cabin building. They built after the double-pen design used by their parents and grandparents in Carolina. The cabin had two main sections with a breezeway, or dogtrot, in between. The kitchen attached to the back of one of the main sections. They peeled smaller poles for cabin rafters, chimney framework, horse shed, corncrib, and smokehouse. The fireplace chimney they built of creek bank clay and Spanish moss. Flat pieces of petrified wood from the creek bed served perfectly for the fireplace hearth. The land in a way was not alien to these people. They had seen most of the trees before, in Carolina and on the way between there and Texas. Sherod knew which ones to take for which building tasks. There were the ones that stood between the southern homesteader and his greatest foe—decay. The heartwood of cypress for roofing shingles and fence pickets, that of pitch-filled longleaf for posts and cabin foundation. Posts also of mulberry, persimmon, and chinquapin; rails of long-splitting oak. Then there were the ones for burning. Splinters and knots of longleaf heart for kindling and quick black smoke. Oak of many kinds for long evenings by the winter fireplace. Hickory, the pre-

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mier firewood, the smoke for curing sausage and bacon. In the first winter, when the cabin puffed smoke from its new chimney, and Anna sat by the fire spinning their small store of wool, the woods were seldom quiet. Sherod's axe rang in the hammock; hickory and beech came crashing. The garden space opened to the sky, near the house where the soil was deep and fertile. There came a day when the southern breeze blew warm and robins swarmed from the hammock and took to the northbound skies. Sherod stood in the morning doorway, and called for his wife to bring out the seeds, brought all the way from East Louisiana. The next day he rode to his brother's cabin, to talk of planting and to borrow more seeds. They planted mustard and turnip greens first; then later, black-eyed peas, beans, watermelons, and gourds. Corn claimed the greatest space. In April they plucked the leafy slips from water-soaked sweet potatoes; with a notched stick they pushed the root ends into the loam among stumps and blackened logs. When Sherod's wife brought water to him in the garden, he liked to lean on the hoe handle and scuff the dark soil with his toe. He would drain the gourd dipper, hand it back for her to refill from the oak bucket, and lean to scoop up a handful of soil. It sifted back to earth, full of decay and promise. Scarcely had the turnips turned the new ground green when the rabbits came, nipping them off at the ground. Sherod sent John after them with the rifle. Later, when the peas sprouted, deer sneaked in at night while the dogs slept on the cabin breezeway. Sherod came out at midnight with a torch of pine splinters. Pairs of green eyes glowed in the garden. A doe fell at the flash of his rifle, and for breakfast there was venison heart. One spring morning Sherod was adding rails to make the garden fence cattle-proof when he heard a strange humming sound. He straightened. The sound came louder and suddenly a swarm of frenzied bees engulfed him. He stood unmoving. They passed as quickly as they had come. He watched them cross the garden and settle on an elderberry bush at the edge of

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the woods. At noon they still hung there, enough to fill a water bucket. Sherod sawed a two-foot section from the hollow black gum log he'd brought in to make cattle troughs, and in the afternoon, gently tipped the elderberry bush over and introduced the bees to their new home. A tapping on the cypress lid of the hive brought the last stragglers to its darkness. Honey would have to do until they could get sugar. Spring rains brought the creek up, and with squirrel liver he baited the hooks he'd brought from Carolina. He dangled them from limbs overhanging high banks of the creek. Next morning nearly every branch waved from unseen tugging. Slippery bodies followed the flat heads of catfish up from the depths when he pulled the lines. Homesteading was hard work, but with effort a man could get what he needed just by reaching out. The land was fat. There was wild fruit—dewberries, blackberries, plums, grapes, papaws, mulberries, mayhaws. There was wild meat—deer, bear, turkey, squirrel, fish. And then there was the livestock. At heart Sherod was a cattleman. He worked the dirt because his wife expected it, and because he liked corn and peas. He built home and sheds because it was respectable. But he'd trade these any day for a good horse and cow dogs in the woods after stock. He watched his cattle flourish. They moved out into the piney woods in spring and summer to get the weeds and grass brought up by the warm sun. They came to the bottom canebrakes in winter, pulling and pushing down the tall stems to get at the highest leaves. Sherod was a good rider and could rope, but he learned a lot of new things about ranching in this East Texas country. Lore from farther west and from Mexico drifted in. He picked up new ways of roping, building saddles, and handling cows. The years passed and Sherod and his wife settled in to raising kids, cattle, and hogs. Ranching became a way of life with Sherod, his brother Alex, and the other neighbors, who still lived at arm's length.

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Sherod's original sixty head of cattle increased rapidly, because he kept all heifers and the range was lush. "The exuberance of rich pasturage here in early times," said Governor Roberts of Texas, years later, "gave to the cattle an enormously large size of bone, body, and horns." The cattle were mining the nutrients of a virgin range, hardly touched by grazing animals for thousands of years before. The horses and mules they used to herd the cattle or pull wagons roamed the open range in bands of twenty or thirty mares and one stallion or jack. These animals annually were penned and the young ones broken for riding or the harness. The best ones went to a life of less freedom around the homestead or to new owners. Each spring Sherod, his brother, and anyone else claiming calves on their range got together to work the cattle. When they found a bunch, some of the riders circled the cattle and held them in place while others cut out and roped calves to be branded and ear-marked. Soon after that, usually in mid June, they gathered the steers for the trip to Alexandria, Louisiana. The cattle drives followed the old "beef road which crossed the Sabine River at Hickman's Perry. From the sale of these grass-fat steers came cash to the frontier homesteads. About the only thing Sherod and his neighbors did to manage their stock was to burn the range. It was hard to burn anything except the longleaf woods, and the only thing burning did there was cause the grass to sprout earlier and the weeds to come out thicker. Natural fires, though, were common enough that the homesteaders didn't always have to set the fires. Sherod and his neighbors had hogs, but mainly for their own use. It was hard to move hogs to a shipping point, and harder to sell them once they were there. In summer the hogs scattered out over the uplands, much like the cattle. In winter they followed the cattle and horses to the bottoms to forage for beechnuts, acorns, and hickory nuts. Each time Sherod saddled up to ride, he put a few ears of corn in his saddlebags. When he came across a band of hogs, he dis-

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pensed a little corn, paying a token to the process of domestication. But in spite of this, the hogs eventually became nearly as wild as deer. Sherod kept a few sheep, chickens, and oxen to round out his self-sufficiency. The sheep were sickly and easy prey for just about anything that had teeth, but Anna wanted the wool. Foxes ate the chickens, but the Wrights loved eggs. And the oxen could hold a band of steers together or walk in the mucky bottoms to drag out logs where a horse could not stand. Ranching thrived. Only the bears sometimes made it difficult. Years later, Sherod's grandson recalled how tempting it was for cow dogs to chase bears instead of cattle like they were supposed to. "One time when the dogs were along on a cow hunt, they got after a very large bear. Not a man in the crowd had a gun. They all decided to let the cattle go and to try to drive the bear home. With the help of the dogs he drove all right until they got in about half a mile of the house, when he backed up against a large pine tree and refused to drive any farther. "One of the boys went to the house to get a gun, but before he got back Uncle Alex got off his horse and picked out a pineknot about three feet long that had a large mallet-like end, where it grew into the body of the tree. While the bear was standing on his hind feet busily fighting the dogs, Uncle Alex slipped up behind the tree and hit him on the head with all of his might, putting him out of business." He also remembered how Sherod's hogs many times fed bears instead of Sherod's family, but of one time that a bear took on more than he could handle. "One evening, about sundown, the hogs came home as hard as they could run, the boar missing. They [Sherod's family] were satisfied a bear had been after them and had caught the boar. He came home during the night, however, pretty badly chewed up. Next morning they took the dogs to hunt the bear, and found him near where he had fought the hog. After they killed him, they counted sixteen gashes in his hide, from six to twelve inches long,

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that the hog had cut. They were satisfied he would have died from these wounds. The hog got well." Later in life, Sherod and his family sold woods products other than cattle on the hoof, because steamboats pushed up the Neches River. At Wright's Landing, about two miles southwest of the old homestead, they loaded cypress shingles, cowhides, otter furs, and barrels of bear fat on boats bound for waterfront markets. He sat longer these days in his front porch rocker, for life was easier. He could hear the steamer's whistle through the bottomland woods on its way upriver. "Hit's the boat, Anna! Fetch my horse. Maybe they brung your needles an* cloth an' that sugar we sent for."

It is doubtful that Sherod Wright saw himself as a pioneer conquering the wilderness. It is more likely he acted as a prudent businessman, moving his family and livestock to the frontier where he could gain land, the key to wealth and position. The lack of neighbors and the inconvenience of being far removed from eastern towns was a small price for the opportunities of the virgin forests and ranges. What did he gain? Besides a large number of descendants, through eight children, he left behind fifteen hundred cattle, seventy-five horses, and twenty Negro slaves when he died in 1857 at the age of sixty-two. His children fell heir to a good piece of land and a legacy of living on it. Part *. The Sherod Wright Labor In 1838, shortly after the impatient Texas homesteaders had ousted their sponsor and a new flag had replaced the Mexican standard, Sherod Wright surveyed the 177 acres of his labor. He placed it twenty-five miles southeast of his league in what became Newton County. It straddled a borderland between the piney woods and the swamp. Sixty years later, the town of Buna

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would spring up six miles away to the west. Soon after Sherod had staked his claim, his oldest son John married neighbor Eliza Ann Hart. It seemed the proper thing for John and Eliza to get the labor of land; Sherod presented it to them as a wedding gift. The newlyweds moved there and began work on their own homestead. A quarter century later, as the Civil War drew to a close, their seventh child was born there, in the little hammock where the piney woods met the swamp. His name was Solomon Alexander. Sol grew to manhood on his father's cow ranch, as his father had done, in a home of pine logs and cypress shingles.

Through the woods they streamed toward him, a vast and tossing herd. They flowed around tree trunks and coalesced again, like the muddy Sabine water rushing through the bottom woods in spring. They drew closer and closer. The boy turned to run, but his legs would hardly move. They seemed infinitely heavy, and he tried to pull himself along faster by grasping at bushes. He glanced over his shoulder. He could see their long horns now; he heard the maddened bawling of the leading cows. He pulled at the branches in terror. A storm of blackness swept over him. He lay still. The darkness passed. Above him in the dim light he saw the uneven brown boards and the peeled log rafters. Sweat drenched his body. In the distance cattle mooed. He shook sleep away and leaped from the bed. They were coming with the cattle! The others' beds lay empty, with the covers turned back. He smelled sausage frying.

"Solomon Alexander!" his mother exclaimed as he padded into the kitchen. "You've overslept. They're comin' with th' cows already." She reached to push the hair back from his forehead. "Why, you're soakin' wet! You ain't caught th' fever agin, have you?"

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"No, ma'am. Just a bad dream." "Well, hurry an' git your clothes on. The men'll be wantin' late breakfast soon as they git th' cows bunched. You'll have to help me." He went back to the bedroom. Instead of dressing he went to the window and looked out across the front pasture. In the distance the cattle milled, mooing as if they had all lost their calves. He saw his father loping around the edge of the herd, sitting straight as a hoe handle in the saddle. "My father, my uncles, and the Richardson boys all sold their steers to the same buyer," he remembered later, "to be delivered at the same time, in the open pine woods on the Louisiana side of the Sabine. The day before they were to cross into Louisiana, my uncles and the Richardsons drove their cattle down to our place, where the Wright cattle had been gathered. The herds when thrown together numbered around seven hundred head—all of them old-time Texas longhorns. Quite a few of them were 'mossy horns'—old steers, wild and lanky. "It was the most ideal location for a cow ranch imaginable. It was wilderness country even after my time, and, to an extent still is. Our range—not all owned, but what we had the use of— comprised about eighty thousand acres, the west half slightly rolling, longleaf pinewoods, the east half marshes, alternating with strips of level pinewoods and numerous small swamps. We lived right at the edge of the marshes near the center of the range. "Our range was bounded on the north by Nichols Creek, on the east by Sabine River, and on the south and west by Big Cypress Bayou and Boggy Branch, a tributary of Big Cypress. Numerous small pinewood branches flow into the marshes, and a gum swamp, from one hundred to two hundred yards wide lies between the pinewoods and marshes. The pinewoods were perfectly open, without underbrush. I have never in all of my rambles run across a territory anything like it. It seems to have been made to order." Sol's mother sent him to the smokehouse for a slab of bacon.

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Inside, the log walls were blackened from years of hickory smoke. He pulled over a stool so he could reach the greasy slabs hanging from rafters over his head. With a butcher knife he cut the leaf of beargrass yucca that passed through a hole in the side of bacon and around a pole that lay crosswise over the rafters. Before climbing down he reached over, as he always did, to touch the sausage packed firm in its coils of pig intestine. He swallowed the saliva that collected in his mouth. He chewed on a biscuit wrapped around a piece of sausage as he carried the bucket of milk to where the men sat on a big log. They ate in a hurry—sausage, bacon, biscuits, gravy, and gourds of milk. The horses stamped and mouthed their bits where they stood tied to the hitching rail. Two men rode around the cattle, waiting their turn at breakfast. They were off with the cattle much too soon to suit Sol. He leaned a pole against the corncrib eaves and shinnied up it. Perched on the ridgeline he watched them disappear in a flurry of dust and yapping dogs. He longed to go with them, but at six he had a few years yet to wait. They were back again that night—cattle, men, horses, and dogs—but not by plan. His father came in and broke the news. They had moved the cattle to the stand, or trail pen. west of the John Powell place, which lay west of Nix's Ferry where they would cross the Sabine. The cattle broke out during the night and stampeded back to the John Wright place. There the riders found them in the darkness, herded them into a pasture, and circled them for the rest of the night to prevent another stampede. "That was one unforgettable night," Sol recalled. "Mother and my sisters stayed up all night and cooked, and the boys would come to the house in relays of two or three to get water, coffee, and lunch. The next morning, after they turned them out and started to Louisiana with them, us kids went down to the pasture to see what the ground looked like. There wasn't a blade of grass to be seen. About fifteen acres of the east side was marsh where the day before the grass had been as high as a cow's back. Now it was a perfect loblolly, not a blade of grass in sight."

