Personal Anecdotes

Steve told this story in his bird book. He was sixteen years old.

I finished my junior year of high school in May of 1965 at Schreiner, a military academy in Kerrville. A schoolmate, Sherman Baker III, “Tres,” of a third-generation family in Tamaulipas, had described the wilderness north of their ranch, El Pichón, and I was fascinated. I told him I wanted to ride through that country. He told me that if I showed up, he would provide the horse.

On the 9th of June I was at El Pichón. On the 10th I rode out of the north pasture on a sorrel gelding, with two changes of clothes and 30 tiny cans of 3-in-1 machine oil. Tres made that call. “Where you’re going,” he said, “this is better than money. One can will cover a night’s room and board for the two of you.” He gave me a map with the names of the ranchos from Pichón to Barra del Tordo and up to La Pesca. “After La Pesca,” he said, “sell the horse.”

In 1965 this part of Tamaulipas was a world with the dew still on it. Huge tropical hardwoods, canopy unbroken, small streams running clear, and even at noon the wildlife was moving. I doubt I will ever again see guan so close, red-billed pigeons so thick they left feathers when they scattered, yellow-headed parrots blasting out of nowhere, hundreds at a time, screeching so loudly my horse got jumpy.

At Barra del Tordo I found the village quiet and the sky darkening. Up ahead I saw the lights of the ice house, where they were loading a truck with live sea turtles, crates of turtle eggs, and grilled snapper, all of it covered in sawdust. I asked how to reach a fishing camp run by a woman named Julieta. A middle-aged lady beside me laughed and said, “Soy Julieta.” I asked if I could visit. She asked if the horse wanted to visit too, then smiled and said, “Vámonos, ya entrando el mar.” Let’s go, the tide is coming in.

She led the way across a tidal flat with a flashlight, weaving between beds of oysters, up to a camp in the lee of the dunes with the surf roaring just beyond. That night I had a meal I have never forgotten: snook a la plancha, oysters shucked that same day, vegetables from her own garden, and banana cream pie, all done on a wood-burning stove. When she ferried me across the river the next morning, she wouldn’t take my money. All she wanted, she said, was to know I got home safe.

For days I rode the beach through what I later learned were the Kemp’s Ridley sea-turtle nesting grounds. I ate turtle eggs at every meal. I was in a classic “edge,” where the beach, the prairie, and the chaparral all meet, and the animals were everywhere in the bright daylight: coatimundi, gray fox, badger, raccoon, coyote. The gray fox kits struggled through the grass while their parents barked at them to hurry up.

Five hot, dry days out of La Pesca I rode into a ranch where they were getting ready to harvest sorghum, and the white-winged doves were rising out of the fields by the thousands. A stern man of about forty reached out to shake my hand, a rancher, farmer, and church elder. Old Sorrel had found a home.

It was the 4th of July, 1965.

Steve and Les were friends for sixty years, from boyhood in Brownsville. Steve told this story at Les’s memorial.

This goes back to when Les was a junior at SMU, on that great swim team. It was Christmas, he’d come down to see his folks, and I’d come up from Mexico. He told me his friends from the swim team wanted to go riding horseback in Mexico over spring break. Well, all right. I had the horses.

Sure enough, they showed up, Les and four guys. In those days I kept horses at a little ejido south of San Fernando, on the edge of an arroyo coming out of the Sierra de Monserrate. Rough, beautiful country. We rode ranch to ranch, feeding the horses and saying hello to the ranchers, and at one old family’s place two things happened I’ve never forgotten.

First, there were twin daughters, maybe eight years old, dressed up in little green shirts and red cowboy boots, their hair up in French braids. Little dolls. We hadn’t been there twenty minutes before those two girls had Les by both hands, one on either side, chirping and cooing and showing him the whole ranch. They hadn’t known him twenty minutes. But that was Les. Little children want things steady and safe and dependable, and they saw that in him immediately.

Second, the ranch had a stacked-wood corral, ebony and mesquite, no wire, solid as a wall. We put my horses inside to feed. A norther had blown in, cool and perfect, and because the wind had been out of the north, all the migrating birds had fallen out, indigo buntings, black-and-white warblers, everywhere. Les was sitting up on top of the corral with those two little girls, and we were watching the horses eat. Everything was fine.

And then comes this little pig. Maybe thirty pounds. But this was no Wilbur from Charlotte’s Web, this was a thug pig, and she did not like my horses in what she considered her corral. She tore into them, getting underneath them, biting at their hocks, until it was out of control. I got mad, picked up a rock to scare her off, gave it a little too much altitude, and wouldn’t you know, I caught that pig right between the ears. Down she went, not moving.

Now I’m in trouble. Les stops smiling. Both little girls give me that scowl. You just killed Daddy’s pig. And I’m doing the math on what a pig, and all her future piglets, is going to cost me, and the conversation I’m going to have to have with their father. The only friends I had in that crowd were the horses, over against the wall going, hit it again, Stevie. Unfortunately, they weren’t going to be on the jury.

Then I hear that voice. When Les wanted to be emphatic with me, he always started with my name. “Steve.” What? “Pig’s not dead. Look at its rib cage.” And sure enough, a little rising and falling. That booger jumps up, shakes herself off, scowls at me, and I swear she turns to Les and those little girls and smiles, and trots off. And the two girls are looking up at Les like he resurrected that pig. He just turns to me and smiles. I thought, classic. I cannot out-good Les Hodgson. Ever since, I’ve quit trying.

What I remember most about that man, and I knew him sixty years, is that most of the time he was smiling. But that day, on that corral, with those two little girls, the smile he gave was beatific. I’ll never forget it.

I said this at his service, and I mean it: he was as tough as a coffin nail. And this too I want you to keep. I never saw that man do a low thing. I never saw that man say a low thing. And I was around him enough, in enough circumstances, that if it had been in him, I’d have seen it. We all know the pain he was in that last year. But what did you see? You saw him smiling. He carried it, and he kept quiet about it. God bless him. God bless all of you.