Defective Dove Hunting

Dennis Whiteside shows the big bass he caught on on his birthday, before releasing it.

 Three doves winged in over the sunflower field where Rich and I were hidden amongst the stalks. I fired twice and they just kept going. At that time I had shot 8 shells without dropping a bird.

“Looks like I would get lucky just once,” I muttered.

“Maybe your best chance would be a dove that is just UN-lucky…” Rich thought to himself. I knew what he was thinking. He didn’t have to say it!

For one thing, those 20-gauge shells were bought on sale about ten years ago. Old shells lose their power. I am sure of that, though it hasn’t been proven. And for another thing, I had a defective shotgun.

My old friend Rich Abdoler had owned it since his boyhood, one of two model-50 Winchester automatics, and he knew I wanted one of those badly, so he sold me the one he least wanted. I figure he knew something about the guns inability to shoot straight, and took advantage of me. I am thinking about legal action, partly because the shotgun has a bound up poly-choke, one of those bulging chokes on the end of the barrel that you twist to adjust, from open to fully choked. It was stuck on full choke that evening, and the last thing you want while hunting doves is a full-choke barrel, and you couldn’t adjust it with a four-foot pipe wrench.

So you can understand why, by the time the evening was over, a top-flight experienced shotgunner like me had only killed two doves with 12 or 14 shells.

And honestly, one time I killed ten doves with ten shells, a long time ago when I was younger and not under so much pressure and had a really good shotgun.

So you shouldn’t be thinking I am just a lousy shot.

    I did have a pretty good dove dinner, if there is such a thing. Rich killed 8 doves that evening and gave me his. He was using a twelve gauge, because he was out of twenty gauge shells, having shot all he had the evening before at that very spot, taking a limit before sunset. So the doves I shot at were extremely wary, unlike the easy ones he had found the day before.

    I may never shoot that poorly again, and I doubt that I ever have before, and while it is extremely embarrassing for a grizzled old outdoorsman like me to admit to such an evening, you can see how journalistic integrity would compel me to report the bad outings with the good. I have always felt that honesty is the best policy when there is a witness.
  
You see some strange things when you are outdoors. That evening Rich and I watched three different doves light on standing sunflower stalks and peck away at the seed heads. Neither of us had ever seen that before. Doves are not known to perch and feed, as other birds do. They are ground feeders, and you have to have grain on the ground in fairly open areas to attract them. We saw three of them break the rules. But then again, I have spent enough time outdoors to not be surprised at anything I see. You can never say ‘never’ or ‘always’ about wild creatures.

Wildlife that doesn’t adapt at all seems to have trouble surviving in the changing outdoorsmen have created.

    My friend Rich Abdoler has been a Corps of Engineers Ranger on Truman Lake for many, many years, and he says this year there were seven fatalities on the lake. One of them was a man who died in an ATV accident. He says that the biggest resource problem they have on the 115,000 acres of public land around the lake relates to the illegal use of ATV’s, and the erosion and disturbance it creates. Men are becoming too lazy and overweight to walk, and ATV’s are the answer for a modern-day generation that wants to enjoy the outdoors without any effort. But you are nothing close to a hunter or an outdoorsman if you spend your time in the woods on the seat a motorized vehicle. Every year, there are thousands of people who die or are seriously injured on ATV’s. And you can never really see the woods as it is on one of those. But then again, there is a difference in being a hunter and a shooter. Today’s generation is losing track of the difference.

On that 108-degree day we had back in the early part of August, I floated the river with writer Jim Spencer and his wife Jill Easton. I wrote about that trip and mentioned that a very large bass had made a pass at my buzz-bait that day right near my boat. The bass was close, and I saw his tail as he rolled across the surface. So as it happens, I was on the river last week with my good friend Dennis Whiteside, paddling him down the river on his birthday. When we neared that spot, I told him about the big bass I had missed and eased him to within casting distance of that spot, where some big snags and a log rested in deep shaded water. I’ll be darn if he didn’t cast a white buzz-spin in to the exact spot and that big bass nailed it. He fought him awhile and landed him, we took photos of it and released it. It was a real beauty, and I will never pass that spot again without fishing it well. That big bass will get even bigger! You can see a picture of it on my website, that address given at the end of my column.

On Friday and Saturday afternoon, September 23 and 24, Sondra Matlock Gray and I will be at the Hammons Walnut Festival at Stockton Missouri handing out free copies of the outdoor magazine we produce. It is quite an event; if you have never been there you should come and see it. Then our big outdoorsman’s swap meet will be on October 22, at Bull Shoals State Park in north Arkansas, and it is in conjunction with an annual event they have known as the Dutch Oven Cooking Competition. Last year we drew about 1500 people to our swap meet, but they expect 2000 people to come to that Dutch Oven meeting, so we may have a big crowd. If you have outdoor items or gear to sell, you should attend this as a “vendor”. You can reserve space close to where I will be building my wooden johnboat, just by contacting Tabitha Stockdale at the Bull Shoals Visitor Center, phone 870-445-3629. Or you can e-mail her at tabitha.stockdale@arkansas.gov. Do that early so that all the spaces won’t be reserved already.

    If you want more information, you can write me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613 or e-mail me at lightninridge@windstream.net. You can see recent photos from our Canada trip, or that big bass from last week’s trip, on my website, www.larrydablemontoutdoors. blogspot.com





  

  

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High Heat and Tall Tales

Jim Spencer shows off an excellent smallmouth! Photo by Jill Easton

Summer rivers often require pulling a canoe. Photo by Jill Easton

The heat didn’t ruin the beauty of the river in summer, and if you tried to stay in the shade, it wasn’t so bad. About mid-afternoon, it was 108 degrees, and I’m sure I have never been on the water fishing anywhere when it was that hot.

The fish weren’t tearing it up. I think most of them were reacting to the effect of warming water, and perhaps seeking deeper places to stay cool, wishing they had a cold watermelon! Fish love cold watermelon on a hot day.

Nonetheless, Jim was casting a small spinner-type lure he normally uses for trout, and he hooked into two or three hard-fighting smallmouth which were getting up close to two pounds. He’d land the fish, then release them quickly so they wouldn’t die of heat stroke.

Every now and then we’d beach my 19-foot square-sterned canoe on a gravel bar where there was a nice, cool, deep current and a chance to catch a fish, and we would wade out up to our armpits and cast to the other side. It didn’t work, for some reason; maybe the fish could smell us. In heat like that you sweat a lot, even in the water. I think maybe, in that river, we had an easier time of it that day than other folks in the Ozarks.

As I mentioned in my last column, outdoor writer and book author Jim Spencer and his wife Jill Easton, also an outdoor writer, spent a couple of days at my place last week when the heat was so awful. They were on their way to a trapper’s convention, as Jim still traps on the lower White River and has written a book on trapping.

When outdoor writers get together, they get outdoors somehow, so we went to the river and fished. The Niangua is one of my favorite rivers, though certain sections of it have been ruined by canoe rental companies who just pack it with people, and the refuse and waste that comes with great numbers of people, a number of them with drugs or too much alcohol. But there are places on this great smallmouth stream where the chaos and capsize crowd doesn’t go. That’s where I go. Only a few years ago, the biggest smallmouth I ever caught in an Ozark river, came from the place we fished last week.

I told Jim and Jill the story about that big fish, which I released, and showed them where I figured he still lives. When two outdoor writers are together, one can’t tell a fishing story the other doesn’t try to top. Jim held up that little brown hairy jig with a spinner on it and said, “See that lure? I caught a trout down on the White River not far from my house that would likely be able to eat any smallmouth in this river in one gulp.”

I listened, and though I hate to admit it, I think the story was probably true. Jim said it was a brown trout, and he figured it was a little better than 30 pounds. He was fishing with light action spinning gear and four pound line, after the stocking-sized rainbows that go 14 or 15 inches and rarely larger. The monster brown lay in deep water, and took the little spinner when it passed too close. Spencer was by himself, with a small net, and he kept the fish on for an hour.

“There was four different times I had that big trout up beside the boat, wallerin’ on top of my net, and all four times the net was too small to get him into it. The fourth time he gave a surge and the line broke. All I would have needed to land him was a big net, but who carries a net that big… who expects to ever catch a fish like that?

Big brown trout lurk in the White River, where they spawn in the middle of winter. There are a number of them in the fifteen- to twenty-pound class, and who knows how many that are larger. The biggest landed so far was 39 pounds.

About that time, Jill hooked a scrappy bluegill and hoisted it in. On those small spinners they were catching bluegill and green sunfish right and left, some big enough to put on a platter and make a nice fish fry.

