https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Wagon_Train_raid
It was here that Great Grandpa Samuel David Stegall (also a Southerner, and the descendant of slaveowners in Tennessee) retreated near the turn of the last century, married Emma Guinn, raised a family, grew some crops, wrote Methodist hymns using shaped notes, brought in the first oil well in Young County (which still provides $64 a quarter to the family fortune) and lived 'til he died. The current house, built in 1905, has been re-imagined through the past 110 years, remains a family gathering spot, and is, in fact, what I consider "home". I've never lived there, but have pored over her hills and creeks and dunes and gullies, man and boy, for my whole life. I plan to retire here, and eventually, be buried in the cemetery in Loving.
On this patch of land, I harvested my first dove, quail, and deer. I have avoided snakebites by inches. I have fought fires, dodged floods, gotten stuck, and have alternately frozen and broiled under the extremes of North Texas seasons. I and my multitude of dogs have been squirted by skunks, stung by scorpions, and blundered in to beehives and wasp nests. I have celebrated holidays and birthdays and Independence Days. My dear, dear friend died here. I courted my wife here, and eventually married off our
daughter here. All of our registered dogs, since I was a boy, are "Flint Creek So and So", as in Casey, Gonzo, Kelly, Orvis, Nick, Jake, Disney, Libby, New Libby, and on down the line to Bentley, our current mutt-in-charge. This is home, if anywhere is.
There is a body of water at my home, located on a ridge high on our property, part of the Flint Creek/Salt Fork drainage. My Uncle Allen paid $800 to have her dug, back in the Seventies. She was originally 18 feet deep, and occupied a third of an acre. In spite of horrible droughts, I've never seen her go dry. Gerald put a hundred channel cat fry in back in the eighties, and I have put a few bass from Lake Graham and PK into her over the years. John, who always sat under the pole to shoot doves, once witnessed a giant whiskered maw rise from her depths to ingest a floating decapitated dove head one hot September day and returned with a rod, a bobber, and a hook baited with worms from the cow pasture. He was rewarded with a six pound channel cat. That fish remains, to my knowledge, the record for this body of water. When Whitney was a toddler, I took her up to the tank in the pickup, and she and I caught dozens of stunted sunfish. She baptized them with her trusty water gun, called them "Glitterfish", and we set them free.
So, anyway, I rode up to the tank this morning, carrying a pink ribbon festooned TFO four weight fly rod and a box with just a few bugs picked for this water. When I got to the tank, I saw that there was no tippet on the line, just a three foot butt section of thirty pound line. Undeterred, I knotted on a popper, and flung it around for a while. One stunted sunfish couldn't resist it, and came to hand. Nobody else seemed to be interested.
If I had to pick one fly, anywhere, for any species, it would be an olive weighted woolly bugger. Since I just happened to have one, I clinched it on, and heaved it out past the weed line, just in the shade of a mesquite tree. On the first cast, a channel cat of two, maybe three pounds, found my offering irresistible, inhaled the little nymph, and gave me a right good tussle for the next two minutes or so. I took a hasty cell-phone pic, and let Mr. Catfish return to his muddy, weedy, home. 
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