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When Sol was older, he helped drive cattle to Louisiana over the trail crossing the Sabine at Sudduth's Bluff. Later, the railroad arrived in Orange, only thirty miles away, and that became the destination of the cattle drive. To reach Orange, they moved their cattle through the "Big Thicket" and its marshes. Sol's father, John, kept about three hundred head of cattle in the Devil's Pocket, between Nichols Creek and the Sabine. This was "swampy, brushy country, with some open pinewoods." Three other people ran cattle on other parts of his range. In April Sol's father searched the woods for maverick yearlings to brand. In May he branded the calves. He gathered and sold steers in June. They sold about four hundred steers a year. Each winter he burned the woods as had his father before him. He set the dry grass with a torch he dragged behind his horse. He burned the longleaf ridge just west of the homestead in late summer, so the grass would green up there in fall and help keep horses and weak cows closer during winter. Ranching was a fulltime job. Sol's brother Tine had a dog named Ruff. Ruff was one of the best stock dogs in the country. With a good dog, a man could get along well in the country then, for there was hardly anything that needed to be done that couldn't be done better with a dog. "He was one-fourth bloodhound and three-fourths deer or fox hound," Sol wrote years later. "Color, black and tan. He could all but talk. He tried to do that—and did, in his own language. He would run anything from a squirrel to a bear, except a rabbit. He wouldn't pay one bit of attention to a rabbit, even if it got up right ahead of him. Tine had him after one bear only, but he stayed right with it till it was killed. "When they started out, Tine would let Ruff know what kind of animal he was after, and Ruff would hunt that animal and nothing else. At the beginning of the hunt, Ruff would tree the first squirrel he came across. If Tine was out for a mess of squirrels, he'd kill this one and from then on Ruff would not pay attention to anything but squirrels. If Tine was after deer, he would blow his horn and go on, and after that Ruff would not notice a squirrel

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but would hunt strictly for deer. If Tine wanted to hunt hogs, he would say, 'Suey! Go find 'em, Ruff* and Ruff . . . would hunt hogs. He would find every hog in the region where he hunted. If he was taken out at night he wouldn't hunt anything but coons, possums, and wildcats. "At that time the only hogs in the country were razorbacks, some of them only half-wild but more of them as wild as the primitive boars of Europe. A man had to have a good hog dog to do anything with them. . . . Every settler had a 'hog claim', which he maintained by keeping his hogs ear-marked. When the pigs were marked, the males were generally castrated. There were always plenty of maverick [unmarked] hogs. Few people fed hogs. They could not be driven up and penned. "Red Stevenson had a claim on between two hundred and three hundred wild hogs in the Big Thicket. He was selling out to leave the country, and Tine and another man bought the hogs, range delivery. They [the hogs] got fat on acorns that fall and after hogkilling weather set in, Tine and his pardner killed better than one hundred meat hogs from two to seven years old. They sold what meat they didn't want for their own use. "They would take a wagon to the edge of the Thicket, get on their horses, and ride into the swamps with Ruff. After locating a bunch of hogs. Ruff would bay them. Then Tine would ride up and go to shooting. . . . When he shot one, Ruff would not, in the manner of most dogs, run up to the squealing animal and go to chewing on it. He would keep the bunch bayed, running around and around them, until Tine was through. The average kill out of a bunch was seven or eight. After Tine had shot all of the meat hogs out of a bunch, he would say, That will do, Ruff, that's all.' Immediately Ruff would stop baying, and the sows and young shoats would run off." Ruff also knew the difference between still-hunting and drivehunting for deer, both of which Sol, Tine, and their neighbors practiced. But the best of things must end. Ruff died from a dose of strychnine put out for sheep-killing dogs near a log camp.

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Every so often on this earth a time and a place come together to let people live at ease in their chosen way. Their wants for food, clothing, and shelter are sufficiently sated for each, without undue censure, to pursue whimsies not designed to improve the lot of society. Sol Wright met with such a time and place—the late nineteenth century in southeast Texas. The axe, plow, and cow of two generations of Anglo frontiersmen had banished the uncertainties of surviving in raw wilderness. But the people were still few and the bounty of the wilderness was hardly dampened. It was truly a time when milk and honey were there for anyone who wanted to hold out a bucket. Sol took advantage of the opportunity. As he grew, hunting, fishing, and rambling became his occupations. It helped that he never married; a family might have demanded a bit more. In our time he might have come close to being called a ne'er-do-well.

The course of Sol's life began to lay itself out in 1872. His father brought home a single-barreled, muzzle-loading shotgun and handed it to him. At eight Sol had a job—"to keep the coons, squirrels, blue jays, and woodpeckers from eating the corn in the field."

Not much later Sol and his mother rode to Orange with a wagonload of goods to trade. Fuel was added to the fire—one of the things they traded for was a little muzzle-loading rifle. The bullets ran a hundred to the pound. "It was a good-shooting gun." Sol was ready to step into his life of living off the land. In 1879 Sol reached his fifteenth year. Few rivaled him as deer hunter by this time. One July morning he stepped off the front porch and headed a little south of east. He held his rifle in the crook of his arm. West of the Hog Pen Marsh he saw a bunch of yearling deer feeding, and tried to stalk them. They danced away into a thicket.

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"I crossed the lower end of Hog Pen Marsh," he wrote later, "and between it and Montgomery Island sighted four grown bucks. . . . I followed the bucks on into Montgomery Island, but failed to see them again. I went on east and crossed Alabama Branch. Here I scared up a doe and fawn, but would not shoot. "I kept on east till I struck Nichols Creek about a mile below where the old Nix Ferry beef trail crossed, then went up the creek to where the River Road to Orange [now Highway 87] crossed. It was then about one o'clock, and I was about six miles from home." The summer afternoon grew sultry and hot. He headed home. He was nearly there, without a deer, when two bucks leaped up in front of him. The little rifle belched smoke and one lay dead. On another hunt he found more deer in a shorter round. "A shower fell one day at noon, enough to wet the grass good. As soon as it quit raining, my brother Tine and I got on our horses and pulled out hunting. We went back in the marshes, and in about a four-mile ride we saw thirty-five deer out in the open feeding. I killed a five-pointer. I saw one bunch of ten large bucks. Another time I saw fourteen does and yearlings in one bunch." One night after guests went to bed, he and Tine went hunting and the next morning had two bucks hanging in the smokehouse. The surprise and pleasure of the guests was just another strand that tied Sol to his life of hunting. One of Sol's last deer hunts took place in the spring of 1906, in the Big Cypress Swamp near Tine's place. Sol was forty-two. He said, "Deer were getting kind of scarce, and I didn't try very hard to kill one. The season was closed, but no one paid any attention to the game law there then." Sol loved turkey hunting, too. He sought them in spring when the gobblers were strutting. The wild turkeys in our part of the country all go to the Sabine River swamp to spend the winter, coming out into the marshes and pinewoods about the first of March. They start laying about the first of April . . . the only time we got to kill them." Turkeys weren't as plentiful as they

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had been in Grandfather Sherod's time, though, when "in the spring... he could hardly hear the [horses'] bells for the turkeys' gobbling." Fishing was sometimes as much fun as hunting, when he was young. There was the time that they made the eight-mile wagon trip to the Bridge Place on Cypress Bayou [probably the present crossing of Highway 87]: ". . . all Tine and I had to do to catch a topwater was to put a little piece of worm on a minnow hook and throw it in. Then all we had to do to catch a bass was to put the topwater on a hook and throw it in. The hooked topwater wouldn't much more than strike the surface before a bass would grab it. We were as busy as a pair of one-armed paper-hangers. The bass were of the small-mouth variety, and they made the lines sing. "Father got coffee made and broiled bacon and called us to come and get it or he'd throw it in the creek. We yelled back to him to throw it in that we didn't have time to eat. Never in all my life have I seen bass strike as they struck that day. Father saw how we were throwing them out, and after eating a bite joined us. By that time we had about all of the fish we needed. He was nearly as bad—or as good—as an Indian about not wasting game or fish. Pretty soon he was telling us to let's go and leave some for the next time." Alligators made great sport for Sol and his friends. On a Sunday afternoon ". . . we would cut a green longleaf pine sapling, about as big around as a man's wrist and about twenty feet long, to punch him [the alligator] with it to see him flounder and throw his tail around and snap at the pole. If one gets hold of the pole, he will give himself a roll and snap it in two as though it were a pipe stem. If we couldn't find one on dry ground, we would punch them in their dens, to see them flounder and throw water." As Sol grew into manhood, Grandfather Wright's labor of land and the country thereabouts grew too small. Other East Texas woods still lay open, and he lengthened his rambles. Railroads pushed their way into the country, and with them came lumber-

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ing and jobs that paid good money. Sol took up tie cutting, mostly to finance his hunting and fishing sprees. "I was starting in on an occupation that I was to follow a long way. John Clasner, an experienced tie-maker, showed me how to chop. Chopping was kind of natural with me. I had used a broadaxe a little hewing house sills, and it wasn't but a few days till I was considered one of the best tie-makers on the job. It was pole pine ties, and of course, they are not hard to make. "I was all set. I could make pretty good money and ramble all I wanted to and always be sure of a job. There was tie-making every place there was timber, and there was always room for one more. Best of all, I didn't have to work under a boss. I could work as little or as much as I pleased, and if I wanted to sit down and rest it was nobody's business. . . . If a man knows he can quit or sit down and rest any time he wants to, he feels comfortable with himself. Then tie-making is nice clean work. Cutting the ties, a fellow never thinks about tune's passing. The trouble is, it passes too fast." In the winter of 1906, Sol built himself a houseboat on the Neches River at Ford's Bluff, now Evadale. From November to February he drifted downriver to Beaumont, living off the land. He shot squirrels, deer, turkeys, and ducks. He caught catfish. "It is wilderness country, most of the river bottom is dense cane brake, and I sure had a good time. That is the only way to have a genuine good time, hunting and fishing." Several years later he started another trip down the Neches from Town Bluff to Beaumont. He wrote, "I made me a goodsized row boat and got together a camping outfit. A single-barrel shotgun, a supply of chuck and ammunition, some bedding and an axe and tent canvas made up most of it." He hunted, fished, and paddled his way down the river. He ate squirrels, turkeys, ducks, and catfish. He passed Sheffield's Ferry, Wright's Landing (named for his Uncle Alex), Yellow Bluff, Ford's Bluff, and on to Beaumont, where he sold his outfit. But the wilderness was almost gone. Deer were getting scarce.

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Bears had dwindled to a token few. Cattle thronged the bottoms, stripping down the cane. It seemed like a man saw signs of people around almost every bend. It was not many years before Sol moved on to places he'd heard were still wild. He went west, to the open spaces and mountains. He finally stopped in California. As he grew older, visions of past years came more often. Soon they would be gone forever, with no one that remembered: That is why, I guess, I have written down this account of my life." Part 3. Section 20 Six miles east of Buna, a county road turned north off the Devil's Pocket Road. The man slowed the car. His map showed this to be the southeast corner of Section 20, the square mile of property he wanted to buy. He turned left onto the county road. The year was 1945. As the car crept along the road, the man looked out across the parcel of land. Blackened stumps dotted the rolling expanse of tall grass. On sandy ridges stood slender pines—longleaf—that looked to be about thirty-five years old. About right, he thought, for seedlings that had sprouted when loggers took the virgin stands around 1910. He walked across the land, looking closer at the soil and grass. He could see that sheep and cattle grazers burned it yearly—the grass grew from fire-blackened tufts. The stock had grazed it heavily for years; the heels of his boots barely dented the hoofpacked soil. Like most pine woods land, the dirt was poor. Thousands of years of rain had leached away the fertility. But he could envision thriving stands of timber if only the livestock could be kept out. And the land was cheap, hardly more than ten dollars per acre. Later, about a quarter mile from the east boundary of Section 20, the man found a heap of rotting logs and cypress shingles. There were pecan trees, crepe myrtle bushes, and Japanese hon-

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Section 20 and the Sherod Wright labor, 1937. Based upon a map supplied by the Zingery Map Company.

eysuckle amid the native weeds and bushes. A deserted homestead, gone to seed. From the abandoned homesite he followed a dim trail. It ended at a small cemetery, hidden in the higher ground beside the swamp. On a headstone he saw a name: Wright. His map showed a square piece of property about the homeplace and the cemetery. The parcel totaled 176 acres and had a label: S. Wright.

