I’m riding shotgun in his battle-tested Chevy Suburban, an actual shotgun rubbing against my left leg, when Bob Sanders tells me that it was water that drew him to this land—1,100 acres along 2.6 miles of the Big Cypress Bayou, near the Louisiana border. He moved here three decades ago with his wife, Kimmie, and their young son Dustin, guided by an understanding, commonly held among cattlemen, that if you wanted to run a herd, you needed to find water. “In my younger days, ranching was just an excuse to ride a horse,” he says. These days, ranching this land is his livelihood. Because of its river frontage and 75-acre oxbow lake, you’d be hard-pressed to find a wetter patch in Texas.

Looking out the windshield past spent .22 casings on the dash, we can see cattle egrets wandering among a s

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