Outdoors With Mat Taylor
A time for Thanksgiving and for remembrance

Former Soil Conservation Service employee and longtime writer Mat Taylor offers his outdoors column for Dispatch Record readers. He can be contacted at (254) 518-2262 or via e-mail at mntaylor@agristar.net.

It's a cold and windy Thanksgiving Day afternoon as I write this column and try to watch the Cowboys game at the same time.

My wife, Nelda, and son, Matthew, and I have just enjoyed a meal of turkey and dressing, gravy and assorted vegetables. I topped it off with a piece of pumpkin pie with whipped cream. I will have to take several long walks over the next few days to work off all the extra calories.

This is a time to give thanks, but it is also a day of Thanksgiving memories.

For 20 years or so, I hunted mule deer and whitetailed deer in West Texas. With my father, father-inlaw, brother, son and friends we hunted on the Jack Brown ranch south of Marfa, the Combs Cattle Co. ranch near Marathon, the Allison ranch south of Sheffield and the Shannon ranch east of Iraan.

The mule deer season in Texas has always opened the Saturday after Thanksgiving and then runs about two weeks. Therefore, almost every year, we spent Thanksgiving Day traveling to our deer lease. It was a good time to travel, as there was not much traffic.

We generally had our family Thanksgiving meal the day before or the prior weekend, and we always took leftovers with us in the ice chest. After arriving at the lease and setting up the tent, or in later years the camper, we built a big fire and ate another Thanksgiving meal in the late afternoon.

I would melt butter in a cast iron skillet over the fire and then heat a mixture of turkey, dressing and gravy until it was golden brown. No other Thanksgiving meal tasted so good as that reheated turkey and dressing, with a few ashes mixed in for flavor, cooked over the campfire and eaten as the sun went down over the desert hills. I can still taste those meals in my memory.

I haven't hunted desert mule deer in a number of years, but I enjoyed hunting those dry, rocky hills and canyons of far West Texas, walking through ocotillo, yucca, assorted kinds of cactus and cat claw. I always ended up with several scratches and cuts, but it was worth it.

Another memory of West Texas is the distinctive odor of creosote bush, especially after a rare rain.

I killed a nice buck almost every year, but I cannot always remember what deer was bagged on a specific year without looking at my photo album. My most distinctive memories, however, are of my family and friends sitting around the campfire after a long day of hunting, telling stories and solving all the world's problems.

Another Thanksgiving memory concerns fishing. Several years ago when we did not go hunting over the holiday weekend, my late father-in-law J.F. Strickland and I traveled all the way to deep South Texas to fish in Falcon Lake. That has always been my favorite place to fish.

The Thanksgiving weekend was an excellent time to fish Falcon, as the weather was pleasant, not too hot or cold, and we generally had the lake to ourselves. There were a number of snowbirds who spent the winter in RV parks near the lake, although most of the retirees did not fish except from the boat dock. The men usually sat on the dock and told war stories.

We caught a lot of fish on our trip to Falcon, a large lake that covers over 84,000 acres when full. It is located on the Rio Grande River near the small community of Zapata.

Several times we caught more than 200 fish in two days of fishing. The bag would include largemouth bass, white bass, crappie, catfish and Rio Grande perch. Of course, most of the fish were released, but we kept a few for a fish fry when we returned home.

At the present time, Texas' two border lakes on the Rio Grande -- Falcon and Amistad, 67,000 acres -- are experiencing a renewal of excellent fishing, especially largemouth bass. During the recent drought years, the lake fell to record levels, almost 40 feet low at Falcon.

After several wet years, the lakes refilled and covered acres and acres of new vegetation, and that created excellent habitat for bass and other species of fish. I have read reports of recent fishing tournaments held on the lake where it was not uncommon for a fisherman to catch 20 bass a day that weighed a total of more than 100 pounds.

Instead of going hunting, maybe it's time to go fishing.