On shallow places below the shoals, where you could see the gravel two or three feet below us, there were dozens and dozens of big black fish, slowly, slowly moving upstream. You could have gigged a hundred of them during the day, drum from two to eight pounds. I have never seen so many drum. Since they sometimes hit small lures, I am surprised we didn’t catch one or two. If you could have drifted a nightcrawler down along those gravel shoals and held it there awhile, I think you could have caught several.

But drum are not prized. The meat is white, and good, but the fish has such a large spine and rib cage that you have to have a big one just to get a filet of any significance. Nevertheless, no one complains about the fight they put up, as they are real scrappers. Before the day was over, we must have seen several hundred of them, a sight I never witnessed before.

We paddled upstream for hours, a couple of miles or better, than turned and headed back, well into the afternoon. I kept using a big buzz-bait, sure that I would hook a hefty bass that Jill could get a good picture of. Just before we reached my pickup, along a deep quiet bank with lots of logs, a monstrous largemouth bass followed the topwater lure and boiled at it right beside the boat. My jaw fell open as I saw his broad side and tail sweep across the surface. I am not exaggerating when I say he would have weighed seven or eight pounds.

Jim heard the eruption of water and turned to see the commotion on the surface beside the boat. “How big was that one?” he asked.

I just told him it was way too big to get in the net! But at least he didn’t break my line.

Last winter in early January, a friend and I floated an Ozark river hunting ducks when it was eight degrees at dawn. All day long the temperature never rose above twelve or fifteen. I have floated the rivers for years and years and years, beginning when I was just a small boy. In all that time, I never floated when it was that cold or when it was as hot as it was last week. But when it is hot, it is easy to cope with. You just get in the water, and stay wet all day. In that extreme cold, you are in real danger. With hip boots and heavy clothing, you are so bundled up you might not get out if you went in. Hypothermia is a killer that comes on you when you don’t know it is there. But what a day it was for duck hunting, mallards were everywhere. The only trouble is, I was so cold I couldn’t shoot worth a darn.

In 108 degrees, it is easy to cast, easy to paddle and easy to swim. Still, I think I will be happy when the cooling weather makes the fish hungry. In October and November, April and May, I won’t complain about a thing. If I should, somebody remind me about what July and early August was like. At my age, I might forget.

Write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613 and e-mail me at lightninridge@windstream.net.

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Observations From My porch

How to spend a very hot day and never complain about the temperature.

I sat on my screened porch this morning early, when it was at least as cool as it is going to get. A squirrel made a hole in the screen last winter, coming in to get at a bag of birdseed I had setting on a table. And a raccoon made a bigger hole last summer so he could get into a bag of corn cobs leftover from roastin’ ears I should have thrown out in the back lawn. So I am going to have to fix some places, when it cools down. I said that in February too… “I am going to fix that screen when spring gets here.”

As I get older, a lot more things go undone. You know what the problem is? When it is too hot, you can’t work, and when it is too cold, you can’t work! When it is just right, you remember how hot it was or how cold it was, and you take that time to go hunting or fishing rather than work, knowing those perfect days for hunting and fishing are all too few. That’s the way it ought to be. What harm does a hole or two in the screened porch do? If I just leave the screen door open, the coon won’t make the hole any bigger, he’ll use the door. And why worry about constantly mowing. My back lawn has a lot of wildflowers in it most all summer if I don’t mow, and there are baby rabbits in there, and more food for the birds if I don’t mess with it.

If you mow all the time, you have nothing but grass. If you don’t, there is variety and diversity, more wildlife and more birds. Dozens of species of birds live in the trees and shrubs behind my screened porch. One I saw this week was an indigo bunting and his mate. The female is very drab, but that male is a bright metallic blue, a tiny little guy whose color makes him stand out. I seldom see the bigger rain crows, also known as yellow-billed cuckoos. They are shy, and hard to see, because they actually see you and hide behind large branches. Their call is loud and raucous, a diminishing cluck, cluck, cluck, which old timers said would foretell the coming of a rain. Every morning and evening I hear them, and true to the legend, a rain always comes….within a couple of months. It happens every time I hear them.

Rain crows have had a feast this summer because they are one of the very few birds that will eat fuzzy, hairy caterpillars, and a huge crop of walnut caterpillars descended upon us in June. They stripped the leaves from walnuts and hickories and pecans, and some of the big trees in my lawn are nearly leafless. It won’t kill them unless it happens a couple of years in a row, and then it might. But nature doesn’t work that way usually, as things of mass destruction and aggravation, like those darned noisy cicadas, usually come in cycles. The numbers of walnut caterpillars across the Ozarks this year were unbelievable. They are gone now only because they changed into little brown moths with rusty-red colored collars, a little better than an inch long, and for the past week you could see them by the millions beneath lights at convenience stores. They have short lives; they just lay eggs under leaves and then die.

Sitting on my porch, I notice leaves on redbud and mulberry trees turning yellow, probably as a result of dry weather and heat. I watched a few yellow leaves drift down off the mulberry tree, giving just a little hint of the coming of fall, now only a few weeks away. Another hint is the maturing acorns on the branches of a giant white oak tree that grows nearby to shade my porch. That’s good news; we need a good white oak acorn crop for wildlife species of all kinds.

The heat is awful, and I suspect I should keep an eye on my pond, which I made years ago on this high ridge to give water to wildlife, a home for some fish and bullfrogs, and a cooling relief for my Labradors. As the water drops, the mud around it is an indication of all the visitors; raccoons and skunks, a fox and a bobcat, and several turkeys and deer. Because of the dry hot summer, we will see some deer dying in the Ozarks due to blue-tongue… also known as epizootic hemorrhagic disease. Deer which die from that awful affliction come to water to die, more of them in August and early September. Some years are worse than others, and I think this year will be one of those.

I still don’t know what the wild turkey hatch is going to be in this area. I haven’t seen many poults, but late-hatching turkeys are hard to see until late summer and early fall. The quail seem to be non-existent this summer, up here on Lightnin’ Ridge. In past summers, as I sat on my porch early in the morning and late in the evening, I have heard four or five bobwhite roosters whistling. This summer I have heard only one, and I heard him only one morning. What a shame that this Ozarks country will have fewer and fewer quail, until someday, I think we will have none at all.
Tomorrow, early in the morning, I will be on the river. An old friend of mine, outdoor writer Jim Spencer, will be here to visit, and we are going to float the Nianqua River and catch some bass on topwater lures. Another old friend, river guide Dennis Whiteside, reports that bass are clobbering the buzz-baits we love to use, if you know the water to fish. You have to seek out shady, deeper water with a little current to catch bass, but from now into September, buzz-bait fishing should be excellent for those who know what they are doing.

Jim Spencer and I began writing about the outdoors when we were just kids, back in the sixties. Looking through old magazines a few weeks back, I found an article he had written when he was 14 years old for Harding’s magazine, now known as Fur, Fish and Game. It was a trapping article, and he was paid for it.

Like me, Jim has always lived in the woods, his home now is at the edge of the national forest down in Arkansas, off in the middle of nowhere. We both obtained wildlife management degrees the same year, mine from Missouri University, his from Louisiana State University. About the same time, we began writing for Outdoor Life and Field and Stream magazines.

Not long ago, I found a book produced years back entitled, “The Best of Outdoor Life… the Greatest Hunting, Fishing and Survival Stories from America’s Favorite Sportsman’s Magazine.” In it were articles Jim and I wrote in the early 1970’s, and with our stories were others written by Zane Grey, Jack O’Conner, Archibald Rutledge and a list of famous writers who were old men when we were born, or long since gone. It made me realize that we are the last of a dying breed.

I don’t think the world will miss us when we are gone. That’s why we are going fishing tomorrow, with Zane Grey and Archibald Rutledge and Isaac Walton. It is going to be a great deal cooler, standing out in that current under a shade tree, than it is on my porch. If anyone needs us just… well, heck, nobody ever has needed us. I keep forgetting that!

My mailing address is Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613. See www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com
Posted by Sondra Gray at 8/01/2011

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The Little Jones Boy

The two little boys were only 7 years old. Cousins, they had spent a day at their grandparent’s place in the country, and had wandered off down to the river, where they were forbidden to go. Their mothers had been distraught, threatening to never let them visit their grandparents again. Both had received a spanking, and they were pouting about the harsh discipline meted out. After all, their fathers had been there fishing only the week before, and the river sounded like great fun.

That evening they were sitting on the porch with their grandpa, and he was sympathetic. “Nothing seems fair when you’re seven years old,” he said, “and subject to the whims of cruel mothers set on keeping you from having fun.”

