Hunting A Harvest Moon
By Joe Meador
Having grown up in a small Texas town, being in the outdoors was just part of life. We were dirt poor but didn’t know it. There was always food on the table, water in spicket and 3 channels on the tv. If the President was on, he was on all 3!
Back in the late 1990’s I worked for a fuel company. My job was to deliver gas to farmers, ranchers and weekend warriors. One day while delivering fuel to the Oil Ranch just outside of Waller Tx. I saw a sign that said “Even the poorest cow has a leather coat”. Some 20 plus years later I still think about that. I can relate that to my childhood, even though we were poor we had it really good by today’s standard’s.
Hempstead Tx. was the kind of town were everyone knew everyone and also knew their business. With that being said, if you got in trouble, that party line (most people have know idea what that is) would get the news to your house before “you” got home.
When we were growing up, we had chores. Nothing like chores of today where cleaning your room pays you $20 a week. We would feed & tend to the animals, cows, chickens, horses and slop the hogs. Someone is wondering what in the hell that is. Being the youngest I never had to milk the cows, I just gathered the eggs and slopped the hogs. All for a mere 4 bits (50 cents) a week allowance.
My favorite time of year was summer. That meant no school and my favorite cousins were coming to stay. Tooter & Bubba, with their help it would cut the chore time in half and off to our favorite fishing hole. (This also meant our allowance was cut in half). We would tromp through the woods, cross a dirt road, hop a barbed wire fence, cut through the pasture and there is was. The five acre lake on the Tremble ranch that we pulled countless bass from. Although we never had permission to fish there, we did it anyway. If the fish weren’t biting, no problem we were going skinny dippin.
I remember the summer of 1975, Uncle Doug and Aunt Cookie came to drop off Tooter and Bubba. They brought their brand new single shot 22 rifles. Open sights and we were tearing up those beer cans as fast as Uncle Doug could drink them. I was hooked. For the next two weeks we hunted and ate dove, squirrel and rabbit.
I remember telling myself I was going to save my allowance and buy one of those 22 rifles. However 50 cents a week only leaves a dreamer to dream.
I still talk to Tooter pretty regularly. We still laugh about the old days and how good we had it. He still has his 22 rifle. I never did get my 22 single shot rifle. I guess I just skipped and started with the 410.
My parents divorced when I was 4 or 5 years old. My dad Jake, passed away when I was seven years old. I don’t have a lot of memories of him. A few camping trips, one fishing trip and the stories my uncles would tell about him.
In my dads family there was 4 boys Aubrey, Gene, Charles and Jake. They were brought up hunting and fishing the backwoods of deep East Texas. I latched on to Uncle Aubrey after my dad passed away. My mother would send me and my sister to stay with them for a week or two during summer break. Uncle Gene was a construction worker, he was mean and tough as a briar. Uncle Charles and his family moved to California when I was pretty young, so I never really got to spend much time with him.
Uncle Aubrey worked nights driving a truck for Red Arrow Freight. While he was sleeping during the day I would practice my casting. He had a surf rod, I called it the big fishing pole. I would cast it for hours in his front yard waiting on him to wake up.
Finally, I’d hear the door open to his pitch black bedroom with the tin foil covered windows that no one dare enter if it was closed. He would come down the hallway bigger than life and sit in his chair. Aunt Ronnie would bring him his coffee as he fired up a Raleigh and turned on the CB base station and let all his fellow truckers know the “double eagle” was listening.
I would sit there watching cartoons waiting to hear him say “Jody (what my family called me) you want to go fishing? Oh yes sir!! Back then we didn’t say “ yea, naw, huh or what” to our elders. That would have gotten you an ass whoopin!
I would pace the floor waiting for him to finish his breakfast and fire up that 1976 double cab 454 Chevy. Man we were going fishing! We’d go to Sheldon Reservoir catch catfish. Uncle Aubrey would bring them home nail their heads to a tree in the backyard and skin them while Aunt Ronnie got the grease hot and cut up fries.
Aubrey took me on my first real hunting trip. We went to San Augustine and stayed at Genes cabin. Man, Uncle Gene must be rich I thought. He has a cabin in East Tx. and a trailer house in Houston.
We walked what seemed like 100 miles that day we saw one squirrel and Uncle Aubrey killed a rabbit, we toted around until we both got tired of carrying it.
“Jody” he yells out (as he pointed to a briar patch) did you see that white flag? I was thinking, if I was out here in those briars I’d surrender too! Turns out, he was referring to the way a Whitetail deer would raise his tail when spooked and run away. I said let’s go catch him. Jody he says, you’ve got a lot to learn about hunting and it all starts under “The Harvest Moon“.
I asked what the moon had to do with hunting? He says well Jody, back when we were young we would work all summer, doing odd jobs and whatever we could to make a little extra money, (Along with our regular chores). We needed it by squirrel shot, and buck shot. A double barrel 12 gauge was all we had to hunt with, no matter what we were hunting. Looking back I think some of the stories that Uncle Aubrey told me may have been tall tales. But that didn’t matter to me, I just loved listening to him talk and tell stories.
He said after the Harvest Moon, which typically happened first a week or so of October. The cat squirrels would be running wild in all the trees in East Texas. We would head down to the Tuplegum Slough, White Slash or the Blue Hole, find a big oak tree, rare back on it and sit still waiting for the cat squirrels. He said it wasn’t always a cat squirrel that we came home with, sometimes it was a rabbit or even a deer if we were lucky. He said we would have buckshot in one barrel and squirrel shot in the other, just in case!
Now that I’m might near 60 years old, I find myself thinking more about Uncle Aubrey and his brothers and their hunting tales, as we start sighting in our high-powered rifles getting our buggies tuned up ready for the woods.
Today our style of hunting is so much different from what they did. We shoot high powered rifles with scopes that will put a deer within arms reach and automatic shotguns for everything else. We sit in fancy box blinds elevated up to 20′ sometimes, some have heaters and TV’s. We also use trail cameras to see when and WHAT has been at our automatic feeders (With settings capeable of feeding up to 6 times a day). But, one thing we still have in common, our hunts start under the phase of “The Harvest Moon”.
Joe Meador
Spent over 20 years in the Petroleum Transport business before retiring in 2018 to start other adventures. He currently resides in a small Southeast Texas town enjoying the quiet life. When he isn’t working, he can be found in the woods hunting, or casting a fly in a mountain stream.
