The stories in this book are the kind you might hear sitting on the porch past dark listening to distant hounds after a fox in the southeast Texas bottoms, tales with some truth and some lies and much pleasure take in the telling and the listening, tales with a strong sense of place and people, rooted firmly in the oral tradition.
Sure enough, there "ain't no such animal" as a completely honest man, as the title story shows. Other stories tell of justice as swift and sure as a mule's kick, of epic brawls and the trials of courtship, of poachers, politicians, and preachers, of hogs and...

In fact, all the stories in this collection are good uns. Bill Brett has a fine ear for the ways of speech and a sharp eye for the way of life of the forests and swamps of the southeastern region of Texas.
Some might say that the tone of many of these tales is more autobiographical than that of his earlier collection, There Ain t No Such Animal, and perhaps that s true, for in these stories he shows a keen understanding of what it was like for a boy growing up in the early decades of the twentieth century, passing into manhood, and accepting the responsibility that comes with...

Bill Brett's folk tale of life in the Big Thicket takes place in the years around the turn of the century. Brett heard the story from the old man who had lived it. He retells it as a captivating, earthy yarn that won the National Cowboy Hall of Fame's Western Heritage Award for folklore in 1978, when it first appeared in cloth edition.
The narrator, a young man hurt in an oilfield accident and down on his luck, runs out of money. When the opportunity presents itself, he steals a small herd of steers and a horse and sets out to drive them to a distant market. Suddenly his plans are halted...