“Trophy hunters are like politicians, they both like to pull the trigger from the comfort of a safe distance.” - J. Bartell, The 231 Club: My Ten Year Journey From Therapist to CIA Courier and Sanctioned Kills - A True Story

“I think I saw some huge trout in the creek the other day!” My buddy Bill blurted loudly. Bill was known to get excited about fishing in general, but trout was a new thing for Bill.

“Pure unadulterated BS Bill, you’ve never seen a trout in your life! Especially a trout in North Chickamauga Creek!” I quietly shot back.

I’d been trout fishing a time or two on the Tellico, and Big Creek, up by Big Frog Mountain, and I considered myself somewhat of an expert at this point, in just about all things trout like.

Forget the fact that I’d never actually seen a trout longer than12 inches, or had ever netted one longer than a stretched 10 inches. Corn and salmon egg fed at that.

But I knew #$%^ good and well that that there were no trout in our little languid nearby creek.

This area of the lengthy old creek was chock full of many legends though. Old Dragging Canoe haunted this area. There were tales of five foot long Muskies around the Lower Mill before the damn was blown out, years before the lakes were backed up by TVA. Old Timers referred to Muskies as trout. The old mill survived, but we’d never seen Muskies in modern times. We wrote these stories off to just another old time tale, spun to keep a bunch of kids dreaming of glory.

Upstream of the mill a short way, accessible from Boy Scout Road, was a good sized garbage dump compliments of a local garbage pick-up service and uninformed, or highly compensated, County Commissioners. At least it was downstream of Hixson’s water supply further upstream at Cave Springs.

The dump was a pretty decent place to practice the fine art of rat shooting with 22s after dark. There were a plethora of rats and mangy cats to hone one’s off season skills with a trusty squirrel rifle. Creek pollution was not discussed as far as I can remember, and Musky preservation was an even more remote concept.

Then there was the Old Mason who told us that he was living in the last house on an old abandoned county road. He teased us with the myriad of secrets the Masons had instilled in him over the years. The secret sign he would use if his truck broke down on some strange road, and he needed assistance from a passing fellow Mason. He never actually told us what the secret sign was, or how to make it. It was just something that every good Mason was taught to remember. We always suspected he was some full of crap, old broken down, and limping, retired brick layer.

But the old man, who lived at the end of the old abandoned county wagon track, that led to a ford in the creek, that once joined Old Hixson Pike, also told another legendary tale.

“My mother, God rest her soul, sent me out to pick a mess of blackberries for a big cobbler. Lord, how that woman could bake a fine cobbler. Well, the best patch was down in Max Hartman’s sand pits down there deep in the creek bottoms, beyond his big corn field.”

“Well, boys I drenched my overhaul legs in coal oil to keep the chiggers off, and in no time flat, I had two big lard buckets full of the finest berries you ever saw. I headed back to the house here about dark, and for some strange reason I got the uneasy kind of feeling I was being followed. I’d stop and listen, and every time I did, whatever was following me through the big old pin oaks, would stop too.”

“So when I got to the edge of that big corn field, I spun around right quick, and right behind me stood a huge black panther, it’s tail just a twitching. Hit let out a terrible scream and growled long and loud like I never heard before. I dropped them buckets, and tore out through that corn like a house-a-fire. Well, I come to a big, high bob war fence, and I sailed over it like old Jesse Owens himself. But, my tennis shoe got hung in the top strand, and down I went in a heap! The shoe finally popped off, still stuck in the wire, and I ran all the way back to safety with only one shoe. By the time I got to the house, that bare foot looked like day old dog meat. I was bleeding like a stuck hog,”

“My mother wrapped up my foot trying to stop the bleeding as best she could, and then she told me to go back and get them berries and my shoe.” She handed me her pistol and said, “Now you get back and get that shoe son, and bring me them berries back. Now go on!”

“Well, boys I want you to know, that was the only time I ever balked on my mother!” I said, “Hell no! I aint never going back down there ever again!” And I didn’t.

My daddy had to go down there in the dark with a lantern and get that old shoe and them buckets of berries. When he finally come back, he said there were big cat tracks all around them buckets!”

“Them Mason’s got some secret sign for telling your Momma, Hell no! I ain’t gonna do it?” Bill was a keen student of BS. The old man, with the bad limp, was kin to him somehow or another.