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In the world beyond the little cemetery, two great wars had come and gone since John and Eliza Wright had been laid to rest. Their son Solomon had lingered awhile, then had moved westward. His wilderness had faded. He died in California in 1931, a thousand miles away. The other children had scattered, but not as far. Most settled in the surrounding country, but Grandfather Sherod's labor had been sold. During the last war the new owners had cut the loblolly pines that had taken over the pastures where the cattle had once been gathered for the drive to Louisiana.

The man took possession of Section 20 the next year. He decided to fence the livestock out. He bought net wire for the bottom portion, to keep out sheep and hogs, and barbed wire to put above that, to keep cows and horses from crossing. Posts of longleaf heartwood were getting scarce; some were trucked in from remote tracts, but creosoted posts of peeled pine saplings had to suffice for most of the fence. The spring of 1947 was the first time in more than a century that Section 20 had not been grazed. The new owner was a little concerned about how the local ranchers might respond to a fence. Grazing their cattle on private land had been their custom for generations. He knew the story of another landowner who had fenced his land ten years before, in the nearby Devil's Pocket, between Nichols Creek and the Sabine. It was a spring day in 1936, people said, that a visitor drove from Jasper down the dirt roads to Joe Bingham's store at the crossroads. He worked for the new owners of some of the old Sabine Tram Company's land in the Devil's Pocket. He had asked about help to build a fence. A contract was let. Wagons and workers scouted the cutover longleaf areas for rich pine logs and snags suitable for fence posts. They set the posts and strung three barbed wires around eighteen thousand acres—the first enclosure of any size, ever.

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The last day of the summer-long job they spent putting a water gap of cypress boards across Slayden's Creek in the north line of the Delilah Dearks league. The job was done and paid for. The moon was full and the next morning there was no enclosure. The fence had been cut between every post, all fifteen miles of it. The message that local people did not want their open range fenced was heard in Jasper and the land was sold to another owner. Earl C. Hankamer. . . . But the fence around Section 20 stayed in place. Many of the livestock owners had other land to graze, and a square mile of land wasn't much. The owner breathed more freely. There was a baygall on the north half of Section 20 that drained eastward into the swamp on the Sherod Wright labor. Like most drainage systems in the longleaf forest, it began in a mucky flat, a ridgetop marsh. Water left the marsh in a meandering channel; downslope it cut a ditch one to four feet deep. Soon it picked up scrub white bay trees on its bank, then water oaks. Trickles from springs added to the flow. About midway from marsh to swamp the channel split and split again to make a wooded bottom with seeps and shallow pools. Black mud hid beneath the drier spots. One tried to cross on roots or solid ground; a misstep made deep and sucking tracks. Sphagnum moss, ferns, and, in summer, yellow-fringed orchids covered the ground. White bay, water oak, and black gum laced together overhead. Shrubs of galberry, azalea, titi, wax-myrtle, red bay, blueberry, and holly had to be pushed aside as one traversed the little bottom. On a rise in the middle grew a small hammock forest—loblolly pine, magnolia, white oak, and one beech tree. Underneath the beech it was cool on the hottest summer day. There wasn't much wildlife on Section 20. Country people who had toughed out two wars and a depression had seen to that. But sometimes as he walked near the little hammock, he would see the tip of a squirrel's tail in the fork of a water oak. A few coveys of quail ventured out into the grassy flats looking for seeds. Dogs barking and a rainy night sometimes brought the smell of skunk.

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Red-cockaded woodpeckers lived in a few of the oldest longleaf trees, and bluebirds nested in holes they had abandoned. Sparrows and other small birds flushed up along the woods margin. Deer, what few were left, hid in remote hammocks and swamps, seldom coming out far enough to leave even a track. Bears had been gone for decades; panthers dwelled only in the minds of oldtimers. Once he saw dried feet of some of the last native turkeys, dangling from a string on the gallery of a house in the nearby Big Thicket. In the hammock, on the hills, and across the flats shuffled a strange creature that would have been a marvel to Sherod Wright and his children. Armadillos, rooting and digging in the aftermath of all that once was. Even Sol might never have seen one; the forefront of their armored battalion had barely invaded from Mexico when he left for other wildernesses. Now every evening they scuttled across the graves of John and Eliza where the hammock met the swamp. The man who bought Section 20 wanted to bring back trees to the cutover flats. He saw stands of planted slash pines fifteen years old on the nearby Siecke State Forest. They looked good. He began buying seedlings and over the next several years, set out thousands of them among the blackened longleaf stumps. Sometimes of a Saturday morning, bending to pick up his bundle of seedlings and move ahead before slicing into the ground again with his spade, he would hear distant thunder. Dynamite, he knew, blasting out longleaf stumps, the last great reservoir of turpentine. Men hauled them away to De Quincy, Louisiana, to the distillery. Along the road at the south boundary of his property, log trucks hauled the last vestiges of old-growth longleaf they could find to the sawmill near Montgomery Island. The lumber was the best to be had; it sold for thirty-five dollars per thousand board feet, in sixteen- to twenty-four-foot lengths. The year after he bought his land, he ordered a few truckloads of it and built a barn. He disked lanes around his property to keep out the fires that

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still swept yearly through the nearby woods. In particular he surrounded his precious plantings of slash pines with firebreaks; the young trees couldn't stand fire until age ten or so. But outside the plantings, he still planned to burn his land about every three years. It would help the longieaf. After a few years he began to wonder if he had wasted his time planting all those slash pines. With the livestock gone, longieaf pines began sprouting by the thousands in the open flats. He began to think that slash pines weren't so good after all; trees in older stands he saw looked sickly, and many had died. He set fire to the grass and the longieaf thrived. He built a house on his property. He watched the grass grow thicker and taller. It seemed a waste not to use it, especially when it was the trees and not the grass he wanted anyway. Several years and he could wait no longer. He bought thirty cows and a bull and turned them loose on Section 20. Within a year the little longieaf seedlings disappeared. The cows stepped on some; others just died. It seemed so simple in retrospect: each cow weighed a thousand pounds, each foot pressed on the soil with two hundred and fifty pounds. The soil grew brick-hard again. A fence kept cows out of fifty acres around the house. Here the longieaf seedlings thrived, and so did choice grasses he never knew were there before—Indian grass and big bluestem as tall as a man's head. How they had managed to hide and survive a hundred years of grazing he couldn't say. He made a little money on his cattle, but he had problems. To keep them healthy, he had to feed a protein supplement in winter. Mineral deficiencies in the soil made some of them sickly. He began to wonder if cows were worth the costs. Years passed and he watched fences close up the land around him. Landowners squeezed out the free grazing; they wanted to use their land for other things. Lumber companies and forestry agencies planted thousands of acres of fire-sensitive pines; they fought with traditions of burning the range—and won. The old-time stockmen grew tired and died. The open range

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was gone. It was just as well; fire-free woods grew up with brush and loblolly, and a cow could hardly find a mouthful of good grass anyway. Sons and daughters moved away to the cities, to respectable jobs. A few stayed, subsidizing other incomes with a few cattle in the woods. But they had to keep fences in repair; new laws made it illegal for stock to be wandering about. So they spent their Saturday afternoons tying rusty barbed wire to rotting posts with baling wire, hating to give up the old traditions. "I hear Kirbyville auction's givin' a good price, Nate. Why don't you take that old Bremmer cow and git rid of her, once and for all. Ain't nothin' but trouble, anyhow." It seemed a losing battle. He saw new ranchers enter the woods, with bulldozers and brick houses. They leveled the trees, planted pastures, fenced with new wire and steel posts, and brought in cattle with numbered tags in their ears. Money came in with them—had to, because raising cows was a marginal business, and wouldn't pay for all those trappings. Hobby ranches, they seemed to be, playthings of wealthy people. But mostly the fences just sagged lower and fell to the ground. The woods thickened and the cows disappeared. Switch cane sprang up in bottoms that had not seen a decent canebrake in eighty years. By 1980 one could drive miles in the woods without seeing a cow. When the new owner first took over Section 20, he saw young people scrambling to leave the woods. The coastal cities burgeoned. The traffic hummed and the smog thickened, there to the south. Two decades passed, then three. The people started coming back, a few at a time. You could see them with their Houston license plates, driving up on weekends. They had grown older, and perhaps wiser. They picked up the fallen wire and stapled it to new posts hauled from town. Some cleared underbrush and built houses. Or rather had them built, by contractors who hauled lumber, bricks, and roofing from town. The wood came from faraway places sometimes, had been

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Sol Wright's wilderness.

run through mills and machines so you hardly recognized that it came from a tree. Each newcomer seemed to have his little parcel of property, inherited after a hundred divisions from Great-grandfather or bought with a lifetime of savings. The parcels were posted against trespassers, their trees and squirrels guarded carefully. They had to be; there were no longer enough for everybody.

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Some years after Section 20 had been fenced, its owner bought part of the original Sherod Wright labor. The cemetery came with the land. He deeded the cemetery tract back to the Wright family. One day a couple drove up from the city, where they worked. They had an uncommon interest in the old Wright homestead, and finally bought it. Soon they built a brick house there, under the old pecan trees. They cut the timber—the third time it had been cut—cleared off the pastures, and kept working in the city. The little cemetery still lay out by the swamp. Cardinals still flashed in and out of the bushes at its edge. But somehow it seemed a more peaceful place than before. Perhaps John and Eliza in their graves felt more settled; their great-great-granddaughter and her husband owned the new house under the pecan trees.

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8. Legacy

IN HIS ZEAL to hack a living from the wilderness, Grandfather used up a lot of things. He knowingly exterminated some, perhaps because he thought they weren't worth saving. He took other things that he knew were useful; maybe he thought they would renew themselves. But mostly he probably never thought at all; he just did whatever made living better at the time. It may seem that our grandparents bequeathed a poor legacy. But somehow they left more than just used-up land. They left the story of how they'd stripped the land, to hint at how it might be fixed. They left a feel for how they loved the land. They sparked a dream in some to have it return to what it was. Let's look with a critical eye at what people through the years have done to the land, and what we've been left with. The story really began long before Grandfather, or even his grandfather before him. . . . The. Hunters and Trappers From the dawn of his time man has been a hunter and trapper of animals. In the beginning, his spears and snares made small mark upon the hordes of beasts he pursued. Their fecundity and wariness quickly hid the scars of his foragings; the limitations of his knowledge and his weapons made him a feeble predator. But as he moved toward the noon of his day, man built upon the traditions of his kind before him, and learned to bring down game at a greater distance and to build better traps. The Ice Ages came,

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and glaciers spread over the land. He endured and emerged from this era of great cold, improving his hunting strategies and his weapons because his sustenance became more dependent on the acquisition of the beasts that thrived below the glacier front. During this time of the great ice sheets, an unprecedented event occurred: man in search of other hunting grounds discovered the New World, a land where animals had lived unmolested by humans. Some say that as he populated this new world, he exterminated many of the animals that were cumbersome prey—the great ground sloth, the woolly mammoth, the long-horned bison. Ancient points of flint lie embedded in the buried skeletons of some of these beasts, reminders of early man's prowess with the spear and throwing stick. Man quickly spread over the New World, and thrived by spear and bow for thousands of years. Later, a different kind of man found the New World. He came armed with thunderous magic, the firearm. He produced better traps and poisons, and turned his attention to those animals that had eluded the primitive men before him. Infused with a view of endless plenty as the wilderness receded before him, he shot and trapped and poisoned without a thought that the bison and passenger pigeons would give out, and without a hope that the wolves would. But they did. And he changed not his ethic, but only his target—to deer and bears and turkeys. Man in East Texas was no different. With his finger on the trigger, he followed the last deer track and sat beneath the last turkey roost. But the end of heedless harvest is near. "Get your gun! Call the dogs!" may not now be the first thought a young East Texan has when he sees a doe and fawn in spring. Many an older East Texan is proud to have deer again in his back pasture or wild turkeys in his county. Some even enjoy hearing the howl of "wolves," gone these fifty years. The animals that survived man's careless years come cautiously forth, to test the changing wind. Their kinds are not as

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numerous now; the seeds of many of them were lost. But their hunters are tamed; they've leashed the primal urgings flickering in the cave fires of their minds. The Timber Croppers The first East Texas harvester of timber was the Indian who built fires around the base of the great cypress to fell it and make his boat. The same Indian hacked with his stone axe and burned until he had a clearing to grow his corn and beans and squash. His was a puny effort, and the scars he left were small compared to those Nature slashed with ice, wind, and fire. The white frontiersman with his steel axe and saw came next, and slashed and chopped and burned some more, and the scars became a little bigger. This man selected the straightest trees from the forest to build his home. He opened a larger clearing for his com and beans and squash. But still there were untold acres of dark forest and giant oaks that aged and fell and returned to the soil as they had for eons. One day a startled hunter stood on the riverbank and watched a steamboat nose its way up the muddy Angelina. River commerce had dawned. Soon huge rafts of logs clogged the rivers at flood, bound for coastal markets. Smell of sap and crash of timber filled the forests near the rivers. Then came the Iron Horse, puffing and steaming its way into the woods and across the creeks and rivers. The twentieth century dawned to find steel rails spreading b'ke spider webs through the forests. John Henry Kirby and other lumbermen who had waited, poised for this moment, prospered. From the merging of the railroad and the virgin woods, they built themselves an empire of wealth and power. The longleaf pine was the choice of the lumbermen; the trees stood tall and straight, maybe three or four sawlogs to the first limb. The wood was straight-grained for sawing, rot-resistant with pitch. A house of longleaf boards could be built in days, and

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would last a hundred years, without paint. Not as good as cypress perhaps, but much, much more plentiful, and easier to get. The harvest of the longieaf peaked about 1907. It climaxed an era of timber commerce that, before the trains came, had been painfully slow, at least in the eyes of the lumber barons. From the time the first railroad pushed out onto the sandhills until the last big stand of pines fell was about thirty years, about the span of the best years in the life of a logger. Thirty years to take away what fire and rain had worked for untold centuries to build. The hardwoods in the bottomlands and on the hills lasted longer than the pines; they were tougher to get to and harder to saw. There were many kinds, with many uses, and people took the best kinds first. White oaks for barrel staves, walnut for furniture, hickory for axe handles and wagon wheels. Later the loggers helped themselves to seconds, and thirds. Invariably, the trees that the loggers chose, whether pines or hardwoods, had provided the best food and homes for wildlife. They were the large and vigorous trees, yielding tons of fruit and seeds and thousands of snug hollows. To make things worse, after the loggers passed, many of the good wildlife trees not cut for timber—the young hardwoods, the old cavity-riddled pines and oaks—were bulldozed or poisoned as weeds and replaced. By the best timber crop, loblolly pines. East Texas today grows loblollies, row on row, over hundreds of square miles that used to be hardwood and longieaf country. The loblollies themselves are cut young, to make way for the next crop—it's more economical. They are, at best, marginal for any kind of wildlife. Modern forestry produces cash but little wildlife. People in their wisdom, which recognized the need of wildlife to be protected from the trap and the gun, are slow to acknowledge that it must also have a proper living place. Gray squirrels perceive no difference between rifles and chain saws—thoughtlessly applied, the two are equally deadly.