He had their full attention that warm summer night, as the sun began to set and they were all three enjoying a glass of lemonade Grandma had brought them. “I reckon it’s all because of that little Jones boy, years back, that they is so doggone mean to you two,” he said, “but I reckon we can’t speak of that, it's too awful to remember and I promised I wouldn’t tell you little guys that story. It was a bad, bad thing…best forgotten and too bad to talk of.”

It wasn’t quiet long. The two wanted to know who the little Jones boy was. Grandpa could tell that much, he reckoned. “Cute little guy… lived down the road apiece, but mean as a pet Billy goat. Course I can’t say anymore about him, cause nobody talks about it nowadays… reckon he’d be nigh onto a growed man now if he’d just not been so determined not to mind his ma.”

“Was that a whippoorwill I heard,” the old man took out his pipe, and seemed to want to change the subject. The two little boys wouldn’t hear of it. “Tell us about the little Jones boy,” they said, nearly in unison.

“No, no, boys,” the grandpa shook his head as he filled the bowl of his pipe. “It’s a story you don’t want to hear and yore mothers would skin me alive if I told you about that little Jones boy and the awful thing what happened to him.”

With an interest heightened by his hesitancy, the two begged him to tell them the story. “Please grandpa,” said one, “we won’t tell nobody.”

As the urging continued, the old man lit his pipe in the fading light of evening, swatted a fly with his fly swatter, and gave in. “Well, all right, I’ll tell you, but you’ve got to always keep this a secret between the three of us. Cause I may be the only man what knowed what happened to that little Jones boy.”

The old man sent a puff of sweet-smelling pipe tobacco smoke into the air, and took a deep breath, the two little boys’ attention riveted on him. “I reckon I was just a young man back then, when the little Jones boy up and disappeared. He was bad to just ignore his grandma and his ma, and folks thought for a while he just wandered off into the woods and might wander on back when he got good and hungry. Some folks said maybe he went off down to the river and got drowned or ate by a giant alligator snappin’ turtle or something, but his ma had told him never to go to the river, and she said he was sure to stay away from there, bein’ the kind of good kid he was.”

He drew a puff from his tobacco, noting he had the two boys in undivided awe; their mouths open with anxiety. “Only I never did figger he was a good kid. Mean as a snake, I’d say, bad to lie and sneak off, not mind his ma and kick old dogs and throw rocks at the chickens and that kind of thing.”

The old man continued as dusk settled and the sun left a blood red sky to the west, “So as I remember, that’s when I went down and set me a trotline for catfish in that big deep scary hole of water down there where you boys was just a couple days ago. And I baited it with big old worms and some shade peerch I had caught from the creek.”

With his two grandsons sitting on the wooden floor of the old porch before him, the old man shifted in his rocking chair and put his foot up beneath him, the way that old-timers do. The boys were totally enthralled with the forbidden story.

“Well sir, I tell ya,” the old man puffed on his pipe and listened as a screech owl wailed from the woods across the gravel road before the old farmhouse. “When I went back in the middle of the night, dark and scary as it was, I figgered I’d have me a big ol’ catfish. But I went out there in my ol’ boat and that line was hung up down deep on the bottom pulled back in under a big rock bluff.”

The screech owl wailed again, and the western sky began to dim as the old man continued. “I couldn’t pull that line up at all, so I just strips off my overalls and my boots, and I grabs my flashlight, and I dives into that clear deep river to see if I can unhang that hung-up trotline.”

Dramatically, he took his pipe out of his mouth and shook his head. “Don’t know if I should tell the rest of it,” he said quietly, looking at the floor beneath his rocking chair in mock anguish. The boys, beside themselves with excitement, urged him to continue the story, as they were now on their feet beside the rocking chair, hair standing up on the backs of their necks as the screech owl gave forth its eerie cry again.

“Well boys, you got to remember that its natures way to rid the world of the weak and the stupid,” he said, “when a kid won’t obey his mother, its like a little duck that gets off away from his brood and gets ate up by a big ol’ bass or a fawn that won’t stay hid, and gets ate up by a wolf…”

The little boys knew something awful must be coming. “Go on Grandpa,” one urged.

“Well I swum down into the deep dark water with my flashlight, an’ there he was, a humongous ol’ catfish the size of a full growed Hereford bull. A good axe-han’les distance it was between them beady little horrible eyes…”

Well boys I hates to tell it, I hates to remember it, but there ain’t no way to forget what I saw… there sticking out of his big ol' ugly mouth, full of jagged old teeth…”

The old man’s voice was just a whisper now, as he glanced over his shoulder as if afraid of what might be behind him… “Stickin’ out of his big ol’ ugly mouth was that little Jones boys leg!”

Years later when the two boys were much older, their mothers commented on how they never went near the river again when they were small. Sometimes it takes a grandpa to help raise little boys.

You can see this grandpa’s website at www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com or write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613. The e-mail address is lightninridge@windstream.net

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The Rescue

Larry Dablemont paddles the first official "float" of the new johnboat

Last November, I drifted slowly down a river in my johnboat, with a blind attached to the bow; limbs of sycamore and oak to hide me and the boat as I floated down the river. It was getting cold. I figured there would be mallards on the river, but there weren’t many.

As I looked downriver, trying to make out the movement of a flock of ducks, three wood ducks flushed from some brush alongside me, only twenty or so yards away. I dropped my paddle and picked up my shotgun in time to drop the last one of the three. A beautiful drake wood duck in front got clean away, but the other two were hens, and the last one folded cleanly and fell to the river downstream from me.

That night, I admired what a beautiful creature she was, and cleaned her, cutting out the two sides of meat lying to each side of the breastbone. The meat was dark, and red. I soaked it in milk overnight, and the next evening I cross-cut the two breasts into a total of 8 little steaks about an inch and a half wide, wrapped each in a small piece of bacon, sprinkled some special seasoning and garlic on them, and put them on a wooden skewer, with a slice of onion and green pepper between each piece of meat. In about fifteen minutes over a hot flaming grill, the meat was cooked, and it was delicious.

If you are a vegetarian, that is fine with me, but I am not. I like wild game, and I would not hunt anything unless I prepared the meat and ate it. That makes me a predator. You would think I would sympathize with other predators.

That brings me to only a few days ago, when I drove a couple of miles down the road that takes me from this wooded ridgetop where I live, and started to pull out on a two-lane highway, just beside a bridge over the river. As I stopped there, I saw another wood duck hen fly along before me, only a few feet from my hood, and right above her was a sharp-shinned hawk, death on wings.

The hawk nailed the woodie in flight, and drove her to the highway shoulder pinning her with its talons, and trying to rip away her neck with its sharp curved beak. I just stopped my pickup in the middle of the highway, jumped out and ran toward the scene of the crime, and rescued the squealing wood duck by threatening to make a football out of the hawk. It tried to carry the hen away, but he wasn’t quite as heavy as she was, and the hawk couldn’t get airborne.

Freed from the iron grasp, the hen waddled out into the highway as if stunned, the feathers on her back askew, her mouth open, squawking as only a hen wood duck does, a sound like no other on marshes or rivers. There had been no traffic, but I looked up to see a couple of oncoming vehicles now stopped, drivers frowning, not understanding the urgency of the situation. I got back in my pickup and the hen took to flight over the bridge, and was nailed again by the hawk. The feathers flew from her back when he hit her and knocked her to the bridge-top pavement.

What could I do? I jumped out again, screaming threats at the hawk, and the wounded wood duck dived over the side toward the river as the hawk retreated. I don’t know what happened to her, but I gave her a chance. Drivers in both lanes now were stopped, yelling something out their windows, hopefully directed toward that villainous hawk. If they were talking to me, I hope they are ashamed of themselves. After all no one should be in such a hurry so early in the morning, and patience is a virtue!

Reflecting on it later, I felt bad about what I did. Not so much about stopping traffic, but for not realizing the hawk had more right to take a wood duck for a meal than I do, because he was merely being what God created him to be. It isn’t his fault that he looks wicked and mean. Actually, I too have sharp toenails and little beady eyes. Certainly his plumage makes him more beautiful than I, and his graceful, swift and powerful flight is spectacular. When I am chasing rabbits out of my garden, there ain’t nothin' swift or graceful about it.

If the hawk had shot the wood duck with a shotgun, and cleaned her and cooked the meat, I would have less of a problem watching it. But the attack of the sharp-shinned hawk is swift, savage and heartless. In his talons, the duck would not die quickly; she would be partly eaten before her heart stopped beating. Maybe it is that part of it which makes it hard to watch, difficult for us to accept. Nature is perfect in its functions, but brutal at times.

