Beaver Snatchin, Fish Catchin, and Hog Dispatchin (or lack thereof on all counts)

So there I was….minding my own business, when the phone rang. I answered it and listened to a guy tell me all about this problem he has with beavers. He asked if there was any way I could come solve his problem. I said I would be glad to, but it would cost him. So, seeing as how my wife is in town for the first time in about 4 months, I figured that if I was going to waste my evenings chasing beavers, I was going to get paid well for it. I wrote up a proposal – Which, by the way is very difficult to do without throwing in a few sexual innuendos here and there – that basically lets me make about $250 each time I go look for beavers. I’ll be darned if he didn’t agree to it. Now I go out to the dam place every evening and set my dam traps to wait on the dam beavers to come. After a week of no dam success, I set up a dam bow-stand so I could hunt the dam things after it got dam dark. The first night I sent two 3” 000 buck shots right into the side of one of the dam beavers. I’ll be dammed if it didn’t slide into the dam water and get away. This is a dam on-going story, and I’ll give ya’ll a dam conclusion when I get one.

As for the fish catchin, it was SLOW. We brought home a few eating fish, but the final tally was something like this:

6 flounders, 5 trout, 7 redfish, 3 sheepshead, 5 black drum, untold numbers of shrimp, mullet, croaker, and menhaden, 4 crabs, 2 hard heads, 1 alligator gar, and 3 gizzard shad.

It may sound like a lot, but spread that over about 28 hours of two people kayaking and fishing in the hot sun and 20-30 mph wind, and it’s not all that glorious. To make a long story short, we fished the mouth of the San Bernard on Friday, East Matty on Saturday, and West Matty of Sunday. Sorry, no pictures. Nothing really worth seeing.

We finally threw in the towel on Sunday afternoon and called a guy that runs hog dogs. Since I had no hogging clothes, I went to wal mart and bought me a set of Dickies coveralls. I looked GOOOOOOOD!!!!! Anyway, we headed out to the farm and loaded up the dogs and proceeded to drive/walk every single rice/corn/milo/soy bean farm in all of Matagorda county. We haven’t come across a hog to yet. I didn’t think that was possible, but it happened. The only two ghosts we let out were a possum that the lead catch dog got pissed at, and a snake that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Maybe the next adventure will hold some glorious story, but until then, I’ll keep my hooks pointy, my gun oiled, and my knife sharp.