Slough is a term you don’t hear much about in New Mexico….They don’t have them to my knowledge….Back in the southeast you have a bunch..That is a small area of water cut off from the main stream except for during flood stage. They are always full of fish…And you fellows in Alabama and Mississippi know all about them. In one of the Chapters of  one of my books I talked about us cousins mudding a slough. This is a true story from this fiction writer and worth repeating I think. There were several sloughs close to Coal Fire, AL on Coal Fire Creek and one looked ready to be muddied. We made our paddles for raking the mud and paddles for slapping out the sick fish. I think we may have had several Uncles with us. Anyway, we got the slough all muddied up and the  fish started coming to the top.   The Uncles were chasing the fish around and slapping the fish from the water and us cousins were running around gathering them up. One of us cousins, I won’t call any names, always wanted to be first. They slapped out this dang jack. and you know the old jack has around 35,000 sharp teeth (now that may be fiction) and Cousin picked him up but somehow he got his thumb in that jack’s mouth….Big mistake….That boy almost lost a thumb…..I guess to jack’s,  fingers and thumbs look a lot like worms…..Seems to me like it took a long time for that thumb to heal….And it took a long time for the rest of us cousins to pick up a dang old jack, I can tell you that…