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The Nutrient Harvesters In East Texas as in all natural environments, life springs from the soil. The life-giving qualities of the soil are its nutrients, or minerals. The principal nutrients are nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. Phosphorus and potassium, like a variety of other minerals needed by plants in lesser amounts, are built from the soil itself. Nitrogen, unlike the other nutrients, originally comes from the air, and in nature must be taken into the soil by bacteria before trees and grass can use it. Plants must have both nitrogen and the other nutrients for growth. Animals are nourished by the plants; they eat according to how well the plants are fed by nutrients. There is a virtually unlimited supply of nitrogen in the air. When it is depleted in the soil, it can be brought back quickly by bacteria that grow naturally on the roots of certain plants. Unless these plants are encouraged, however, the soil may be nitrogenstarved despite the abundance of nitrogen in the air. The other nutrients are available in limited quantities; natural processes replace them much more slowly. They come into the soil in the form of tiny molecules as the rock decomposes through geologic time. People add them to poor soils as fertilizer. Nutrients, in the medium of water, move from the soil into plants. They move through the food web from plant to cow to human, and eventually fall back to earth to await the need of another plant. They are lost when they are washed out of the soil by water, or carried away in the bodies of plants or animals. Without soil nutrients transported in this soil-plant-animal cycle, life as we know it could not exist. Living things do not basically differ among themselves in their need for nutrients—an oak tree and a squirrel are the same. If the supply of nutrients is good, life flourishes; as the supply of nutrients diminishes, life falters. Plants and animals may be likened to marathon runners in an endless race, carrying supplies of nutrients without which they

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would die. Each entry in the race replenishes its nutrient supply as it runs—a deer eats nutrient-bearing acorns and rattan leaves —until finally its life fails and it falls to earth. The nutrients it is carrying may quickly be garnered by a different runner—a coyote eats the deer—but eventually, the nutrients must return to the soil, there to await being taken up again by the roots of plants. Plants are the only runners that can take nutrients from the soil and bring them back into the race. Humans have learned, beginning in the hungry dawn of prehistory, that Nature in her normal apportioning of nutrients to the various runners is not particularly attentive to people: most of the wild nutrient-bearers are not very useful. But eventually people also learned that, by selecting and culturing plants and animals, they could funnel nutrients into products that were more useful to them. Thus Man the Agriculturist was born, and the doom of an unfettered nature was sealed.

On a hilltop in Jasper County overlooking the Angelina River there is an outcrop of rock. For hundreds of centuries the rock has weathered from the summer sun and winter rain. Pieces have fallen from its surface to the soil at its base, and lichens and bacteria have worked at the pieces to make them smaller and smaller, until finally molecule-sized fragments are released. The rock is a source of nutrients—the vital, invisible fuel of life. Before people came, nutrients were seldom idle once they escaped the bondage of the rock. Many were quickly absorbed by roots of longleaf pine trees, and they nourished new pine needles. Later they fell to earth with the needles, and were released to the soil the following year as a wildfire turned the needles to ashes. Soon they were taken from the soil again by broad-leafed plants that grew in the wake of the fire; and the plants were eagerly consumed by deer. Others of the nutrients traveled downhill in the torrents spawned by spring rains, to be carried along in the Angelina

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River flood. Some of these were deposited on the nutrient-rich bottomland of the river; they quickly built acorns and persimmons for riverside foragers. Some were swept to the edge of the sea, where they entered into the frantic food web of the estuary. Myriads of oysters, young shrimp, fish, and birds fought for them there. For the nutrients there was little repose. In those days there was a great diversity and abundance of plants and animals, each adapted over the millennia to get its own share of nutrients. And each community of plants and animals was selfish with its treasure, as if the plants and animals knew that, once the nutrients had escaped them, it would take the rocks a long time to make more. When the Indians came, it made little difference. The minerals continued their rapid transit from soil to plant to animal. Now they were sometimes carried by Indians as well, but the Indians simply passed them on as had the animals. In the few centuries before white people, the Indians learned to burn and chop small clearings in which they planted crops. The minerals had their first experience of being tunneled for the particular benefit of people. But they were still returned to the soil near their birthplace, and continued to nourish the lives of wild plants and animals as before. The first white people who came were similar to the Indians; they were generous in their use of minerals and eventually returned what they borrowed. Their numbers were few and they lived side by side with the forests and the animals in them. But the kinds of things they did forewarned of things to come—these people were possessed with the means and the urge to drastically reorder the pathways and ultimate destinies of the minerals. The first inklings of major change came with the white settlers and their animals. They brought their cattle and hogs, cleared and plowed larger and larger areas for farming, and shot more and more of the deer, bears, and turkeys. More and more minerals were taken from the soil by corn and beans and fewer by oak and beech trees. Many plants and fruits were eaten by hogs and cattle instead of by wild animals. But the minerals were still

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around; the shrubs and trees hung on the peripheries of the settlers' clearings, ready to march in and reclaim them should a settler move away or die. But then within the course of a few hundred years—mere seconds as history is reckoned by the woods and hills—these white people developed a frightening capability. They learned to garner a great proportion of the land's nutrients and to transport them here and there at will and even to place them in inaccessible repositories out of reach of the nutrient-hungry communities of the land. Minerals released from the rock ledge in Jasper County have had strange destinies since white people multiplied on the land. Some were hauled away stored in tree trunks; these now lie inert in the wood of houses in Houston, Beaumont, and Dallas. Others nourished grass plants consumed by cattle; people in California and New York ate the beef and many of the nutrients found their way to the sea in city sewers. Even greater quantities than before were washed to the Angelina River by rain, because the soil was laid bare by unwise farmers. In later years many of these settled to the bottoms of reservoirs, there to lie far from the reach of trees and squirrels. Many that did not leave fields through breached terraces were pulled from the soil by cotton plants, and reached livestock in cottonseed meal and garment stores in pairs of Levi's. Many nutrients still move rapidly from soil to plant to soil in hay meadows and pine plantations, but these eventually feed eastbound cows and pulp mills, and not deer. Nutrients, the lifeblood of the land, are being bled away through the arteries of civilization. Their destinations are many, but only sometimes will they again nourish a forest or a wild animal. We call an abundant supply of nutrients fertility. We attempt to replenish nutrients with manufactured fertilizer, but only if we plan to quickly remove them once more in a product to be shipped to market. No one is foolish enough to try to replenish, for deer and turkeys, the nutrients in an Angelina River bottomland starved by a Sam Rayburn Dam.

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The Water Managers As nutrients dictate the sustenance capabilities of the land, so do habitats govern its quality as living space. For thousands of years in East Texas, water has been at work molding habitats from substrates. Centuries of rain falling and running downhill to the sea made hills and valleys from land that once was ocean bottom. One by one the smaller fragments of the soil leaped from their places of origin on hillsides to run with the flow of torrents down, down to the roiling river; and on with the river to find a new berth in the floodplain or the shallow margin of the sea. The river itself, ever restless, ate at its channeled banks and wandered back and forth across its floodplain as the years passed, leaving terraces and trenches in the flatness of the bottomland. Water was the sculptor, ever at work on the face of the land. Through time, as the features of the land emerged, plants and animals adapted their life-styles to fit the kinds of environments that water carved from the land. Longleaf pines grew upon the sterile sandhills from which the nutrient-rich clays had been stolen by the water. Towering oaks and hickories stood rooted to the bottomlands below, where water had stacked the fertile soils, layer by layer. Cypress and tupelo gum trees, crowned with nests of herons and egrets, bathed their feet in the wetness of abandoned river channels. Catfish lurked in the summer pools of the river, waiting for a freshet to send the river out of its banks and among the leaves, logs, and debris of the bottomland, to expose the fat grubs and beetles to their foragings. The bottomland chestnut oaks drank their fill, and after the river subsided, dropped their acorns to feed the hungry turkeys and bears that came down from the hills in the fall. East Texas was a finely tuned orchestra and there were many players. Water was the maestro, coaxing the perfect harmony from the assemblage, for they had played together for centuries.

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In the Bible, all the people on earth except Noah and his family were destroyed by a flood. Almost as though today some ancient fear persists, civilizations exhibit a consuming interest in the control of water on the earth's surface. Waters are channeled and checked. They are held in large reservoirs by dams, and dispensed in controlled aliquots at the whim of farmer and utility company. Water, we have you almost under control. Our fears may be laid to rest.

Because Nature in East Texas was so attuned to the unconstrained forces of water, civilization's control of water has had drastic and sometimes unexpected consequences for plants and animals. The adverse effects of harnessing water have been proportional to, and sometimes coincident with, those of nutrient control. People have drowned bottomlands behind dams of concrete and steeL Above the dams bass and crappie explore hollow snags that once housed families of squirrels and raccoons. Below the dams, sloughs and oxbow lakes shrivel and die; the rivers' overflows no longer replenish their water. Some of the wildlife that once used these sloughs — alligators, herons, egrets, raccoons, minks, and some kinds of fish — are gone or diminished in number. Giant cypress and tupelo that once stood majestic in the brown slough water have been exposed to the timber cropper and are gone, and there is no water to nourish another generation. To anyone who has hunted the river bottomlands before they were freed from the annual rush of muddy water, the woods below the dam are quieter. The whine of mosquito swarms rising from dark pools, the echoes of pileated woodpeckers conversing, the scuffle of squirrel feet on bark and their whistle and chatter— all are harder to hear than they used to be. The tree trunks are cleaner now; their bark is not silt-stained higher than a man's head. Thickets of loblolly pine choke the once-open bottomland flats

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and creep down the dry slough banks. The youngsters of the upland forests stream in hordes to populate the territory reaching from the hills to the river, like town children discovering a vacant lot. The proprietor, the river, has been imprisoned in its channel; the invaders frolic at will at the feet of the old-time residents. And the days of the residents—the swamp white oaks, the shagbark hickories, the cypress and tupelo—are numbered. A fisherman running his nets and trotlines ten miles below the dam has noticed other things. The river fish are not the same. In the old days when the river was up, the catfish poured through the culverts beneath the river road, and you could net them there by the bushel. They swarmed out over the bottomland on the rise of the flood and all you had to do was tie your hooks to the top wire of submerged fences. Now, confined to the river channel, the catfish find slim pickings. Some fish find the new river more to their liking, but the old fisherman cannot benefit from these. As scarce as the catfish are, likely he'd retire soon and join the weekend crappie and bass fishermen from Beaumont and Houston, touring the lake in their bill cape and bass boats. The Misffuided

Protectors

In primeval East Texas, disaster roved the woods. Ice storms swept down from the north in winter, ripping branches from trees and snapping trunks of saplings. Hurricanes moved north from the Gulf in summer and fall with days and nights of rain and wind. The trees rocked back and forth, their roots loosened in the water-softened soil, and they toppled. Swollen rivers, unchecked by dams, scoured their channels and pillaged the bottomlands. When the rains did not come, sun scorched the pine hills, and fires flared up to sweep the forests clean of brush. Because disaster came often, plants and animals that capitalized on it did well. The longleaf pines thrived as the fires licked at their trunks. Turkeys and quail reveled in the green flush of plants that followed fire. Like well-kept orchards, the forests that were pruned and thinned by ice and wind increased their