I am a naturalist, trained and existing that way since boyhood, and I know what happens in the woods because I have always lived there and worked there. It doesn’t bother me to watch a hawk kill a rat, because I don’t care much for rats. I can hardly stand to see a little fawn or a baby rabbit killed and eaten by anything, even though I know the great Creator made it to be that way, and I need to accept it.

In the reality of it, there is nothing more brutal or savage than man. Man has this little streak of evil that wild creatures do not have. He is destructive, gluttonous and barbaric at times, and yet in most all of us, there is a ton of goodness, and compassion and sympathy. I see my friends and neighbors showing love and generosity constantly, and find it more often than not in complete strangers. But men are not part of nature any more. Neither am I. That poor hawk may have gone hungry that day, when God meant him to eat, to serve his purpose in nature thinning out the weak and sick, feeding his youngsters just as we must feed ours.

But if you were in one of those vehicles behind me, He meant for you to be a little more patient when somebody is trying to save a wood duck!!

What a great day we had at Bull Shoals State Park in north Arkansas, last Saturday, building an old time White River johnboat. A big crowd turned out and it was fun. We took the boat down to the lake and gave folks a boat ride and it didn’t leak a drop. Now we don’t know what to do with it. If you know someone in need of a 20-foot wooden johnboat like they made almost a hundred years ago, contact me. And you can see photos of the event, and the finished boat, on my website, www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com

My publishing company has a facebook page now. You can find it under Lightnin’ Ridge, if you know the way to do that facebook stuff. The ladies who work for me, Sondra and Dorothy and Diane, take care of facebook and websites and computer stuff. I am a grizzled old veteran outdoorsman, and I ain’t never gonna get involved in such technical, modern nonsense. There’s fish to catch, rivers to float, wilderness to explore and computers are evil, to my way of thinking… like them darned hawks.
Write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613. Or e-mail me at lightninridge@windstream.net. E-mails aren’t evil, I don’t suppose.

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Hot Summer, Cool Stream

If you have the ambition to get away from the air conditioning and get your body acclimated to summer, find an isolated section of river where canoe rental people do not operate, and plan a two- or three-day trip in the middle of the week with a friend who is inclined not to complain much about sleeping in a tent and having wet feet.

By doing so, you can actually get off away from the world’s problems. Float downstream and find a gravel bar or sand bar to camp on, where there is some shade of course. In the cool of the evening, find a deep shoal and wade out up to your waist above it or below it and cast a topwater minnow or a little popper of some kind with a spincasting outfit or maybe even a fly-rod. There will be bass waiting to jump all over that lure, I’ve seen it happen! When it gets dark, push your boat or canoe out into a big eddy fed by that river current, where there’s some deep water and rocks, and fish without lights, letting your eyes become accustom to the night. Cast a jitterbug toward the bank with a casting reel and a stronger line, and work it steadily across the surface.

If there’s a big bass anywhere close, he will jump all over that jitterbug. This time of year, the rock bank towards the upper end of the eddy where the current feeds it will hold the smallmouth, but the lower sections of a big deep hole, on the opposite bank where there might be logs and limbs, are where you will find river largemouth, and they can’t pass up a jitterbug either.

If the eddy is good and deep and has a bluff, chances are there’s a big flathead catfish, or several, maybe up to 25 or 35 pounds. I have caught a few catfish from small Ozark rivers that exceeded 40 pounds. Flatheads can be caught on trotlines set deep, across the eddy and baited with LIVE bait, like chubs or sunfish, or even small suckers. There are channel catfish in many streams too, and they will take nightcrawlers or dead bait, even chicken livers. It takes a lot of work to set and bait a trotline, and it involves some danger, as you can get entangled or hooked and pulled under by a weighted line. Have two sheathed knives on your belt to cut yourself free if you need to. If you set trotlines and run them in that deep water, DO NOT DO IT FROM A SMALL CANOE, USE ONLY A VERY STABLE CRAFT. I would never ever trotline from a seventeen-foot double end canoe! Actually, I wouldn’t even float the river in one.

I know it is hot, but I am tired of staying inside. I have fishing to do, and I have missed it. I don’t know that it was as hot when I was a youngster, fishing up and down the Big Piney River in July and August. There was no reason to hole up in the house, because we didn’t have air conditioning, and maybe everyone could stand the heat better because of that fact. What man has done to make life easier for himself has gone a long way toward destroying himself. Just think about that, there are so many areas where we have created monsters… not knowing it at the time. Maybe computers and televisions and some medicines fall into that category. I think everyone sees what alcohol and drugs have done.

Maybe air conditioning has us in a destructive grip as much as anything else. None of us would choose to live without it, but I know that men who lived without it stayed outside more and could take the summer much, much better. Of course our ancestors were tougher… they had to be.

We fished all through July and August, and as a teen-ager guiding float fishermen, we never let a 95-degree day never stop a daylong fishing trip. My clients would show up and we would start very early in the morning, when it was cooler. But we would float the river all day at times, always catching fish, even in the middle of the day. Of course, the river was more shaded then, because landowners hadn’t started clearing the banks of shade trees as much back then. There were a lot fewer cattle. The river had much more water in those times, and it was much cleaner. Shady gravel bars offered great places to stop and relax, and swim in a cool river current for a little while. Then it was back to fishing, casting to whatever shaded bank there was, where the water had a little current and a little depth.

It is a tragedy that so many of deep holes of water are filled in, and Ozark rivers drying up more and more. So many of the gravel bars now are covered with cow manure. It doesn’t have to be that way, as government programs pay for watering-devices up away from the river, and for fencing the cattle away from the stream, for setting aside strips of land which can be placed in grasses and planted in trees which support wildlife. Numbers of landowners have joined those efforts, and the results are amazing. But you have to pay for the work first, and then through the agricultural department, you are reimbursed for your efforts. Some landowners just don’t want to do it, and care little for our streams. But there are far more of them who would indeed join that effort if they just had the money to put up for the initial fencing, watering and planting. Of course, we have a state conservation department which has millions of millions of dollars they could use toward that purpose, and since they federal government would give it back to them, why wouldn’t they, as a CONSERVATION agency, want to see our rivers preserved? It could be done so easily, but it isn’t.

One landowner Bryant Creek, with some eroding banks along the river become worse each year, ask the Missouri Department of Conservation to come in and help him fix the problem. Two of the agency’s people showed up at his request, looked at the long stretch of eroding bank and said they could fix it for $18,000 dollars!

There is no money to help save our rivers…but we are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to stock elk, and a million dollars to finance a study to see if we have enough black bears in Missouri for a hunting season.

If the MDC would commit to a program of putting up the initial money to repair and fence off buffer strips along the streams which are so much treasures in the Ozarks, they would get it all back in little time, from the federal government. And all by myself, I could sign up dozens of landowners on our best streams who would be ready to make the change. Operating on nearly 200 million a year which we all give them, and wasting large chunks of that, the MDC will never spend a penny on such a rivers projects. I keep hoping that some private group like the Smallmouth Alliance, or Ozark Paddlers, or maybe even the Nature Conservancy, would just tackle one pilot project along one of our rivers to show what could be done. If you would like to see how this works, we will run a magazine article in the Lightnin’ Ridge Outdoor Journal’s September issue, showing and telling what one river bottom owner has done with that government program, and why he says it has paid him big results… why he urges other landowners to do the same.

My website is www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com, and you can e-mail me at lightninridge@windstream.net. Write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, MO. 65613

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Boats Galor

I have heard that the boating industry has been having a difficult time over the past few years. Probably that has a lot to do with the price of gasoline. But think for a minute about how many boats there are out there on inland waters across the country and in Canada. If you want a boat today, and want a bargain, you can find one. There are a ton of pre-owned boats for sale.

I only owned two fiberglass bass-boats in my life and that was a long time ago - they weren’t anything like today’s bass tournament boats. Both were very small, but that was thirty some years ago. Have you ever heard of a Kenzie-Kraft boat? It was a great fishing boat, made by a company in Oklahoma, but again, it was small enough to maneuver into flooded backwaters and heavy timber, and easily handled by a foot control trolling motor. I had a 70 horsepower motor on it, and that is the biggest motor I ever used.

I decided about thirty years ago that I wanted a lake boat that I could use for all the things I did, and I started using aluminum lake boats through the Lowe Boat Company in Lebanon that were capable of anything. I put a deck on the front of them, with a trolling motor and seat for fishing, which I could remove quickly when I wanted to use that same boat for duck hunting. Because I was an outdoor writer, I got special discounted writer’s prices, and usually sold the boats every two years and replaced it with another improved model, so therefore, I never had any money invested I couldn’t get back fairly easily.