Bill continued rather suspiciously, “When exactly did this happen?”

The old Mason thought for a long while, “Well let me study on that. I recon it’d been about ’53 or maybe ’54, best I can recollect it.”

The other major environmental disaster on this particular stretch of creek, was a place of local commerce the locals referred to simply as the slaughter house. Cows, pigs and the occasional deer terminated life there, finalizing a short journey as table fare.

The concrete killing floor drained into a pipe, and the pipe drained into a sluice, which in turn cascaded ten to twelve feet into a swift, spring fed pool that drained into the main creek.

The pool was crystal clear, tree lined, sandy and about 30 feet in diameter, and 15 feet or so deep. Lining the bottom the pool were small bits of pig and cow parts in various stages of cold decay. Bovine and Porcine scraps, small and slimy enough to elude the killing floor drain.

Occasionally the pool would turn a strange shade of milky red when times were booming inside the slaughter house.

It was this odd red tide that excited the secretive trout. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I’d sworn Bill was as big a liar as his crippled old Mason loving relative.

But there it was, the guy inside hosed down some bloody dead farm animal, the red mixture shot out of the sluice, cascading like some weird waterfall, into the clear pool, and just like some dreamy apparition, trout as long as your leg materialized out of the bushes, as if by pure magic.

It was every bit as fantastical as Muskies, black panthers, secret handshakes, or the ghost of Dragging Canoe. My mind was uncontrollably racing with this bloody new discovery.

Bill kept saying excitedly, over and over, “I told you so! I told you so! I told you there were trout in this here creek! How we gonna catch ‘em?”

“First off Bill, you’re sworn to secrecy. You tell anybody about this, and overnight, every clown and Bozo in this county, who thinks he’s a trout fisherman, will be here with frog gigs and treble hooks. Did you see the size of that big one? Those fish are all wall hangers Bill, verifiable trophy wall hangers! Top secret Bill. You got to promise me you’ll keep that fat mouth shut.” I didn’t know what else to say in my badly confused and stunned condition.

We raced home on bicycles to get our trout fishing paraphenalia in order for the next day assault on “Blood Pool.”

Fishing this hole was extremely difficult. It truly was a hole. You had to cast down into it from about 10 feet above the sluice. The trout could see your every move when the water was clear as glass, when it wasn’t suddenly turned a blood red. The giant carp didn’t seem to mind as they vacuumed up bits of pig guts and snouts. These giant bottom suckers were all some strange hew of black and they were all world class in size. Sluggish, but well fed. We figured that cow and pig guts caused their color change.

The big trout had that glorious rainbow like stripe that was almost neon in intensity. We figured the pig blood did that also. It was an incredibly mesmerizing display to witness.

Day after day we peddled to this blood soaked spring hole. We threw everything we had at the huge fish. The more we tried, the more we educated the blood thirsty trophies. Frustrated, we consulted with experts. Max’s Bait and Tackle on Access Road was our nearest expert on all things trout.

“Max, what you got for trophy trout?” We pleaded.

“Where in the hell did you find any trout around here?” Max scowled quite dismissively.

We lied, “Just tell us what works Max, and we’ll pay good money for it!”

We left Max with a sizable sum of disposable income in exchange for a small bag of Tellico nymphs, gold and silver number 7 Indiana spinners, some assorted Royal Coachmen, and a muddler minnow or two, but little or no understanding, on how to effectively present such oddities to trophy rainbows.

Nothing worked. To this day I bet if you look really close, you’ll still likely find trees around that spring festooned with hardware from Max’s Bait and Tackle. It seemed like a wise investment at the time. Stock in ENRON and Edsel comes to mind.

In a fit of blinding genius that so often inflicts trophy hunters after a frustrating day of fish watching instead of fish catching, I stumbled into the slaughter house with a small Mason jar in hand. The guy in the blood soaked apron and the belt full of greasy sharp knives peered down at me through dense smoke wafting from an almost done nickel cigar.

“What in the @#$% do you want with a jar full of pigs blood kid?” The incredibly menacing meat merchant demanded with a scowl.