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yield, and the bears and turkeys and passenger pigeons feasted. Ivory-billed woodpeckers found their favorite grubs beneath the bark of trees killed by storms and floods. Deer and turkeys moved from one forest clearing to another, feeding on the greenery and insects that thrived where fallen trees let in the sun. Civilized people appointed themselves to conquer the agents of disaster. They quenched the fires and dammed the streams. Before long, plants and animals loving benign environments came in and pushed aside those depending on disaster. Loblolly pines crept into the flood-free bottomlands below the dams, sapping the vigor of the oaks and hickories. Turkeys and squirrels searched harder to find acorns and nuts in the fall. Grasses choked the longleaf forests shorn of fire, and here as in the bottoms, loblolly pines marched in unopposed. The leafy plants that hid the nests and young of turkeys and bobwhite dwindled. The woodpeckers faced boom and bust: dead trees came with a rush as the loggers passed, but then there were none for years while the forest regrew. And the young trees that were left bent with the wind but did not fall; neither did they provide mast for the hungry. Man the Protector reigns. He has donned the hat of Smokey the Bear to protect his own interests from Nature's agents of disaster. By so doing he has inadvertently starved the multitudes who lived in the aftermath of destruction. The Space Consumer* Plants and animals live on a thin veneer at the boundary of sky and earth. They must have their roots in the soil and their heads in the air. Each acre where the ground is blocked from the sky is an acre lost to them. A parking lot, a highway, a building—animals and plants can live only as rootless transients where these are in the way. Before the twentieth century, people did little to seal off the surface. The places taken by an Indian's lodge or a settler's cabin

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were mere dots on the face of the land. Even in later years where houses were crowded together in cities, the weeds and grasses grew because the earth met the sky in the alleyways and at the roadsides. But that all changed in the last few generations. Now asphalt spreads like lava from the volcano of progress; it coats the earth as highways, streets, and parking lots. The home space used by each person and the number of people making homes have increased to the point where tens of thousands of acres of soil are covered by houses. The appetite of industry for space competes with that of homes. Cities creep outward ever more swiftly, covering prairie and woodland and field. The space usurped by civilized people goes beyond places where the sky is shielded from the earth. Space to things wild and untended implies more than the minimal growing room needed by potted plants or stabled animals. It is the area needed for a population of deer to grow and bear young year after year; as such, it must sustain many more than one deer. It is the domain of a stand of oaks, a place large enough that oak seedlings spring yearly from fallen acorns, and young oaks struggle among themselves to fill the space left when the parent tree topples. And as we have seen, a space may not be very useful unless it's treated right. A hardwood forest needs hollow trees to be good space for gray squirrels. Passenger pigeons had the entirety of the eastern forests within reach of their wingbeats, but it served them nothing without plentiful crops of acorns, and nesting places free from squab hunters. Collectively, there is still enough space of the right kinds in East Texas to support some of each kind of plant and animal that ever lived there. But it is so fragmented by different owners and different treatments that it is useless to many. A vacant city lot is large enough for dandelions and gophers, but too cramped for raccoons and foxes, and wild turkeys are not satisfied without contiguous miles of upland forests, grassy glades, and fertile bottomlands. The variety of wildlife decreases as subdivision of properties increases; say good-bye to many of the far-ranging H47]

kinds as grandchildren parcel among themselves the acres left by their grandparents.

Human lives are bound up in the recurrence of happenings. Spring after spring we see the same procession of flowers, the same pattern of life as trees leaf out and gardens grow. Each fall the same pageant of color unfolds and geese ride the north wind south. These things will come again; we feel secure. It disturbs people when events do not recur; there is a suggestion of lost opportunity. The change from legions of passenger pigeons to none was disquieting because it was final. The pigeons would not come again. Minerals in the land, and the wealth of life they supported —once gone, they cannot be rebuilt in time measured by human generations. It would be easier if things gone could be blotted from memory; if, like the dinosaurs, they never existed in our world except as a sort of fantasy. Then no one would miss them; we would be satisfied with what we have. But we are set up to preserve pictures of the past, to remind ourselves how it was. So we are stuck with the knowledge that our forebears let some things go. Likewise, those who come after us will know what we lose. Some of them, like some of us, will think, half seriously, "Yes, I would like to have seen one." Some might even say, more seriously, "We could have used some." What will be their legacy?

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9. When the Stars

Begin to Fall HOW CAN WE take what's left of the Land of Bears and Honey and make the most of it? How can we pass on to our grandchildren the best possible legacy? Some seek to save, in public trust, the best examples of what the land was once like. Pieces of land in state wildlife areas and parks, in federal preserves and forests, and given by private foundations. Places that people from cities can visit some day and say, so this is how it was. This is the safest course; Grandfather left a lesson in the whimsy of private ownership. But land costs money. So little land is now in public trust, and there is so little money with which to buy more. Is there another course? Why not rebuild the private lands, some ask. There lies the best potential. There lies most all the land. Rebuild the entire land? One can't do that. Who can see cow pastures and pine plantations return to anything that resembles the wilderness that used to be? Can this be done? It could be done. Given time and its own direction, the land would rebuild itself. Most of the wealth of life that used to be would come again, in time. One need but visit a left-behind field or village to sense that this is true. But people in East Texas are not destined to give the land time to go its own course. Their wants for food and shelter must be met. And the land, if left alone, will not provide enough crops for food, or enough wood for shelter; it never counted on so many people. If the land will be rebuilt, we must be the architects. To build a city, one must have three things—the knowledge,

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the means, and the will. If one has all three, the grandest of cathedrals can arise. In the absence of any one, the meanest of huts will fail. To rebuild the land requires the same three things—the knowledge, the means, and the will. We have the knowledge. We know how to take what's left and build a field of corn, a wood, many kinds of birds or none. A herd of deer and a thicket of quail are pages in recorded science. The means are there. We live in a time when the signing of a name causes countrysides of hardwoods to fall and columned pines to march in. Forests yield in a year to pastures and palaces. We have the means to endless directions. But where is the will? The desire to bring back the many kinds of trees and birds, the bears, the April sound of turkeys in the woods? Can we find the will to build the land our grandparents knew? The answer lies partly in a wisdom called tradition. Scientists call it culture. Culture is the traditions of a people. It is what they eat and drink, where they seek their pleasures and punishments, how they treat their grandparents and their land. It is passed on from one generation to the next, from grandmothers and grandfathers to grandchildren. Traditions are the last legacy. After grandparents' trees, turkeys, and teakettles have run out, they alone remain. One cannot be robbed of them, even should one want to be. They hang on, like a song you can't unlearn. Tradition, more than any other force, tells us how we should build our land. Science can give the knowledge, wealth can provide the means, but tradition shapes the will. From where did our traditions of land use come, and where are they taking us? In East Texas, tradition is a time-wearied traveler. It came with people of southern stock, from Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, the Carolinas. Farther back, it came from people who worked the soils of Scotland, Ireland, England, and France, since

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before the time of Christ. Frank Owsley, noted southern historian, has said of these stocks of people and their culture: "Their thoughts, traditions and legends were rural, for with the exception of an occasional ancestor who had been brought from some British city or debtor's prison as an indentured servant, their family trees were rooted in the soil. . . . To them the land was, with God's blessings, the direct source of all the necessities of life and of all material riches. . . . "Because of the great increase in population, together with the enclosure acts and other similar monopolistic trends, the freeholds and leaseholds of the yeomen fanners of western Europe, especially Great Britain and Ireland, became too small for comfortable support, and in many cases too small to furnish subsistence. These farmers thus crowded upon inadequate holdings and often deprived of access to the land, were in consequence possessed of a great land hunger. In America, and especially in the South, they found a boundless domain which, together with a genial climate, they came to regard as theirs by the manifest will of the Divine Providence." In the southern states these people found Heaven on Earth, and gorged themselves on land. They grabbed the richest pieces first. Some skimmed the cream, then moved on to yet untouched delights. Others put down roots on good pieces of land and stayed. These southern settlers generally leapfrogged from the East Coast westward. The last southern frontier lay in eastern Texas; westward beyond that was harsh country where the trees were stunted and the land was dry. Thus the first settlers to arrive in eastern Texas had strong and distinctive traditions. The core of these traditions—subsistence on the land—was centuries old and had come from across the sea. The New World had added pieces to these traditions: limitless hunting and fishing, running livestock on free pasturage, wasteful use of seemingly endless soil and timber. In East Texas these rural people put down final roots. There, for over a hundred and fifty years they lived, and passed on their

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seeds and their traditions. They cut the trees on the land for houses, for barns, for furniture, and for tools until all the good ones were gone. They cleared the trees from the most fertile soils and planted corn, cotton, and collards, year after year, until the fertility left the soil. They let the soil wash off their fields and down the rivers. They grazed the pine woodlands and the bottomland canebrakes until all the good grasses were gone. They shot the bears, the deer, and the turkeys without restraint. That the land at length became too small to nourish so many people, and that, finally, traditions of land treatment no longer provided a living, seemed to make little difference. There still remained the urge to go through the motions. There is sign of change in the old traditions of land treatment. Change is coming first in the young, for they are open to learning new ways. Books, magazines, and television speak of the need to change, and young people listen. Public schools and universities are their teachers now; Grandfather lives in another town. Ironically, some of the corporate industries, long viewed as the archenemies of environmental concern, are making significant progress toward building a new land ethic. They have much of the land, and they have the means to conserve what is left. People trained in universities make corporate decisions. They are not bound by tradition as tightly as people still living on the land. There is a company that strips many acres of East Texas land each year, to mine the lignite beneath. What could be worse, a coal mine that obliterates every living thing from the land's surface? But the upheaved land is soon reclaimed, remolded into hills, valleys, and ponds; planted to grasses, shrubs, and trees. Each year, other plants and wild animals come in from the periphery; the land begins to heal itself. After several years, this company sells the reclaimed land back to local citizens. Tradition moves in. More often than not, the young trees shading ponds and dotting hillsides fall to the mowing machine and the farmer's axe. Soon the hills are smooth and the fence rows clean. Grass, hay machines, and cattle reach to all

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corners. Once more the place looks respectable. There is a lumber corporation that cuts timber for profit. It seems strange to some of the loggers that this company sets aside tracts of hardwood bottomland and saves old longleaf pines, for a few birds and squirrels. There is no law that says they must. Despite his stubborn ways, Grandfather was in one sense a visionary. Get your education, he said to his progeny, perhaps seeing the need for more than he could teach. The educated will control the world, he said. And the educated will make the break from tradition. More and more today the land is controlled by those who were educated away from Grandfather's knee. This presents at once a hope and a danger for the land. There is hope because what these people learn from the world outside frees them from Grandfather's thoughtless traditions of land abuse. They garner the knowledge to foster a new tradition of land stewardship. But there is a danger because Grandfather loved the land in a way that cannot be taught by classroom lectures in a faraway city. If the grandchildren learn of better ways to treat the land, will they also learn to care? Let us hope that, somewhere in their distant past, future presidents of corporations will have followed grandfathers along piney woods creeks with fishing poles in hand. That, somewhere in their fondest memories, they hear April sounds of turkeys calling, autumns filled with squirrels.

John awoke. In the darkness he held his hand, palm outward, in front of his face. The luminous dial of his Rolex showed 3:00 A.M. He lay on his back and let sleep ebb away. He had learned to live with the habit of waking long before dawn. Executive syndrome, his doctor called it. It usually irked him, but this morning he welcomed it. For three weeks he had planned this hunt, talked it up among his friends. Now it was here. Even the drive up last night, fight-

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ing weekend traffic, had been pleasant. Talk of old times and other hunts. He sat up and swung his feet off the bed, wiggling his toes in the pile of the carpet. His pants in the dark felt strangely rough to his hand; it was seldom now that he wore Levi's. He pulled them on before flipping the switch at the bedside. He finished dressing then, and opened the door into the hallway. From the open door across the hall, snores rumbled. Through the darkness floated an image of old fat George, mouth open and nose skyward. John closed the door behind him. The percolator, primed with water and coffee, sat on the white formica of the cabinet top. He plugged it in, leafed through an Outdoor Life magazine until it began to gurgle, then poured himself a cup. Switching off the kitchen light, he went outside. The air was crisp. A jacket from the hall closet and the warm cup in his hand broke the chill. For the comfort of guests accustomed to luxury, the inside of the lodge resembled all the hotels he'd ever stayed in, but the porch was open, built veranda-style at his insistence. He pulled up a leather-bottomed chair and leaned back in it against the wall. The roof shut out part of the overhead sky, but he sat near one end so he could see the stars. He felt the coffee begin to seep into his blood. A "who, who, who-who, who, who, who-who-aaah!" smote the blackness far beyond the clearing. More distant who-whoing answered, and the barred owls conversed back and forth. Pretty soon they tapered off, and all he could hear was a semi truck on its way to Houston, whining faintly in the distance. Suddenly he snapped the chair forward. Its front legs thumped on the boards. Coffee sloshed from his cup and he felt it warm and wet on his thigh. Startlingly close a howl was lifting. Quickly it rose to a high pitch, then descended. Rising again more loudly, it was joined by another. The night came alive with howls, barks, and yaps. Shadowy forms leaped across his mind; adrenaline joined the caffeine in his veins. The sounds subsided.