But the idea of a boat for any type of outdoor activity, from bass and crappie fishing to trotlining and duck hunting, stayed with me. About ten years ago I started using War-Eagle boats which are all camouflaged, and I don’t ever worry about getting mine scratched up a little. It does a great job of putting me in a situation to fish for anything, or use it for hunting in any season. Because of that versatility, I can do more outdoors with my boats than those who own the metal-flake fiberglass bass boats can do, and for far, far less money. That may be the reason that today’s bass-tournament boats could fade away someday, to be completely replaced by metal. Cost, weight, versatility, and a fading popularity of fishing tournaments all play a part in that.

When the brightly colored metal-flake fiberglass bass boats began to come out, I lived in Arkansas, near Bull Shoals Lake, and I remember seeing those bright new boats sitting in front of mobile homes and small houses where a family did without a lot of things, or lived on government assistance. I knew a fellow who financed one of them with a 50-horsepower motor, and he had never owned a pick-up in his life that was worth more than a thousand dollars. It was something to see him pulling that bright new bass boat to the lake every Sunday with an old clunker needing a muffler, with rust spots on the fenders.

Those bass boats from twenty years or so back are still found all over the Ozarks, some sitting in a barn or a pasture with weeds growing up around them, and truthfully, though they aren’t very shiny any more, they still are just as good on the water as they ever were, if there’s a good motor with them. If you go out and look, you can find some of those bass-boats that aren’t much different in style from the new ones, for only a few hundred dollars. With some work, you can make them look really good again, and some of them have motors that can be repaired fairly easily as well.

Less than 75 years back, they were making little 4- or 5- foot aluminum V-bottom boats that were not very fancy at all. You could power one out on the lake with an 8 horsepower motor and go really fast, (at least for that time) find a good place to catch crappie, and feel like you were the luckiest fisherman in the world. There are thousands of them sitting around today in the Midwest, on old rusty trailers with flat tires. With aluminum prices as they are, they may be worth quite a bit at metal salvage places.

In Canada though, those little aluminum boats are still valuable, because outfitters can secure them to the pontoons of airplane and fly them out to little remote no-name lakes, and have a boat everywhere they want to take fishermen. Last August we visited several small lakes like that in Ontario, always with a little 9-horse motor you could carry around in the plane, and run all day on a gallon of gas. There was always great fishing, just because some old aluminum boat was there waiting, perhaps not used in months, but always dependable. I paddled two or three of them around fishing for bass and walleye and northerns, in waters where no big bright fiberglass bass boat will ever be able to go. Canada, and northern waters in states like Minnesota and Wisconsin, are not very good places for fiberglass boats because those lakes have rocks everywhere, just below the surface, and rocky reefs which appear out of nowhere in the middle of lakes so wide you may only be able to see one shore. Fishermen who come to Canada in the southern bass-boats sometimes don’t know what to expect, and over the past twenty years, thousands of fiberglass boats have been ruined on those rocks which northern lakes are famous for.

If the economy ever gets so bad no one can afford to buy a new boat, those of us who fish and hunt have little to worry about, there are enough good sound boats sitting around which haven’t been used in years which will do the job. They are not so pretty, but I learned years ago that it isn’t “pretty” that catches fish. The uglier my boat, the less I have to worry about it when I tie it up on the shore to hunt deer, or turkey, or run a trapline. The drabber it is, the more likely I am to be able to hide it when I am hunting ducks and geese. And it hasn’t depreciated much. I am thinking that the future of hunting and fishing boats made of fiberglass is not good. I believe if common sense prevails, fishing boats of the future will be made of metal.

I am looking forward to building the wooden johnboat down at Bull Shoals State Park in Arkansas in a couple of weeks, remember that we are looking for folks who want to come and sell old time fishing gear, or items which relate to the outdoors, like quilts or carvings, canned goods, paddles, old magazines, art, etc. See my website for details about that day-long event on July 9, at www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot. com http://www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com

I would like to thank everyone who sent messages of condolences to our family over the death of my father. We received e-mails and cards in overwhelming numbers, and they will be kept and treasured. Thanks to you all for and outpouring of prayers and sympathy. E-mail me at lightninridge@windstream.net or write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613.

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Looking Backwards, Through Tears

Dad shooting pool back in the day

Paddling a boat in later years

The author shown here with his dad

 This will be a difficult column to write. On Father’s Day, my dad, Farrel Dablemont, passed away peacefully, with his family around him. He was 84 years old and had suffered for several years with Parkinson’s disease. He had been spared the tremors which go with that dreaded disease, but for the past year, walking had become very difficult. I am comforted by knowing that he is walking just fine now, the man who stood so tall and strong when I was a kid, who taught me little by little, over many years, the things a boy should know about living right.

My dad had many friends and family who have preceded him in death, and personally I believe that somewhere, wherever heaven is, there is a great reunion going on this week. And while there may indeed be streets of gold and great mansions in that place, I have a feeling there are also beautiful rivers and woodlands and wild ducks, and turkeys and fish. Dad wasn’t much of a fan of golden streets; he liked woodland paths with wildflowers in the spring and fall colors and a good tracking snow in the winter. He loved to float rivers, and while in my boyhood we were confined to the Big Piney and the Gasconade, as I grew up we explored many others, like the Buffalo, the Kings and the War Eagle in Arkansas, and one of his favorites, that we first saw in 1971, Crooked Creek.
 
We got to fish together one last time a little more than a year ago, before it became too difficult for him. That was quite a day, as we caught smallmouth and Kentucky bass and largemouth by the dozens in a stream not far from here. 

His disease had taken the smile from his face, but he was smiling inside that day, and we talked then about how blessed he considered himself to be, with the very greatest of friends and a family blessed, I believe, because of the good life he had led.

He and my mother had moved up next to me in northern Polk County ten years ago, but dad lived most of his life over around Houston. His last twenty years of work, he drove a school bus for the Houston School District, and was so proud of that job and all the friends he made there. But of course you remember, if you read much of what I wrote, that he and my grandfather bought the pool hall in Houston when I was eleven years old, and I went to work there, from age eleven to the age of 16. I couldn’t wait ‘til school was out so I could head for my important job at the pool hall, where all my friends were, old men in their 60’s and 70’s we come to call the front bench regulars. What an education it was, the basis for a book I wrote a few years back, entitled “The Front Bench Regulars”.
 
On weekends, dad and I floated the river in one of the wooden johnboats he built, to fish for goggle-eye and green sunfish and smallmouth, or we set trotlines for huge flathead catfish up to forty pounds or so. We hunted ducks on the Piney out of those same johnboats, and in time I started guiding city fishermen on the river in those boats of his. Dad was proud to have built so many of those johnboats, and he perfected a johnboat with a plywood bottom in the late 60’s. In his lifetime, he must have built close to 110 boats. And we hunted rabbits and squirrels and caught bullfrogs and trapped a little and did everything you could think of that Ozark outdoor fathers did with their sons.
 
Dad had a close friend who was a blessing to our family, by the name of Charlie Hartman, one of the finest men I ever knew or ever will know. Charlie and dad were very close, and when I was young we hunted quail with Charlie because he raised and trained the very finest bird dogs in the Ozarks. And thinking back on it, I believe I developed the values I have today not only from what my dad taught me to be right and wrong, but from watching the men who were close friends of his, men who were the best examples a boy could have. His sense of humor, and quickness to laugh hard and long, were shared by those men, and spread to me at an early age. How could I not be happy? I was the luckiest kid in the world.
 
We went to country churches, we had big family get-togethers in the summer and fall, and I grew up. I never smoked or drank alcohol because dad forbade it, and made it plain that he set rules and I would follow them. I follow the same rules today, and have watched many of the boys from my youth ruin their lives with tobacco, alcohol and drugs which I never felt a need for. I had a dad who kept me too busy for that.
 
My dad looked at himself as a common man without much education, who loved to study the bible and tried to improve himself all through life in every way he could. He didn’t figure he did enough with his life, and he always regretted that. But he never knew the full extent of his influence, his teaching. He never knew fully the admiration people had for him, not for being some perfect person, but for being someone who loved other people, who wanted to do good things for those around him, and tried to correct his mistakes when he made them.
 