I lied, “Well sir, I got this friend, and he’s right sick for a while now, and has some trouble gettin’ out an all, and he ain’t got much, and he says he’s been craving some fresh fish cakes. And so he asked me to bring him some fresh carp, and well, he claims soaking a dough ball in pig blood is deadly on these carp in this here creek. You wouldn’t mind sparing a little pig blood for a sick friend would you?”

The meat cutter in the blood and grease and hair covered rubber boots slowly removed what was left of his cigar, a good deal of the slimy wrapper still stuck to his curling lips, and he very slowly looked me dead in both eyes and growled, “Boy, if I hear you took this here blood to school for some mischief, or made some kind of trouble with it, I’ll hunt you down and I’ll gut you like a deer! You hear me boy? You got that picture in your pea sized little brain boy?”

I didn’t lie this time. I took one long hard look at the holstered greasy knives on the meat man’s nasty leather belt and solemnly vowed, “Yes sir, I got that picture loud and clear sir. Loud and clear!”

I’m here to tell you all, that blood did the trick. Problem was, we broke the six-pound test on 20 pound carp so many times we had to by new line before we figured out how to keep the magic new trout bait away from the once lethargic hungry carp.

Back then, if you accomplished something you thought might be considered news worthy, all you had to do was call the two ten cent daily newspapers in town, the Chattanooga Times, or the News Free Press news desk, and they’d immediately dispatch a photographer/reporter.

My Old Man was of the opinion that the Chattanooga Times, a morning paper, was yesterday’s news every morning, so he didn’t much care for that. The Free Press, being an afternoon paper, was today’s news today, in his estimation. The Old Man would have loved You Tube.

I don’t recollect which particular daily paper actually published the glowing picture of the big fish on their sports page. The big glossy is probably somewhere in the family photo collection, in some dusty old shirt box, on some hidden shelf, in some old dark closet somewhere.

The caption under the photo read, “Hixson track star hauls massive trophy 3 pounder trout out of Chickamauga Creek while fishing for carp with dough balls!”

I lied. I was never much of a track star, and I refused to specify which Chickamauga Creek, either north, or south, the fish had been hauled out of. Sometimes, on very rare occasions, it’s imperative for a young aspiring trophy fisherman to let a bald faced lie loose when preservation of the specie, and the long term good of the pristine environment, is actually called for.

I guess you could go to the Times and News Free Press archives, if such a thing still exists, and search for that sports page photo. There’s this smiling proud kid, in a Hixson jersey, sporting a burr hair cut, high and tight like the Old Man required before the Beetles era arrived, holding a trophy fish, looking all the world like some legendary African big game hunter.

I spent every penny I had to have Mr. Mills on Signal Mountain stuff that fish at the incredible price of $3.00 an inch. This investment quickly transpired after my mother refused to cook the thing. Her culinary denial was due to my very vivid description of the meat cutters cigar, bloody rubber apron, and that belt full of greasy, long knives.

Years later I gave Bill the stuffed wall hanger and apologized for calling him a trout liar. He went on to become a revival tent preacher, nearly starving to death one lonely winter in North Florida, and later commenced a career as a prominent painter of houses on Sand Mountain, I think it was down around Lick Skillet, or maybe it was Dog Town. I often wondered if Bill knew if there were trout hiding somewhere in the creeks draining that part of the great state of Alabama.

The slaughter house went under due to Hixson subdivision sprawl. The dam at the Lower Mill was never rebuilt. Max Hartman quit the corn field and the sand pits. The extensive mountain of Hixson garbage was closed after a big spring flood redistributed it all the way down to Chattanooga where it belonged in the first place. Eye witnesses reported seeing rats clinging tor their lives to Golden Gallon milk jugs, like white water rafters in the Grand Canyon. To the best of my knowledge the Musky never returned, and I guess the big black panther didn’t stick around, likely moving up river to the mountain gorge, or maybe Sequatchie Valley.

The old berry picking Mason, with the bad limp, at the end of the abandoned county road, has passed, with all his secrets intact. The springs are still there but I figure we captured most all of the trout in that stretch of creek soon after the slaughter house blood was all diluted.

But maybe I’m probably lying. Good Luck to all you young and ambitious trophy hunters!

By the way, I’m not sure where one can obtain a mason jar full of pig blood in Hixson these days.

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