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He tilted the chair back against the wall. Silence lingered awhile, then there was a rustle beyond the meadow, like morning beginning to stir. The first line of dawn rimmed the treetops. He looked overhead and the stars were still there; the sky was black. Off the end of the porch a meteor appeared near the zenith and flashed downward. He hummed softly: My Lord, what a morning! When the stars begin to fall! "I tell you they're wolves," said fat George. He reached across the table and stabbed a piece of sausage to the heart. Grease squirted thinly across the table as the tines pierced the bloated skin. George hesitated slightly. Then, like one accustomed to making quick decisions, he followed through with the motion, heaping the link onto his plate. J. D. Lewis was the best camp cook this side of Houston, and George wasn't about to pass up homemade sausage this morning, cholesterol or not. "I ought to know," he continued quickly, before someone could object. "My granddaddy trapped enough of them over in Polk County. There never was any coyotes in East Texas, no matter what them government biologists say." He glared around the table, prepared to defend his statement with belligerence if not with fact. J. D. set another steaming pan on the table, his hand weathered and brown in contrast to white ones reaching for the biscuits. 'There warn't no armadillos here neither, when I was a kid," he observed dryly. "There sure ain't no lack of 'em now." Brief silence, clank of forks and knives on plates. Fat George had a mouthful of sausage. J. O brought in coffee for refills. To tell th' truth, it was prob'ly ol' Jim Massey's dogs." His eyes twinkled. "Well, I'm ready to get after those squirrels," said a thin man at John's right. He followed with a question: "How long have y'all had this lease?" "Just got it last year," John replied. "This is the first time I've

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hunted here, but I understand it's one of the best in East Texas. Our leases in South Texas are good, but we wanted one closer to Houston. That way, we could just run out for a day's hunt and be back at work the next morning." 'That's good thinking," the thin man said. "I seldom get more'n two days off in a row and it's hardly worth driving or flying down to the Brush Country for a few quail. Some of our people go there every year for deer season of course. But I like squirrel hunting better. Anyhow, I hear tell there are lots of deer here, too." Breakfast over, talk lapsed into business as J. D. cleared the table. He stacked the dirty dishes in the kitchen sink and went outside to start the truck. Hawking loudly as he climbed back up the porch steps, he spat out onto the wet grass and stopped to survey daybreak. Time to get movin'!" he yelled inside. Them squirrels gonna be through stirrin' 'fore we ever hit th* woods." He walked inside and slapped a hand-drawn map onto the table. "We're here." He traced a road with his finger. "John, you get off here, since you have to be back by noon. George, you here. . . ." John stepped off the road into the woods. The pickup rolled away, heavy with flesh and bristling with guns. He stood, listening to the gray morning, seeing the silence return. Moisture dripped from trees, and pecked at leaves on the ground. It was going to be hard to hear squirrels because of the dew dripping. After ten minutes of walking, he stopped to listen and look. Away in the distance he thought he heard the scuffle of feet on bark. It was too early in the day for them to be chattering much; that would come later when their bellies were full. Now they would be quietly eating beechnuts or loblolly seeds, or traveling from their dens to a food tree they knew of. The swish of a branch caught his ear, and he looked behind him. A clump of water oak leaves fifty feet above the ground moved up and down, then stopped. There, to the right! Looking in the distance like a fast measuring worm, a cat squirrel sped down the loblolly branch toward the trunk. Too far away to reach with

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number 6 shot. Another branch swished; the squirrel headed away and disappeared. A slight rise ahead in the flatwoods marked what he took to be the bank of a small creek. Beeches grew along the rise. He headed toward it. A sudden squeaking whistle stopped him; primitive man within him savored the sound. Wood ducks! Stooping, he advanced. With the margin of the creek channel just ahead, he straightened slowly, shifting his eyes to the visible parts of the creek without moving his head. Over there the creek deepened in a bend. A sandbar met the creek on the inside of the elbow, but the outside, which he knew would be deeper and steeper, was out of sight. Ripples shimmered, dying on the sandbar. He crouched again and moved ahead, breathing rapidly. He felt sweat on his forehead. Exertion and excitement took its toll of late; the years were catching up. Water and wings exploded to his left, and he jerked upright, whirling about. Three ducks were off, lined out down the creek. Instantly he knew he had exposed himself to the pool ahead, and, as if propelled by his thoughts, six rockets leaped from the showering surface. In formation and gathering speed, they rounded the next bend. He followed them with his shotgun until they vanished. Ducks. Wings on a misty morning. Aura of faraway places, of mystic lagoons and ice-capped coasts. A tangible spirit flew with them, an essence that transformed plodding man into winged Mercury. John had seen it happen. Whistling widgeons over a Louisiana marsh; mallards settling into an Alberta stubblefield. Hunters clutching their guns, faces shining and blood pumping with unaccustomed fierceness. As if the energy of the bird was transfused into the man, loosing the shackles that kept him grounded, letting him soar into the sky and fall like maple leaves before the wind. Then there had been that hunting club where trained mallards

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flew from their hillside boxes to waiting guns below. An attempted reenactment of the pursuit of wild fowl, but one that lost the meaning entirely. A parody of the connection between man and land. Bringing the pen-raised duck to earth seemed the ultimate symbol of man's self-imprisonment. From cage to cage. Wood ducks catapulted into the air at shooting galleries? John put away the thought. Sun touched the treetops. He decided he'd better find squirrels soon or they'd stop moving. Cypress knees reached his as he skirted the edge of the bottomland slough; mosquitoes rose to follow him. He headed for higher ground. Suddenly he heard a sound he knew well, a squirrel chewing a hickory nut, carried on the still air above the sound of dripping water. He marked the direction and, with the twenty-gauge held loosely in the crook of his elbow, headed out. Hearing the sound once more, directly ahead of him, he stepped with greater caution to avoid dead branches and new-fallen leaves. His eyes roved the midlevel of the trees, especially at one point where a ridge lifted from the flatness. A branch moved ahead. There, through the trunks of chestnut oak and loblolly, hickories grouped gray-white. A slow fifteen minutes later he sat with a view of the hickory grove, gun across his lap. Several squirrels had come within range, but he waited and watched. He could see the greenshelled nuts among clusters of leaves; they looked as small as chinaberries from this distance. There! A branch terminal sagged and green leaves quivered. A brown-and-yellow piece of fur reached to claim a hickory nut. Fox squirrel. Scuffling noises above his head showered loblolly bark around him. He craned his neck. Forty feet up, two cat squirrels chased each other around and around his tree. An ascending squeal, like the sound of a rusty door hinge opening, challenged from a nearby magnolia. Feeding time was nearly over. Turkey tracks followed the sandy ruts up the rise out of the bottom. They lay over the tracks of J. D.'s truck. John's back warmed as the sun climbed the sky. He glanced at his watch, then

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lengthened his stride. The three-fingered prints veered away. He stopped to look. A barnyard sound came through the scattered trees. "Pert! Pert! Pert!" Rolling thunder then, and a flash of gray bodies rising from the bluestem. No barnyard fowl, those! The last bird sailed with set wings back into the bottomland timber. Quickened heart and step, another mile to camp. My Lord, what a morning, My Lord, what a morning. . . . J. D. had the coffee going. He raised his eyebrows at the empty hunting vest, but said nothing. John offered no explanation; he and J. D. had known each other a long time. Tilting his chair back against the porch wall, J. D. looked off across the clearing. "Nice mornin' for things to be stirrin'," he said. "Not too hot, not too windy. Seen quite a few, I guess?" John nodded, letting the first draughts of coffee settle in. Bluejays screamed. "Who's all them other people?" J. D. asked. "Old fat George's th* only one I really know." "Shell. Exxon. Cameron Iron Works. Dresser," John said. "I've hunted with them all in South Texas. They're a pretty good bunch." J. D. filled his pipe and lit it. Smoke drifted across the porch. "Been doin* some thinkin', have you?" he asked, glancing up at the porch rafters the way he always did when he stepped sideways into a subject. John waited, forming the thoughts in his mind. "A lot of wildlife here," he began, then was silent for a long moment. "In fact, more than I remember seeing anywhere when I was growing up in this country." "Me an' my neighbors stopped killin' it." J. D. removed the pipe from his mouth, paused. "Ten, fifteen years ago, we found a deer track, ol' Jack would get his dogs, an' likely as not, that ol' doe would end up divided amongst half a dozen hunters," he chuckled. "Wasn't no turkeys then. Granddaddy killed out one o* th' last

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flocks in these parts back in th' thirties. There was a roost, then, at th' edge o* th' bottom about two miles from here. These around here now come from over in Alabama or somewhere, I hear. Game an* Fish brought 'em in. "Now, a lot o* my old neighbors have died out, or are so decrepit they cain't bend over close enough to see a deer track. Some o' th' other ones, like me, figured it was time to stop outlawin'. Why your own grandmother'd call th' law on you these days for shootin* a squirrel outa season. "Besides, you cain't hunt anywheres, like you used to. These big timber companies got their land leased out, with a warden patrollin' it." John interrupted. "So times are getting better for game. Is that what you think?" he asked. "Well, I didn't say that. It's gettin' better in places, all right. Like right here. What's happenin' is that a few o' th' better places have a single owner, a timber company or some rich fella. They find out that a company like yours, or a huntin' club, will pay good money for huntin' rights. A lot more money, in fact, than they could make by loggin' it, grazin' it, or anything else. So they lease th' huntin' rights, keep th' locals out, and wildlife booms. With th' Game an' Fish bringin* in turkeys, protectin' alligators, and such, it gets to be a regular wildlife paradise compared to what we've seen in th' last fifty years. Trouble is, that's just happenin' in spots. What's happenin' other places ain't so good. To begin with, most o' th' huntin' leases I've seen in this part o' th' country ain't bein' managed for wildlife. You cain't cut all th' oaks an' hickories an* beeches an* expect squirrels an' turkeys to like it. "What beats me is th' ones who bulldoze th' hardwoods an* plant pines or coastal pastures an* expect to get top price from people lookin' for a huntin' lease! A deer in his right mind wouldn't be caught dead there. 'Cept where th' weeds sneak in, or if he's chased from next door. Quail, they say! If you look close, you won't see them very far from weeds an' brush neither." J. D.'s chair slammed forward onto the floor, and he scurried

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into the kitchen. John heard the door of the oven open. The odor of burned sugar followed J. D. out. His gloved hand held the pan. "Here, have one o' these rolls. They're a little scorched on th* bottom but you can scrape that off." John took one. J. D. set the pan on the porch floor. Scraping a cinnamon roll with his pocket knife, J. D. leaned back in his chair. "Like I started to say, most o' th' land hereabouts is owned in little chunks. Nobody's gonna bother tryin' to lease those; they're too small. An' th' people that own them little places do whatever gives 'em th' best profit. "Take me. I had eight o' my ten acres dozed, an' planted coastal. I run a few head of cows on that, cut winter wood from what's left o' th' trees, an' that's that. Got one covey o' quail, part-time. They hang around th' garden an' wood edges, where th' weeds are. Saw one deer track last year, crossin' my place. "Most o' my neighbors are like me. Even if they did leave a dozen acres o' hardwood instead o' plantin' pasture, all they'd get would be a few squirrels. You've got to hanker after squirrel meat awful bad to trade a dozen of 'em for a cow. All comes back to money." John swallowed the last of his roll and was silent for a minute. "J. D., I've been interested in wildlife a long time. Mainly because I tike to hunt. But for other reasons, too. Here lately I've been real concerned about what's gonna happen to wildlife in this country, here in East Texas. Part of that's just nostalgia. I hate to see everything changing from when I was younger. I want my kids to have the same chances to be kids that I did. You've no idea how discouraging it is to try to raise kids ten miles inside the city limits of Houston." J. D. tamped his pipe. "Yep. I hear about it on th' news all th' time." "Or how bad it is just to live there, knowing that places to hunt squirrels and just get away from people are getting scarcer all the time." He looked away across the meadow to where the trees began.

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... Ill weep for the rocks and mountains When the stars begin to fall. J. D. said nothing. John glanced at his watch. He stood, reaching for his coat. Thanks, J. D." He looked for a long moment into the weathered face. "Ill be back next weekend. Might bring my boys. Phone you on Friday." He turned to go. "Don't mow your pasture too much, now. Gotta give those quail a chance." J. D. chuckled. "To tell th' truth," he said, "I ain't mowed them brush patches for three years now. Figured I didn't need that much beef. On top o' that th' old lady's gone an* planted a bunch of oaks right where I had 'em pushed down ten years ago. Can you believe that?" Trees flew past. Houses stood beside the road, watching; old people rocked on porches, waiting. In the distance, John could pick out the black gum trees almost as soon as they came into view. The sun, kept from his face by the visor, shone crimson through them. None of the other trees were turning yet. Homeward bound. The October afternoon was warm enough for the air conditioner, and John rode with the windows closed. Cows grazed in postcard pastures. Bugs smashed futilely against the windshield. Village Creek was a bridge on the highway, a change in the sound of whispering tires. Birds flashed across the road in front of the car. A few doves pecked gravel at the margin of the pavement, flushing away on noiseless wings as he passed. The air from the dashboard vent spewed cool and sterile. There in a clearing stood a church. A small building with a white wooden cross atop the steeple, two sweet gums and a water oak shading it. He remembered stuffy pews and the preacher's voice, shouting suddenly from a whispered warning, aimed at drowsy youngsters. Time ticked backward. The air conditioner purred; the landscape blurred. In the pulpit, the voice rose and fell.

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So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them. Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth and subdue it. ... Be fruitful, and multiply. Subdue the earth. The houses flashed by with greater regularity. Whatever God had said, old King James' translators apparently thought He meant the world needed more people and less wilderness. East Texans weren't about to disagree. He'd like to know what God had really intended. The road straightened and he could see a small metropolis, once a quiet village, approaching. Houses stood elbow to elbow. Two-storied cracker boxes were stacked in old fields; automobiles scurried about on bumpy asphalt. He stopped at a red light. The prophecy of Isaiah came from a forgotten corner of his mind: Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth! Beyond the second city-limits sign, he pulled into the countryside once more. The land was opening up, into the prairie of the Gulf Coast. Brahma cattle, stalked by egrets, clustered around a water tank. A flock of geese passed low over the prairie and crossed the highway. He was wide awake, fixed on an idea he couldn't quite grasp. Pieces, floating in his mind's eye like parts of a jigsaw puzzle, were trying to come together. Why do people treat land the way they do? It was something about how they looked at things past, things to come, and things now. Grandfathers and their link with the past. Offspring, and the hope they held for the future. Religion and the conduct it taught. Isaiah, J. D., and he, John Hunt, were all driven by these connections. Tradition, that's what it was. Perceptions passed from one person to another and from one generation to the next, that told people what to do.