Today I am remembering the river as it was in early summer, when as a boy I floated with dad, casting a shimmy fly into swirling green pockets where goggle-eye and smallmouth waited in the depths. I remember the smell of the river just after sunrise, the sound of a paddle dipping quietly into the water, the singing of birds, the quiet roar of an upcoming shoal. Those days, long in the past, live with me still. I am not sorry they cannot be again, I am thankful we had them, and I still have them to savor and remember. And I believe, as strongly as I believe in the Creator that made those wondrous places and days, that there will be a time dad and I will be there again, floating a river more beautiful than any we ever saw, in one of those wooden johnboats.
 
But for now, I will go on doing the best I can here, with grandsons to teach what dad taught me. And there are many more stories to write about those good days when my dad was tall and strong, and I was young. There is so much I remember and so much to tell. I’ll finish a book someday that tells it all, when I get a chance to write it.
 
For those who knew my dad and would like to attend his funeral, the visitation will be at Pitts funeral home in Bolivar, 6 to 8 p.m. on Thursday evening, June 23rd. One funeral service will be at the Mt. Olive Baptist church north of Bolivar at 11:00 a.m. Friday, June the 24th.  A second service will be held that afternoon at 3:30, at the Ozark Baptist Church a few miles east of Houston, Mo. where dad will be laid to rest, only a few miles from the Big Piney River he loved so much.

In the pool hall one summer evening, only yesterday it seems, I told Ol’ Bill I just couldn’t wait for duck season. He grew somber and said, “Don’t wish your life away boy… someday those treasured times you look forward to now will be treasured days you remember. When you get to be my age you will look backwards much more often than you look forward.”

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One Month Away

We finally have all the plans made for the big johnboat-building event I wrote about in this column a few weeks back. The Arkansas State Park system has okayed the whole thing and it will be held at the Bull Shoals State Park Pavilion overlooking the lake, under big shady trees. We’ll be building an authentic old time White River johnboat, and have other finished johnboats to display, along with artifacts from the early half of the last century on display.

Best of all, we are going to have several old-timers on hand who were guides on the Ozark rivers, men who paddled those johnboats down the White, the Buffalo, the Current, Jack’s Fork, James and Big Piney rivers. You can hear stories about what the White River country was like before the dams were built, and you can see old photos of the river and the people and the fishing from that time.

The Parks Department has also approved the selling of items from that era, so vendors who have old fishing lures and fishing gear, gigs, sassafras paddles, carvings, artwork, or similar items can set up there beneath the shade trees and sell their items for only 10 dollars per table. If you are interested in antiques, you may find some valuable old lures and fishing gear for sale on that day. My uncle Norten is trying to get some of his sassafras paddles made by then.

This whole area is beautiful, and there is a huge State Park visitor center there, and a 100-year-old johnboat dug from a sandbar on the White River years ago. State Park Naturalist Julie Lovett will be with us too, with some events she has planned to make the day even more enjoyable. There will be food and soft drinks there all day, and we will have a big kettle of sassafras tea with ice, for visitors to enjoy as long as it lasts. Best of all you can see some wooden johnboats on display, the boats that made Ozark river fishing famous. Only a mile away, Jim Gaston’s White River Resort has a restaurant which he has turned into a real museum, and the other direction there is the high tower which gives you a tremendous view of the whole region from a vantage point even eagles don’t climb high enough to see.

If you want to try your hand at trout fishing on the White River, come and camp for a few days, and if you do stay a few days, just a ways farther south you will find the Buffalo River, the Ozark National Forest and the Blanchard Springs and Blanchard Springs caverns. There are beautiful campgrounds on Bull Shoals and the White River, and dozens of resorts that rent overnight cabins on the lake and river. So plan to spend a few days if you come.

I’ll be there with Myron Nixon, working on finishing a wooden johnboat like they once floated down the White River a hundred years ago. We’ll be there all day Saturday, July the 9th. If you need more information, or want to set up and sell old-time items, call me at 417-777-5227, or get in touch with naturalist Julie Lovett or other State Park officials by calling Bull Shoals State Park, 870-445-3629.

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The Coyote’s Gobbler

The one the coyote pup chased to me.

It is late in the spring for white bass to be spawning in waters I normally fish, but my friend Rich Abdoler and I found them this past weekend, spawning at the same time that crappie were spawning. That doesn’t happen often.

We caught a stringer-full of fat crappie on light tackle, casting small white and yellow jigs up against the banks. But catching crappie when you know there are white bass to be caught on topwater lures is like settling for oatmeal cookies when you know there’s strawberry shortcake to be had. It’s like listening to opera music when you know Hank Williams can be heard just around the corner. Like eating a baloney sandwich with your wife when you know you could have had a steak dinner with Dolly Parton. Yeah, now you are getting the idea!

Well, if you have ever seen a two-pound white bass female take a surface lure in some flowing current, you still may not fully understand what I am talking about. We found them in a creek, somewhat filled by all the spring rains, but with clear green-colored water hiding a swarm of white bass. And the rods were bent for an hour or so like no crappie can bend them. I guess I am like everyone else, when I can eat crappie, I am glad I fished for them, but when I am catching white bass that get up close to three pounds and sometimes exceed that, it is hard to stop fishing for them. It is a late spawning season, but the later it comes, the more successful it will be, as a rule. You have to enjoy it while it is there, because it doesn’t last long enough. Like Hank Williams and strawberry shortcake, you just can’t get enough of spring.

I didn’t intend to write anything more about the turkey season. It was a tough season on hunters because of all the rain, and a very late nesting response. Never have I seen flocks of turkeys together so late in the spring as they were this year. Hens stopped mating, it seemed, and gobblers were together in groups of three or four instead of getting off by themselves. I would be calling a gobbler which had hens around him, and another gobbler or two right there. It doesn’t work very well.

When I did call in toms, they came in threes and fours, and there are too many eyes to make it easy to get one of them real close, get the gun barrel on him and shoot him. Having said that, sometimes you get lucky, and I have to tell this story, even though it is going to be very hard to believe. I promise, this happened, just as I am about to describe it.

It was the middle of the last week of the season, and I was in the woods at mid-morning when a gobbler got really vociferous in a field bordering the woodlands. I snuck to the edge and spied him out in the green grass, about 100 yards away, strutting and answering my call with a passion. He was alone! Hallelujah!

So I set up in a great spot, figuring that he was going to stay right there and answer me and not move. He did just that, and I watched him strutting and gobbling for about an hour and a half. Towards noon, a hen ambled down the hill and fed around him, not on a nest, as she should have been, and not interested in mating. He got interested in her, so now he is 150 yards away. Of course my calling is so good I have aroused the interest in a second gobbler, and down the hill he comes, strutting and gobbling and in the mood to fight. They charge each other, and 200 yards away, they have one big brawl, jumping and purring and wrapping their necks around each other like turkeys do, trying to spur each other with those little daggers on their legs. I don’t know which one it was, but one of them got tired of the fight and started up the hill with all the strutting gone, while the other followed, strutting and blowing and trying to get the other tom to spar with him some more. They are now 250 yards away, and I have known for awhile it is all over, I am not going to call in either of them.

But then out of the woods not far away, come a charging young coyote filled with vitamin water and vinegar, and hoping to have himself a gobbler for dinner. They were distracted enough with themselves not to see him right away, and he got close. This isn’t some old wily veteran coyote, it is a youngster, not even a year old, and not much bigger than a red fox. Ten yards from the gobblers, he notices they are bigger than he is, and slows his charge, wondering just how he is going to turn a 25 pound tom turkey which might just outweigh him, into a two- or three-day feast.

Slowing up to think about it cost him. One of the gobblers runs a ways and takes to flight, and is headed exactly away from me, gone and free from worry. The young coyote turns his attention to the whipped gobbler, and makes a run at him, hoping, I think, that the old tom will die of a heart attack, so that he can get his young jaws on his neck without getting flogged. That second gobbler makes the mistake of flying the other way, being no buddy of the first one, and perhaps remembering that down along the timber a seductive hen had been calling for quite some time!

He flies right at me, and I am so stunned I can’t find my shotgun as I watch him. Just in time I find it, leaning against the tree beside me, and I am looking at a huge gobbler coming at me with wings working, not gliding at all. When they want to, those big heavy toms can fly, and gain altitude. He’s bent on landing in a sycamore tree right before me, and I remember all the times I have bragged that you would never see me shoot a wild gobbler off a limb. That was then, when I was young and couldn’t foresee such a difficult season and some gobbler landing in a tree at noon.

The shotgun roared, and the big gobbler, which had just started feeling safe on that limb, plummeted 25 feet to the ground. Ah, it is a wonderful feeling to have called in a turkey and killed it, so I sit there relishing the moment, and I notice that 100 yards out, that young coyote is charging toward my turkey thinking he is the luckiest coyote in the world.

