Poaching and Parenting Don’t Mix
Boy, does anyone else miss all those political commercials, or is it just me? Kidding. Man, those ads are terrible, and many of them are not suitable for children. I kind of resent having to police the mute button on the remote control just so my eight-year-old doesn’t have to listen to the PG-13 political ad being run while we watch the Cowboys lose another football game. Sheesh… Yep, I like to think we all try to be good parents and do the best we can, but invariably, we all fall short. As a game warden, you get to see the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to parents and their kids in the outdoors. This week, we’ll skip the good and the ugly, and go straight to the bad.
In 1968, Game Warden Arthur Mc-Call was stationed in Real County. One night during deer season that year, he was parked by a windmill, about 100 yards off Highway 83, in an area where some of the local cowboys said they had been hearing gun shots at night. The spot allowed Arthur a nice view of the roadway, but as was typical back then, there was very little traffic late at night.
Around 11:00 p.m., a slow-moving vehicle came into Arthur’s view. The vehicle stopped in an area that was high fenced on both sides of the highway, so Arthur’s hopes weren’t high that there’d be something to shoot there.
He was wrong. Ka-BOOM. Arthur said that he “about lost his boots” at the surprise of it, but soon gathered himself and got down to the road. The vehicle drove off right after the shot, but it didn’t take long for Arthur to catch up and make a stop.
Two men were in the front seat of the car. Neither of them fessed up to shooting a deer, but one of them admitted to shooting a rifle from the roadway. That was all Arthur needed to make his case, but there was more to it than that. The “more to it” part made Arthur mad. A small child, the shooter’s son, was sleeping in the back seat of the car. Arthur decided a ticket wasn’t good enough for these guys; they were going to jail. But taking them to jail posed some logistical problems. The jail was in Leakey, and the child and his father lived 40 miles away in Uvalde. He’d have to find a way to get the boy home. The plan Arthur came up with falls squarely into the “things you could do then, but you can’t do now” category of law enforcement procedures. Arthur instructed them to follow him to the Real County Courthouse in Leakey. Once there, the driver was placed in one of two small jail cells. According to Arthur, “Back then, there was no one in that jail but the guy you put in there. There was no jailer, no night person, no phone, no nothing.”
Arthur then put the boy and the shooter in his patrol car and transported them to their home in Uvalde. Sometime well after midnight, the boy was successfully dropped off with his mother, and Arthur drove the shooter back to the jail in Leakey. When they arrived, the shooter was placed in the same cell as his partner, and they were left there until the Justice of the Peace could see them later that day.
Yep, I bet that was a rough night for those guys in that old jail cell with nobody else there. But whatever they endured there that night surely paled in comparison to what that ol’ boy who dropped his son off had to deal with when he got home. Indeed, poaching and parenting don’t mix.