1163]

Youth was the seedbed. In youth, J. D. and John had learned to shoot deer, just as John's kids were learning about cash and Cadillacs. Once rooted, tradition held fast. He suspected J. D. still poached deer when he could. John looked ahead. Telephone poles flashed dimly past at the sides of his vision and converged in the distance. Far down the road, a brown cloud swallowed them. Smog and gulf moisture pushing back the blue of yesterday's norther. Signs on fence posts warned trespassers. One said in uneven letters: No Hunting! Violators Will Be Shot Ducks and geese were money here. Our tradition is money, he thought. That's the value my father gave to me and I'm giving to my kids. The land is just a city park or a nature show on TV. What should I expect? He increased his speed. Leaning forward suddenly, he switched off the air conditioner and rolled down a window. The air was a little sticky, and it carried heavy odors. Mostly of exhaust fumes from traffic, but also of fallow fields, cow dung, and a cattail marsh he saw beside the road. Shortly he saw the freeway ahead of him. Slowing, he swung around the curve that brought him to the entrance ramp. The hum of traffic pitched to a roar. He switched on the radio, loud, to drown the noise. Expecting to hear the usual Thump! Thump! and scream, he was surprised to recognize the music. Today was Sunday. . . . Will there be time tofindsalvation When the stars begin to fall? My Lord, what a mornin' My Lord, what a mornin'. . . . He picked a gap between cars and accelerated. The traffic swept him away.

[164]

References

1. The Virgin forest Austin, S. F. 1904. Journal of Stephen F. Austin on his first trip to Texas, 1821. Southwest. Hist. Quart. 7, no. 4287-307. Bolton, H. E. 1908. The native tribes about the East Texas missions. Quart. Texas State Hist. Asm. 11, no. 4:249-76. Bradford, A. L., and Campbell, T. N., eds. 1949. Journal of Lincecum's travels in Texas, 1835. Southwest. Hist. Quart. 53, no. 2:180-201. Bray, W. L. 1904. Forest resources of Texas. USDA Bur. Forestry Bull, no. 47. Chapman, H. H. 1909. A method of studying growth of longleaf pine applied in Tyler Co., Texas. Soc. Amer. Forestry Proc. 4207-20. . 1932. Is the longleaf type a climax? Ecology 13, no. 4:328-35. Eldredge, I. F. 1947. Thei forests and the future of the South. Washington, D.C.: The Charles Lathrop Pack, Jr., Foundation. Espinosa, Fray Isidro Felis de. 1927. Descriptions of the Tejas or Asinai Indians, 1691-1722, part 4. Translated by M. A. Hatcher. Southwest. Hist. Quart. 31, no. 2:150-80. Hammett, S. A. 1858. Piney woods tavern; or, Sam Slick in Texas. Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson and Bros. Maxwell, R. S. 1981. Personal communication re: James Stanley Joyce. Stephen F. Austin University, Nacogdoches. Morft, Fray Juan Agustfn. 1935. History of Texas. 1673-1779. Translated by C. E. Castaneda. Albuquerque: The Quivira Society. Newcomb, W. W., Jr. 1961. The Indians of Texas. Austin: University of Texas Press. Page, F. B. 1845. Prairiedom, rambles and scrambles in Texas or New Estramadura. New York: Paine and Burgess. Parker, A. 1968. Trip to the west and Texas (18M-18J5). Austin and New York: Pemberton Press. Roberts, 0. M. 1881. A description of Texan. St. Louis: Gilbert Book Company.

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Stoddard, H. L. 1931. The bobwhite quail: Its habits, preservation, and

increase. New York: C. Scribner's Sons. . 1969. Memoirs of a naturalist. Norman: University of Oklahoma

Press. Swanton, J. R. 1942. Source material on the history and ethnology of the

Caddo Indians. Bur. Amer. Ethnology Bull. no. 132. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution. i. Grass

Austin, S. F. 1904. Journal of Stephen F. Austin on his first trip to Texas, 1821. Southwest. Hist. Quart. 7, no. 4:287-307. Bradford, A. L., and Campbell, T. N., eds. 1949. Journal of Lincecum's travels in Texas, 1835. Southwest. Hist. Quart. 53, no. 2:180-201. Cole, E. W. 1946. La Salle in Texas. Southwest. Hist. Quart. 49, no. 4:473-500. DeWees, W. B. 1968. Letters from an early settler of Texas. Waco: Texian Press. Dobie, J. F. 1939. The first cattle in Texas and the Southwest progenitors of the longhorns. Southwest. Hist. Quart. 42, no. 3:171-97. . 1941. The longhorns. New York: Grossett and Dunlap. Dresel, G. 1954. Gustav DreseVs Houston journal: Adventures in North

America and Texas, 1837-18U. Translated by M. Freund. Austin: University of Texas Press. Engeting, G. A. 1951. History of the Derden Wildlife Management Area. Texas Game and Fish Comm. Fed. Aid Proj. 52-R-l, Job 1. Espinosa, Fray Isidro Felis de. 1927. Descriptions of the Tejas or Asinai Indians, 1691-1722, part 4. Translated by M. A. Hatcher. Southwest. Hist. Quart. 31, no. 2:150-80. Hodge, F. W., ed. 1907. The narrative of Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca.

In Spanish Explorers in the Southern United States, 1528-IS4S,

pp. 12-126. New York: Barnes and Noble. Jordan, T. G. 1973. Pioneer evaluation of vegetation in frontier Texas. Southwest. Hist. Quart. 76, no. 3:233-54. Roe, F. G. 1970. The North American buffalo. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Roemer, F. 1936. Texas. Translated by 0. Mueller. San Antonio: Standard Printing Company. St John, J. B. 1974. A buffalo hunt in the Texas prairie. Texana 12, no.

2:179-87. Stiles, H. R., ed. 1906. JouteVs journal of La Salle's last voyage, 1684-

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Swanton, J. R. 1942. Source material on the history and ethnology of the Caddo Indians. Bur. Amer. Ethnology Bull. no. 132. Washington. D.C.: Smithsonian Institution. Wright, S. A. 1942. My rambles an East Texas cowboy, hunter, fisherman, tie-cutter. Austin: Texas Folklore Society. J. Land of Bean and Honey Austin, S. F. 1904. Journal of Stephen F. Austin on his first trip to Texas, 1821. Southwest. Hist. Quart. 7. no. 4:287-307. Bailey, V. 1905. Biological survey of Texas. North American fauna no. 25, USDA Biological Survey. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office. Dobie, J. F. 1950. The Ben Lilly legend. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. Dresel, G. 1954. Gustav Dresel's Houston journal: Adventures in North America and Texas, 1837-18*1. Translated by M. Freund. Austin: University of Texas Press. Espinosa, Fray Isidro Felis de. 1927. Descriptions of the Tejas or Asinai Indians, 1691-1722, part 4. Translated by M. A. Hatcher. Southwest. Hist. Quart. 31, no. 2:150-80. Gaut, J. 1905. Field report, USDA Biological Survey, Special Reports. Box 93, Folder 29, in Smithsonian Insitution. Hollister, N. 1902. Field report, USDA Biological Survey. Special Reports. Box 94, Folder 2, in Smithsonian Institution. Hollon, W. E., and Butler, R. L., eds. 1956. William Bollaert's Texas. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Kiene. A. L. 1966. Texas bear hunt. 1906. In Tales from the Big Thicket, ed. F. E. Abernethy, pp. 123-36. Austin: University of Texas Press. Oberholser, H. 1902. field report, USDA Biological Survey, Special Reports. Box 93, Folder 16, in Smithsonian Institution. Roberts, O. M. 1881. A description of Texas. St. Louis: Gilbert Book Company. Texas Game, Fish and Oyster Commission. 1945. Principal game birds and mammals of Texas. Austin: Von Boeckmann-Jones Company. Tunnel, A. L. 1919. Hunting bear in Big Thicket. The Texas Magazine 3, no. 1:25-29. White, E. M. 1967. East Texas riverboat era and its decline. Beaumont: La Belle Printing and Engraving Company. Wright, S. A. 1942. My rambles as East Texas cowboy, hunter, fisherman, tie-cutter. Austin: Texas Folklore Society.

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4. Tooth and Claw Bailey, V. 1905. Biological survey of Texas. North American fauna no. 25, USDA Biological Survey. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office. Cahalane, V. H. 1964. A preliminary study of distribution and numbers of cougar, grizzly and wolf in North America. New York: New York Zoological Society. Dobie, J. F. 1950. The Ben Lilly legend. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. Dresel, G. 1954. Gustav Dresel's Houston journal: Adventures in North America and Texas, 1837-181,1. Translated by M. Preund. Austin: University of Texas Press. Gaut, J. 1905. Field report, USDA Biological Survey, Special Reports. Box 93, Folder 16. in Smithsonian Institution. Geiser, S. W. 1937. Naturalists of the frontier. Dallas: Southern Methodist University. Hollister, N. 1902. Field report, USDA Biological Survey, Special Reports. Box 94, Folder 2, in Smithsonian Institution. HoUon, W. £., and Butler, R. L.. eds. 1956. William BoUaert't Texas. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Lawrence, B., and Bossert, W. H. 1967. Multiple character analysis of Canis lupus, latrans, andfamiliaris with a discussion of the relationship of Cant* niger. Am. Zoologist 7223-32. McCarley, H. 1959. The mammals of eastern Texas. Texas J. Science 11, no. 4:385-423. . 1962. The taxonomic status of wild Canta (Canidae) in the south central United States. Southwestern Naturalist 7, no. 3227-35. Oberholser, H. 1902. Field report, USDA Biological Survey, Special Reports. Box 96, Folder 16, in Smithsonian Institution. Paradiso, J. L., and Nowak, R. M. 1971. A report on the taxonomic status and distribution of the red wolf. USDI Fish and Wildlife Service Special Scientific Report—Wildlife no. 145. Washington, D.C. Pimlott, D. H., and Joslin, P. W. 1968. The status and distribution of the red wolf. Trans. 33rd N. Am. Wildl. Nat. Res. Conf., pp. 373-89. Russell, D. N., and Shaw, J. H. 1971. Distribution and relative density of the red wolf in Texas. Contribution of Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration, Texas W-103-R. Mimeographed. Wright, S. A. 1942. My rambles as East Texas cowboy, hunter, fisherman, tie-cutter. Austin: Texas Folklore Society.

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5. Wings Allen, A. A., and Kellogg, P. P. 1937. Recent observations on the ivorybilled woodpecker. AtJc 54:164-84. Bailey, V. 1906. Biological survey of Texas. North American fauna no. 25, USDA Biological Survey. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office. Baker, R. H. 1956. Remarks on the former distribution of animals in eastern Texas. Texas J. Science 8:356-59. Dennis, J. V. 1967. The ivory-bill still flies. Audubon 69, no. 1:38-44. Geiser, S. W. 1937. Naturalists of the frontier. Dallas: Southern Methodist University. Hasbrouck, E. M. 1891a. The present status of the ivory-billed woodpecker (Campepkilus principals). Auk 8:174-88. . 1891b. The Carolina Paroquet (Conurus carolinensis). Auk 8:369-79. Lowery, G. H., Jr. 1974. Louisiana birds. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Oberholser, H. C. 1974. The bird life of Texas. Austin: University of Texas Press. Roberts, O. M. 1881. A description of Texas. St. Louis: Gilbert Book Company. Schorger, A. W. 1973. The passenger pigeon, its natural history and extinction. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Tanner, J. T. 1956. The ivory-billed woodpecker. Texas Game and Fish Magazine 14:15, 30-31. Wright, S. A. 1942. My rambles as East Texas cowboy, hunter, fisherman, tie-cutter. Austin: Texas Folklore Society. 6. Home Is the Hunter Austin, S. F. 1904. Journal of Stephen F. Austin on his first trip to Texas, 1821. Southwest. Hist. Quart. 1, no. 4:287-307. Bailey, V. 1905. Biological survey of Texas. North American fauna no. 25, USDA Biological Survey. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office. Gaut, J. 1905. Field report, USDA Biological Survey, Special Reports. Box 93, Folder 16, in Smithsonian Institution. Geiser, S. W. 1937. Naturalists of the frontier. Dallas: Southern Methodist University. HoUister, N. 1902. Field report, USDA Biological Survey, Special Reports. Box 94. Folder 2, in Smithsonian Institution.