I almost didn’t get there first, but I made it a stand-off, warning him that if he grabbed that dead gobbler I would fill him with number six shot. He looked at me, and for just a moment I felt sorry for the little guy. He was skinny, with little pointed ears and an expression on his face that I have seen on mine after missing a turkey, or losing a big fish. He needed something more substantial than meadow mice and prairie voles. But to the larger predator goes the spoils. He is out there somewhere, my little helper, still hungry. And I have had some fried turkey, from the oddest turkey hunt I have ever been on. Sometimes it is better to be lucky than good, and when it comes to hunting and fishing, I am seldom very good if I’m not lucky.

See this weeks photos on my website, www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com. Write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613 or e-mail me at lightninridge@windstream.net.

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Rain and Rotten Luck

Sometimes referred to as a spreading adder or hog-nosed
viper, you can see why some folks are afraid of this harmless little snake.
It mimics a cobra...

 

 The flooding has kept me off the river, and I have not been able to check on the old Canada goose which laid her eggs in a hollow tree twenty feet above the river. I think she might be the same goose who lost her ground nest to flooding last year, and it shows that wild creatures are capable of shrewd thinking. She found a spot way above the floodwaters to bring off a brood of goslings. But that’s where her shrewd thinking ended, because she is less than a quarter mile down the river from an eagle’s nest, and I am fairly sure those eagles will not miss the opportunity to feed some or all of her young goslings to their eaglets. Eagles are tough on young geese and ducks.

But it is a remarkable thing to see this, because I have never known of geese nesting high in a hollow tree before. I have not talked to any other outdoorsmen who have seen it happen either. It is like she watched wood ducks nesting and decided to imitate them. If it weren’t for the eagles, it would have been a heck of a good idea. Anyhow, the photos of the old goose in her nest are on my website now, so if you would like to see this very unusual situation, go check them out. There are also some photos of an Ozark cobra!!

Well, it looks like a cobra. I happened across a hog-nosed viper, or spreading adder, one of the most harmless of all snakes, but the meanest-acting, most dangerous-looking of all Ozark reptiles. The one I found looked to be about 20 inches long, and they don’t get much longer than that. They spread their head and neck just like a cobra, and hiss and spit out foul-smelling venomous-looking stuff, and then eventually, they bite themselves, writhe in agony in a fake death, then roll over on their back and play dead. You can’t get the snake to bite you, but they look like they would.

In the back of their mouths are short fangs, which contain actual venom. That venom is weak, used only to stun and kill toads, which is their main food source. The way the fangs are situated, they couldn’t be use to strike mammals the way a copperhead or rattlesnake can. Their dangerous looks and actions get many hog-nosed snakes killed, but those who know about their phony act let them live. Trouble is, they do indeed look like a cobra, and they will raise their bodies, with flattened head, several inches above the ground when first confronted. I also photographed a big oak which was clobbered last week by a bolt of lightning, not far from Lightnin’ Ridge. You can see all those photos on my website… www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com

I photographed a lot of things while turkey hunting last week, in between the rain and thunderstorms. I didn’t photograph any dead turkeys, and it hurts to say this, but just so all you grizzled old outdoorsmen will know that I don’t always succeed at what I do, (even though I seldom write about anything but the successes)--- I missed two big gobblers in two days.

In the past forty years of hunting wild gobblers, I have never missed two in one season, and have never had a spring that I haven’t killed at least a couple of gobblers, since I use to hunt in both Arkansas and Missouri, and occasionally another state or two before spring ended. But there are six days left in the season as I write this, and I have yet to measure a set of spurs, or drag one back to my pickup. And my confidence is very shaky, because I have garden work to do, and fishing to do, and my boots are almost worn out.

What happened was, I struggled to find a gobbler without hens. As a matter of fact, I never saw a season this late with so many wild turkeys still in flocks, as they have been this spring. I finally got three gobblers going in the deep woods one day just before noon. When gobblers are together, you have to fool three sets of eyes and with their eyes, that isn’t easy. But they came in under the brow of a hill, three toms, all gobbling, and I knew they were only fifty or sixty yards below me. For some reason, one of them, or another one from somewhere else, came around me, running at a good clip. If he had been to my left, I might have killed him, but he was behind me to my right, and as a right-handed shooter, you can’t have a much worse situation than trying to turn that way and shoot a gobbler which is going to put his head down and take off like a racehorse.

He got to within 15 steps or less, and I knew I might just let him go and possibly still get one of the gobblers in front of me to come on up. But it is hard to look out the corner of your eye at a long beard and a bright red head and maintain your composure. I knew better, but I just couldn’t contain myself. I struggled to get my shotgun barrel around and blast him as he reacted, but he was much faster than me. I squeezed off a shot at his head and neck just as he put a 12-inch cedar tree trunk between us.

The cedar tree may die, but the gobbler left untouched, and the toms down below me decide to head for distant woodlands. I kicked rocks and stumps and cussed my luck and asked God how he could let something like that happened to someone who used to go to church on a regular basis. I heard thunder off in the distance and that calmed me down considerably, so I apologized! I know God has more important things to do than help me shoot better, and I told Him that.

It didn’t help. I missed another one the next day, and may eventually tell that story too, but right now it hurts too much to recall it. If I am to learn humility at this stage in my life, I reckon I can handle it, but it ain’t easy.

Because it is the dark of the moon, and May, I will start doing some night fishing below submerged lights, for crappie and walleye, on both Stockton and Bull Shoals over the next two weeks. Nothing can compare to it when it is right. Over the years some of the biggest crappie and walleye and white bass I have ever caught have come from all-night excursions on my pontoon boat, especially on Bull Shoals, where threadfin shad are attracted to the lights, and huge fish congregate beneath those bait-fish schools. When the moon begins to come back, night fishing for bass with big spinner baits will be in its prime. And if the rivers ever get back to normal, float fishing for smallmouth should be great. This coming week may be the best time to catch spawning crappie too, as that kind of fishing is also late. You might begin to see why being an outdoor writer this time of year is a difficult way to make a living. Especially when you have the rotten luck I have! If my fishing goes the way of my turkey hunting, I might not catch a fish until the tomatoes are ripe.

E-mail me with your sympathies if you would like, at lightninridge@windstream.net, or write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613. And better luck to all of you, whether you deserve it or not!

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Hunting the Trophy Mushroom

With so much rain, assuming we have warm weather to follow, we could have a prolonged morel mushroom season, especially in northern parts of the Ozarks. And if you find a few, you ought to find a lot of them. Mushrooms fascinate me, maybe because as a kid I never got to hunt Easter eggs out on the farm like the town kids did. 

I didn’t miss it so much. I remember one year grandpa told me he had found the Easter bunny hung in a barbed wire fence and he had spilled his whole sackful of Easter eggs in the creek. So my cousins and I had some hard-boiled eggs he had spray painted, and were just happy to know that the Easter bunny had got loose and recovered and there would always be next year. But you don’t have to have many hard-boiled eggs to be satisfied, and I always did want some chocolate ones. 

I realize now that morels are like chocolate eggs, you can’t wait to eat some of them, but if you gorge yourself on them, you’re liable to get sick. Every year I eat so many mushrooms at the first setting that I get a little bit queasy. I give away a lot of mushrooms, but not until after the first bunch I find have made me a little bit sick. I do the same thing with spring crappie!  And I am sure that if I had all the chocolate I wanted, I would get a little bit sick from eating them. I don’t know… I never did have all the chocolate I wanted. But I did eat a whole chocolate pie once in about ten minutes and it had such an awful effect on me that I think now I probably wouldn’t be able to eat more than half of one at one time.

Morels make a few people sick and you have to remember that. It is because some people just cannot eat any kind of fungus without having a reaction to it. You will hear many people say that the big red mushrooms which look like a morel are poisonous.  They are commonly called ‘beefsteak mushrooms’, and they look like a gigantic morel, sometimes growing to the size of a bushel basket. They are definitely not poison, I have eaten a passel of them. But they will certainly cause a great deal of stomach distress for some people. 

Morels began to grow here on Lightnin’ Ridge this year early in the second week of April, about the tenth or eleventh. I went out and found a couple dozen small ones on the 13th. They were all fairly high on the eastern-facing slope in scattered timber, but down the slope I couldn’t find any, and that is where they usually are the thickest. On the 20th of April, I found four dozen or so popping up down lower on the slope, but up high where I had found those first small ones, there were no new ones. That seems kind of odd to me. The early mushrooms were small, and drying out just a little and the later ones were larger and fresh. But remember that if you find drying morels, if you put them in the water, they will soften up and taste just fine.

