A gruesome discovery

Alton Jones finds a bug buck and a skeleton in south Texas.

The Jones family had a great Christmas, we just spent time in Dallas with family. It was very relaxing and not at all like what happened a few days ago.

Before I get into that, though, I have to congratulate the Baylor Bears on their win over Washington last night, it was a terrific game. Being a Baylor fan can be rough, but now it’s not so bad. Why? Baylor has not lost a game of any sort since October.

OK then. I’m down in South Texas at La Perla Ranch at the moment filming a hunting show for The Bucks of Tecomate, as well as fishing Falcon Lake. As we hunted yesterday, we found a really nice 12-point buck that I’m going to try to shoot this afternoon. I’ve been working on patterning that deer because we couldn’t get within 350 yards of him, and that’s a bit far for an on-camera shot. Hopefully we’ll get on him if we move a blind or two.

I’m hunting with Dr. Gary Schwartz, the inventor of food plots. He was the first guy to come up with food plots, so he knows a thing or two about deer. What he’s teaching me is that deer are a whole lot like bass. He takes his deer stuff to the level that I do bass. Hunting with him will make me a lot more efficient at hunting and less haphazard.

This morning we covered a lot of land, staying in spots for a few minutes then moving on. We shot a “practice buck” this morning, an old 8-pointer that he wanted to cull from the herd. We’ve been fishing too, which was great, but all the fun was overshadowed by a terrible discovery on Falcon.

I was fishing with my good friends Bryan Carter and Jerry Nye on Wednesday. We were up the river on the Mexican side, flipping logs down the bank. All of a sudden Bryan went “Huh!” That wasn’t a noise I expected him to make at that moment, so I inquired as to what he saw. He explained that at first glance, some trash on the bank looked like a skull and ribcage. Figuring it was a pile of trash – which there’s lots of on Falcon’s Mexican shores – Jerry and I took a look. Sure enough, we started to see it come together. We got closer and saw a pelvis, two leg bones, arm bones, and within 15 seconds it was obvious what we were looking at. It was sort of surreal for a moment. It was 3 feet from the water, so I trolled over, staying in the boat, and looked closer. Then it hit home that yes, it was the remains of a human. Its feet were tied together, and it had rags of mud-caked clothes draped about it. There was no flesh, so it had been there for a while.

The first thing that came to my mind was David Hartley, the man who was reported to have been shot by a Mexican gang a while back. Of course, we took a photo, GPS coordinates and forwarded that information to the Border Patrol. I kind of hope it’s Hartley, because that would bring some closure to the case, the Hartley family and the area.

The eerie part was that it looked like there was a hole in the back of the skull, but to say any more would be speculation.

To say that put a damper on the day is an understatement.

However, with all that excitement, I’ll be down at Falcon for a bit longer trying to get back in the fishing groove. It’s getting to the point where the Bassmaster Classic is the first thing I think about in the morning and the last thing I think about before I go to sleep at night.