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Meat
At bottom human existence is and ever has been quite gory, even if you leave out wars and feuds and duels and murders and other forms of intra-species violence. The main shed blood has been that of...
View ArticleThe World to Wine
The old yearning toward physical self-sufficiency for families and clans runs strong in uncertain times. It is stoutest in the country if only because more self-sufficiency is feasible on dirt than on...
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Ol’ Blue
One cool, still Friday night last March, when the bitterest winter in decades was starting to slack its grip and the first few chuck-will’s-widows were whistling tentative claims to nest territories,...
View ArticlePoultry in Motion
As an aficionado of country how-to-do-it books, I possess several volumes with titles like The Home Chicken Flock, Starting Right with Poultry, and Chickens for Fun and Profit. As their names indicate,...
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The Loser
This story is from Texas Monthly’s archives. We have left the text as it was originally published to maintain a clear historical record. Read more here about our archive digitization project. It was...
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The Chew Road to Knowledge
While chewing tobacco has never to my knowledge been thought very socially suave, in our part of the world it is only during the past forty years or so that it has come to be viewed with much...
View ArticleAll That Litters
Illustrated by Tom Curry.When a personal habit or attitude starts showing up with fair regularity in your dreams, I suppose you have to consider it ingrained for better or worse. Not long ago, after a...
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Going Under
This story is from Texas Monthly’s archives. We have left the text as it was originally published to maintain a clear historical record. Read more here about our archive digitization project. I’d made...
View ArticleLord of the Flies
Those of us who love angling well enough to feel, as the angler Tolstoy put it, proud of being able to care for such a stupid occupation are not necessarily much like one another. Not only are there...
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Drinking
Maybe there exists somewhere a satisfying historical account of ethyl alcohol in relation to human beings, but if so I haven’t seen it, and I’ve read a few attempts. My interest in the subject, I’d...
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Big River
This story is from Texas Monthly’s archives. We have left the text as it was originally published to maintain a clear historical record. Read more here about our archive digitization project. While...
View ArticleMy Favorite Place
James A. Michener The Unlikely Paradise of PresidioI am convinced that whoever surveyed West Texas in the early days marked off some of the longest miles in the world, just to get the job done in a...
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Great Guns
I AM NOT A MEMBER OF THE National Rifle Association, nor do I collect rare firearms, attend gun shows, or subscribe to gun magazines. I am not, in other words, a “gun nut” and, in fact, can sympathize...
View ArticlePaw Prints
ONE THING AMONG MANY THAT I LIKE ABOUT KEITH CARTER’S superb dog photographs, potent and funny and sad, always loving and wise, is that they are mainly concerned with reasonably full-sized dogs, which...
View ArticleThe Old Country
DURING MOST OF MY LIFE I have cherished the Hill Country, as have large numbers of my fellow Texans. It is a swath of rumpled terrain whose eastern and southern edge sweeps in an arc some two hundred...
View ArticleCoping
“The hell with it,” said the seventeenth-century specialist. “I spent nine years working on a PhD and fifteen years making full professor and here I am shoveling rocks out of a ditch. I’m moving back...
View ArticleGood as Gold
The last really obsessed treasure hunter in our area died two or three years ago at a reasonably advanced age, never having found any of what he was looking for as far as I have heard but having...
View ArticleGoats Need Love, Too.
Graves manages to get by in the country despite a little help from his friend. William D. WittliffGoats probably matter a lot to more people in the world than Texans do, but in general Texans...
View ArticleOf Bees and Men
Illustrated by Tom BallengerPeople who have had occasion to know honeybees tend to have strong feelings about them, though such occasions are growing rarer in a mainly urban world. As often as not, the...
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