Alligators lurk in its backwater sloughs. Snakes – lots of snakes – writhe across its waters. They sun in the branches of hardwood trees, and, so the old-timers warn, they sometimes fall from low, hanging limbs, onto the laps of unsuspecting fishermen.

People die there, and bodies are dumped there. Every two or three years, one sheriff told me, his deputies pull a soggy corpse from some out-of-the-way crossing. Texans are taught to revere the Rio Grande, and they vacation beside the cool, clear waters of the Guadalupe. But around the Sabine, it seems, they tend to keep their distance." -- Wes Ferguson, author of Life on the Sabine River