THE CATS OF THE BRAZOS
by Bob Hood for A.C.A.T.S. Catfish Now
If you ever have awakened from a sleeping bag on the banks of a remote river and wondered just how many fish already were on the move in the quiet waters beside you, then you would fall in love with the Brozos River. Even after a generous rain, the swift flow of water down the Brazos in West Texas seems to move quietly and gently, not in a torrid rush like so many other rivers it's size.
The Brazos does not begin as just one giant river. It is formed by three forks known as the Clear Fork, Salt Fork and Double Mountain, with each fork beginning only as small ditches or drainages in far Northwest Texas. The three forks basically flow eastward at first, making many turns to the south and north as they wind their way to a final junction west of Graham in Young County where they become one long arm that winds its way southward through the heart of Texas all the way to its coast.
One morning not long ago, I awoke from my small one-man tent on the banks of the Clear Fork in Shackelford County. Heavy rains that fell three days earlier had put the river on the move. At the yawn of dawn, I stepped from the tent onto ground, damp with heavy dew. I stood there for a few minutes to take in my surroundings. Everything was so quiet, even the river flowed smoothly without the sound of a ripple going over the shallow rocks. A red-tailed hawk left its perch on a huge, dead pecan tree and glided noiselessly across the river to another tree. A fish rolled at the surface in the darkness of a small inlet but I wouldn't have known it if I hadn't been looking that way. The silence was almost deafening.
Soon, however, the river and its surroundings came alive. Two, maybe three gobblers sounded off from their roosts upstream. Cardinals began to chirp as they hopped from branch to branch and a squirrel scampered up a nearby tree and began chattering. If I had been hunting, I would have thrown a rock at that tattling little rascal because he was letting the whole world know I was there.
Well, not the whole world. Not the catfish in the Brazos. No, they were more concerned about finding something to eat in the moving current than they were with anything moving about in the woods away from the river. As I walked over to my 12-foot, flat-bottom boat to get my fishing gear, I looked up-river just in time to see the turkeys fly from their roost.
Now that's where I need to be, I remember thinking to myself, right under that turkey roost. Turkeys, you see, like to roost in bends of creeks and rivers and that's exactly where those gobblers had roosted and any catfish fisherman knows that a bend in a river usually is a good place to catch ol' whiskers, too.
Before sliding my boat from the bank, I waded out into about four feet of water and tied two-drop (limb) lines to overhanging willow branches. On an earlier, 32-day canoe excursion down the Clear Fork, I had used limb lines baited with the livers and hearts of squirrels and bullfrogs I bagged along the way, but this morning I baited them with frozen shrimp I had bought at a store on the way to the river.
On the canoe trip, catching catfish was the sole responsibility of my drop lines, but today they were hung from the willows as extra backups for my rod and reel. After baiting the lines, I used a short paddle to scull my boat across the river and then down the bank to where the turkeys had roosted. I tied the boat off to a boulder that was lodged in the river a few feet from the deep hole.
The Clear Fork of the Brazos does not have a lot of deep holes in it. So finding one at least 10 to 15 feet deep was a treat. Most of the time, the river runs across water only inches to five or six feet deep, fluctuating with the amount of rainfall the generally dry area receives. I baited one rod with another piece of shrimp and made a cast toward the dirt embankment, letting the shrimp fall to the bottom before taking out some of the slack line.