The rain began the next day and continues as I write this, threatening to flood the whole Midwest.  I am sure that any mushrooms still out there will last awhile, and a few new ones might grow. I think I can find some more while turkey hunting, if the sun ever shines again, and likely eat enough to get sick of them again.  It is unusual to see a grizzled old outdoorsman like me who is sensitive to too many wild greens or mushrooms or too many fish at one setting. I have never had any trouble eating too much wild turkey, which I hope to do later this month. But I might also point out that while that one chocolate pie was a little bit hard on me, I have been able to eat well over a dozen donuts in only a matter of minutes, and I feel like I could do that any time. All the food groups that I have mentioned in the above paragraph, combined with lots of home-grown tomatoes and blackberry cobbler later in the summer, will perhaps keep you as healthy as I am. You need quite a few watermelons in the summer too, to stay anti-dehydrated.

Before I get off the subject of spring mushrooms, I might add that I have studied mushrooms for many springs, and I once watched a small mushroom that came up fresh one April morning, for three whole days to see if it would grow at all, and it did not. I believe they grow late in the night, perhaps in a matter of hours, and at dawn, they are as large as they are going to get. The little grey ones grow early in the spring, and lack much color, and the larger ones which are a more yellow in color, come up later. The largest one I ever saw was about 15 inches from the base to the tip.  I may someday attempt to establish a wild mushroom record book, in which we can begin a trophy mushroom category, and a scoring system involving girth, height and some other factors. The world can never have enough trophy hunters, and this will help create more of them. There is a lot of money to be made from trophy hunters, and I believe many of them could be sold bags of mushroom seeds at a premium price!

If you want to be a trophy mushroom hunter, you had best do it on the next few warm sunny days we have. If you eat too many and are still a little selfish about giving them to your relatives, remember that you can just fry them, then freeze them when they cool. Then all summer you can thaw them out, heat them in a microwave and get a little bit sick all over again from eating too many mushrooms.

We have decided to have our historic john-boat building day on Saturday, July 9th, at which time we will build two different wooden river boats, one of them an authentic White River johnboat, and the other a Big Piney style johnboat like my grandfather made nearly a century ago. We are not sure where it will be, but we are going to select a place where there is plenty of shade and have a big dinner that day put together by Richard’s Hawgwild Barbecue out of Aurora, Mo. We hope to find and invite other johnboat builders, paddle-makers, wood-carvers and lure makers; in fact anyone who has a trade or craft relating to the 1900’s through the 1950’s, and just have an enjoyable day reflecting on the good ol’ days. I hope we have ladies bringing canned goods and baked goods, some watermelons and homemade ice-cream, musicians (without amplifiers) coming to play old-time instruments, and folks there displaying or selling old lures, carvings, quilts, etc. If you would like to come and bring something, you need to contact me about it. It is all free and you can set up a table and display your work or sell anything that relates to the old days before the 1950’s. The johnboats will be sold to the highest bidder, and sassafras paddles will be sold as well. I will let you know soon where we have decided to have this historic day-long event which may last way into the night. It will be a lot of fun, so keep that weekend open.

See my website, www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com, and e-mail me at lightninridge@windstream.net  My address is Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613.

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High Water

The little lake in the center of the Ozarks is bigger right now than it has ever been. Pomme de Terre Lake is small in comparison to some Ozark reservoirs like Bull Shoals, Tablerock and Truman, but it is a rocky, fairly clear lake with some very good fishing, one of the few lakes in the Midwest stocked with muskellunge, known as muskies by fishermen.

Last fall, the Corps of Engineers decided that the spillway had some problems, and they shut down the outflow from Pomme De Terre and contracted out some concrete repair projects which seem to be a little behind. The rains which we have received in recent months have filled the lake to capacity, and it has backed up the Pomme de Terre River like I have never seen it.

Thousands upon thousands of live trees are in the water now, budding out and preparing to green-up in a huge backwater mess. This worries me, because if that water stands on those trees until the end of spring, I am afraid thousands of them will die. That happened on Truman Lake about 20 years ago, simply because the development on Lake of the Ozarks prevented releasing floodwaters from Truman. Millions of trees died, and the great duck hunting the lake afforded ended with that, as all the pin-oaks that were being flooded each fall and giving acorns to incoming waterfowl, died out. It seemed to be the beginning of the end for much of Truman’s watershed where cockleburs have now taken over.

I talked to a Corps ranger recently that I fish with, and he said that it looks as if water will begin to be released on April 7, and if so, Pomme de Terre will soon be back to normal, with no loss of trees in the watershed. I am praying he is right. He should know what he is talking about. Ranger Rich Abdoler, one of my closest friends, is a forestry major who has worked on Truman Lake for 38 years, and he is a very knowledgeable outdoorsman.  He doesn’t believe that any trees will be lost because of the floodwaters now seen on the river and other tributaries to Pomme de Terre.

Truman Lake will receive that huge release of water, and it may ruin fishing on the Pomme de Terre arm of Truman Lake, as the river flowing into it will likely be very high for quite some time. Truman Lake has lots of walleye and white bass, and a good population of hybrids (white bass-striper crosses) which grow to 15 pounds or so. The new flush of water might make it harder for most fishermen to fish the river above Truman, but I believe it might draw some large schools of hybrids after April 7, if fishermen know how go after them. But duck hunters on the Pomme de Terre River died a year ago when they tried to navigate the high, swift waters above Truman Lake, and I hope anyone who tackles it this spring will have the boat to handle the size of it.

It has been a late season for spawning walleye, and white bass, which run up those tributaries, because water temperatures this spring have been colder, longer, than normal. But this past week, we found hundreds of white bass males up small tributaries to several lakes, and they were hungry. But females weren’t to be seen, and the whites weren’t taking topwater lures at all. I expect all that will be changing soon.

White bass are fun to catch on light tackle, but if you use light tackle, you might catch a big walleye while fishing for them, and find it hard to handle. I have said this often, but if you don’t like to eat white bass, it probably is because of the layer of red meat found on whites, stripers and hybrids. Filet the white bass you catch, then put those filets in ice water for just a short time, and the filets will become very firm. Then take your filet knife and skim off the red meat found just under the skin. The white meat you are left with is delicious. I wrote recently that I believe white bass filets are tastier than any others except crappie, walleye, bass, catfish, and bluegill! Ands while that is true, when visitors at my place try white bass filets I have deep-fried, no one complains about the flavor, They are very good.

Several readers have asked me about the letters they received from a group known as the “Appalachian Wildlife Fund”.  Thousands of Missouri hunters got a group of tickets in the mail from that mysterious organization, and yes, they got your address from the Missouri Department of Conservation, after donating $50,000 to the MDC. Assistant Director Tim Ripperger says it was all above the table, that sunshine laws mean that anyone can get your name and address and other information which you give to the department when you buy a fishing license. But years ago, when I tried to get such a list, I was told it would cost us thousands of dollars. He says things have changed since then.

At any rate, the Appalachian Wildlife Fund sent all of us tickets which the letter said might win us about 17 different rifles, and four or five hunting trips, including a moose hunt in Canada, and a “Missouri Bull Elk” tag in Kentucky, where, coincidentally, the MDC is acquiring several hundred elk to stock in a selected area of the Ozarks. To win, you had to return the tickets with $25 for each, and then you were eligible for the drawing.

The whole thing sounded very suspicious to me, so I called the man behind it all, David Ledford, head of the Appalachian Wildlife Fund, who lives in Kentucky.  I hoped to find out who won those rifles and hunting trips. He refused to give me names and addresses, and hung up on me. Who is David Ledford, and is he the only one involved in the “Appalachian Wildlife Fund”?  Were all those prizes awarded to some lucky Missourians, or were the winners pre-determined?  Wouldn’t it seem we could all know that, since our license information was used?

Someone needs to investigate this, perhaps our state’s attorney general, or a news agency. But the MDC seems too powerful to be investigated, and none of us may ever know what happened. I know this; when I give information on my hunting and fishing licenses, which gives my social security number as well, I don’t want that information being given to anyone. But make no mistake about this… the MDC received a 50,000 dollar gift, and David Ledford and the “Appalachian Wildlife Fund” made some big money with the information given them. Not one newspaper or TV station in our state will look into it, because no one investigates the MDC, who gives tons of free info to the media each year to prevent that.

We will see if we can get names and address of license holders from the MDC, in order to send out free Lightnin’ Ridge magazines to everyone. Somehow, I doubt it.

My mailing address is Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. The e-mail address is lightninridge@windstream.net  (no g on the end of lightnin).  My website is www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com  

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