[169]

Hollon, W. E., and Butler, R. L. eds. 1956. William Bollaert's Texas. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Morfi, Fray Juan Agustin. 1935. History of Texas, 1673-1779. Translated by C. E. Castaneda, Albuquerque: The Quivira Society. Nehrling, H. 1882. List of birds observed at Houston, Harris Co., Texas, and vicinity, and in the counties Montgomery, Galveston, and Fort Bend. Bull. Nuttall Ornith. Club 7:6-13,166-75, 222-25. Oberholaer, H. 1902. Field report, USDA Biological Survey, Special Reports. Box 95, Folder 16, in Smithsonian Institution. Parker, A. 1968. Trip to the West and Texas (1&H-1835). Austin and New York: Pemberton Press. White, D. 1900. A happy hunting ground, farm and Ranch Magazine 19, no. 18. White, E. M. 1967. East Texas riverboat era and its decline. Beaumont: La Belle Printing and Engraving Company. Wright, S. A. 1942. My rambles as East Texas cowboy, hunter, fisherman, tie-cutter. Austin: Texas Folklore Society. 7. Wilderness Trilogy Roberts, 0. M. 1881. A description of Texas. St. Louis: Gilbert Book Company. Wright, S. A. 1942. My rambles as East Texas cowboy, hunter, fisherman, tie-cutter. Austin: Texas Folklore Society. 9. When the Stars Begin to Fall Owsley, F. L. 1949. Plain folk of the Old South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

[170]

Index

Agriculture, consequences of, 141, 142 Allen, Arthur, 81 Alligators, 1, 124 Anderson County: bears in, 47; buffalo in, 30; deer in, 91; pigeons in, 77; turkeys in, 91 Angelina County, cougars in, 67 Angelina River, 1, 22, 66, 137, 140, 142 Armadillos, 130 Attwater, H. C.,77 Audubon, John James, 57, 73, 74, 76. 80, 90 Austin. Stephen P.. 7. 8. 29. 45. 90 Ayish Bayou. 25 Bailey, Vernon. 45-47. 57, 66, 79, 81 Bay City, bears near, 51 Baygall, vegetation of, 129 Bear Man's Bluff, 45 Bears, 40-55 Beaumont, turkeys near, 91 "Beef road, 114 Bees, honey, 40, 41 Bee Tree Slough, 1 Bevilport, 1 Big Thicket: bears in, 47-54; description of, 10, 12; Are excluded from, 16: in Newton and Jasper

counties, 36, 120 Bison, 23-31 Black Creek, 49. 57 Blackmore. William, 30 Blaine.J. G.,78 Bollaert, William. 45, 66, 90 Bottomland, 143-144; trees of, 18 Bray, W. L.. 10 Brazoria County, wolves in, 61 Brazos County, cougars in, 67 Brazos River, 29, 30, 51, 80 Buffalo. See Bison Buffalo Bayou, ivory-billed woodpeckers near, 80 Cabeza de Vaca. Alvar Nunez, 29 Cabin, construction of, 111 Caddo Indians. 4, 15 Cahalane, Victor. 58-59 Camels, in early Texas, 23 Cameron Parish, wolves in, 62 Canebrakes. 38, 45 Carter, Ab, 46 Catfish, 143, 145 Catfish Creek, pigeon roost on, 77 Cats, long-tailed, 56 Cattle: introduced by de Leon, 32-34; management of, in nineteenth century, 35-39; on Sherod Wright league. 113-116; on virgin range, 114-120; work-

1171]

ing of, in late 1800s, 118-120 Chambers County, wolves in, 61 Chapman, Herman Haupt, 12-16 Cherokee County, early bison in,

29

Cleveland: squirrels near, 91; wolves near, 57 Coleman, W. H., 78 Colorado River, 46, 51 Conroe, bears near, 47 Coon Creek, pigeon roost on, 78 Corrigan, pigeon roost near, 77 Cougars, 56, 65-70 Cowboys: in early East Texas, 35-37; lore of, in East Texas,

113

Coyotes, 58-65 Crops, of early settlers, 112 Cypress Bayou, 29; fishing in, 124 Dam B, 1, 82 Dayton Prairie, 57 Deer early abundance of, 129-130, 143; hunting of, 122,

123

Deerskins, traded by Indians, 90 De Leon, Akmso, 32-34 Dennis, John, 81-83 Depression, Great, increased hunting pressure in, 91 Devil's Pocket, 120, 128 DeWees (early traveler), 29 Disaster, natural, consequences of, 145, 146 Diversity, in plants and animals,

141

Dobie, J. Frank, 37 Doucette, virgin tongleaf near, 12,

13

Douglass, F. D., 77 Dresel, Gustav, 22, 45, 57, 65, 93 Dresser, H. E., 80

Eastman, Whitney, 81 Ecologists, 16, 18 Eldredge, I. F., 16 Espinosa, Fray Isidro Felis de, 29, 42, 43, 45 Extirpation: of bears, 54, 55; of bison, 23, 30, 31; of cougars, 66, 67; of ivory-billed woodpeckers, 80-83; of jaguars, 66; of parakeets, 72; of passenger pigeons, 78-79 Fertility. See Nutrients Fire: importance of, to longleaf pine, 16, 38, 145; setting of, by early settlers, 114, 120; setting of, by Indians, 25-28 Flack, Captain, 34 Floods, effects of, 18, 143, 144 Forest, virgin, 13-15 Forks of the River, 1 Fort St. Louis, early settlement of, bison near, 29 Fruit, wild, 113 Galveston Island, deer on, 90 Galveston storm. See Hurricanes Gaut, James, 46, 47, 57, 79 Gaylor Lake, ivory-billed woodpeckers near, 81 Goshen, pigeons near, 76 Grass, as forage, 23, 38, 114, 131 Hankamer, Earl C.. 129 Hardin County: bears in, 47, 54; deer in, 90; pigeons in, 78 Hardwoods, wildlife benefits from,138 Harris County: bison in, 29; pigeons in, 78; wolves in, 61 Hasbrouck, Edwin, 73, 74 Hasinai Indians, 4, 29, 40, 44

[172]

Hearne, pigeons near, 78 Henderson County, pigeons in, 76-78 Hickman, M. B., 77 Hickman's Ferry, 114 Highway 21, early bison near, 29 Hogs: interaction of, with bears, 115; raising of, by settlers, 46, 114; in the woods. 121 Hollister, Ned, 46, 57. 68, 73, 79 Honey: eaten by bears, 46; eaten by settlers, 40, 45 Hooks, Ben, 48, 70 Hooks, Corrie H., 81 Hooks, Henry (Bud), 49 Hornaday, William!., 30 Horses, 34-36; prehistoric, in early Texas, 23 Houston: pigeons near, 77; deer near, 90 Houston, Sam, 66 Houston County, pigeons in, 78 Hunting: effects of, 89-92; evolution of, 135-136; lease system of. 153-164 Huntsville, jaguar near, 65, 66 Hurricanes, effect* of, 17, 18, 145; Galveston, 18; Natchez, 17 Ice Age, 135. 136 Ice storms, 145 Indians: food bartered with, 111; trade in deerskins with, 90. See alto Hasinai Indians Ivory-billed woodpeckers. See Woodpeckers

Jaguars, 56, 65, 66 James. HallieC., 78 Jasper bears near, 47; jaguars near, 66; squirrels near, 91; turkeys near, 91; wolves near, 57

Jasper County: cougars in, 66; jaguars in, 66; land map of, 107,

110

Jefferson County, wolves in, 61 Joslin. Paul, 58, 62 Joutel (chronicler), 29 Joyce, James Stanley, 13 Kirby, John Henry, 137 Kountze: bears near, 48; pigeons near, 78 Land: incentive for settlement of, 151; subdivision of, 146-148 Land ethic, new, 152-153 Land use: education in, 153; European influence on, 151; tradition in, 150-153 La Salle. Sieur de, 29, 41, 42 Lawyers, in early East Texas, 8 League, Spanish, 108 Lee County, pigeons in, 78 Leon County, pigeon roost in, 78 Leopards. See Jaguars Liberty, prairies near, 22 Liberty County: bears in, 47, 54; deer in, 91; ivory-billed woodpeckers in, 81; wolves in, 61 Lilly, Benjamin V, 48-51, 68-70 Lincecum, Gideon, 12, 22 Lloyd, Olga Hooks, 82 Log cabin, construction of. 111 Long Lake, bears near, 47 Loring (biologist), 79 Lowery, George, 74 Lumbermen, 12-15. See alto Timber Magnolia belt, description of, in early times, 9 Magnolia Springs, Wright homestead near, 109

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Mammoths, in early Texas, 23 Mastodons, in early Texas, 23 Matagorda Bay, bears near, 51 McCarley, Howard, 58-59, 85 Measuring tree, of bears, 47 Montgomery, jaguars near, 66 Montgomery County, effects of hurricane in, 18 Montgomery Island, 123, 130 Morfi, Fray Juan Agustin, 89 Mustang Prairie, 23 Nacogdoches: early countryside near, 7; missions at, 34 Natchez hurricane. See Hurricanes Navasota River, 29 Neches River, 1, 8, 18, 30, 50. 67, 77, 80, 82, 116 Nehrling, Henry, 77-78 Nevill's Prairie, 23 Newton County: cougars in, 66: deer in, 90; early ranching in. 35-37 New World, 136 Nix's Ferry. 119 Nowak, Ronald, 60 Nutrients: loss of, 142; in the soil, 139-142 Oakwood, pigeon roost near, 78 Oberholser, Harry, 46, 47, 57. 66, 79 Old San Antonio Road, 7, 9 Old Zavalla, vegetation near, 22 Orange County, wolves in, 62 Orange Prairie, 36 Otter, 101 Owsley, Frank, 151 Oxen, 115 Page. F. B., 17

Panhandle, of Texas, bison in, 30 Panthers. See Cougars Paradise, John, 60, 62 Parakeets, Carolina, 71-74 Parker, Amos, 10, 90 Pickens, H. D., 78 "Pigeon Roost" Prairie, 78 Pigeons, passenger, 74-79 Pimlott, Douglas, 58, 62 Pine barrens. See Piney woods Pines: loblolly, 10, 16, 138, 144, 146; longleaf, 9-16, 131, 137-138. 143, 145; slash, 131 Piney woods, description of, in early times, 9, 10 Polk County: parakeets in, 72; vegetation in, 12 Pope, Floyd, 77 Prairies, 22-23 Railroads, 137 Ramon, Diego, 34 Ranching, in early East Texas, 35-37. See aim Cattle; Cowboys Red-cockaded woodpeckers. Set Woodpeckers Redlands, 8 Reid, Bessie M., 81 Reighard, George W., 30 Reservoirs, consequences of, 142-145 Riley. Glynn, 61 Rio Grande del Norte, 32 Roberts, Governor 0. M., 8, 10, 45, 72, 77, 110 Robertson County, pigeons in, 78 Rockland, bears near, 47 Roemer, Ferdinand, 30 Roosevelt, Theodore, 46, 51 Ruff (hog dog), 121 Russell, Dennis, 61

H74J

Sabine River, 7, 9, 18, 36, 114, 123 Sabine Town, vegetation near, 9 Sabine Tram Company, 128 Sailer, John, 49 Sam Rayburn Dam, 142 San Jacinto County, effects of hurricane in, 18 San Jacinto River, 36, 66 Schorger, A. W., 76 Section 20, 126-132 Settlers, early, in East Texas, 712, 107-116 Shaw, James, 61 Shawnee Prairie, 23 Sheep, 115, 126, 128 Siecke State Forest, 130 Silsbee, deer near, 90 Singer Tract, ivory-billed woodpeckers on, 80, 81 Slaves, of Sherod Wright, 116 Smokey the Bear, 38, 146 Soil: fertility of, 139-142; of the Magnolia belt, 9-10; near Nacogdoches, 8 Sour Lake: bears near, 47; deer near, 91; squirrels near, 90, 91 Space, as habitat, 146-147 Spring Creek, turkeys near, 90 Squirrels, 2, 91, 138 State Game, Fish and Oyster Commission, 91. See aim Texas Parks and Wildlife Department Steamboat trade. 116 Steinhagen Lake, 2, 82 Stock laws, 132 Stoddard, Herbert, 16 Sudduth's Bluff, 120 Tanner, James, 80-83 Tarkington, deer near, 91 Tarkington Prairie, 23, 36. 37, 57 Texas, province of, 7

Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, 55 Thompson, Captain Lewis, 13 Thompson, George B., 78 Thompson, Hoxie, 13 Timber: croppers of, 137, 138; management of, 13. See also Lumbermen Traditions: in land use, 150-153; sources of, 150-152 Trees: special uses of. 111; wildlife uses of, 138 Trinity County Lumber Company, 13 Trinity River, 18, 23, 33, 36, 46, 57. 72, 80, 82 Turkeys, 89-92; hunting of, 123 Tyler County, virgin longleaf in, 12-14 United States Biological Survey, 45, 66, 79, 81, 90 United States Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife, 60 University of Kansas Museum of Natural History, 60 Vara, Spanish, 110 Water, management of, 143-145 West Yegua Creek, pigeons near.

78

Wilderness, settlement of, 108-116 Wolves, 56-65 Woodpeckers: ivory-billed, 79-83; pileated, 82, 83; red-cockaded, 2, 85-88, 130 Woodville, pigeons near, 77 Wright, Anna, 108-116 Wright, John, 45, 108-116 Wright, Sherod: homesteading by, in 1832. 108-116; labor of, 116,

[175]

127; league of, 107 Wright, Solomon Alexander, 3538, 57, 66, 71, 89, 90; birth of, 117; boat trips by, 125; cattle work by, 118-120; hunting by, 122-126

Wright Creek, 110 Wright's Landing, 116 Yale University, students of, in East Texas, 12-15

[1761