I
saw a couple of unusual things in the woods this week as cool weather came and
fall flowers seemed to be blooming everywhere. For one thing, the migration of butterflies is beginning and
it seems you can find some different-looking ones every year.
I opened the door to an old
shed last week and a beautiful creature had a home inside. His name really hurts him. Folks know him as a woodrat, but he
is nothing like a Norway rat or house-rat which is not even native to the Ozarks. The woodrat deserves a different name because he isn’t dirty
and doesn’t carry fleas, which caused the plague in Europe centuries
ago. Again, it is the house-rat which did that.
The woodrat, native to this country,
is nothing
similar to the non-native house rat.
house rat
The
woodrat I found jumped up to a beam along the wall of the shed and sat there
looking at me. It’s face, with big
black eyes and large, round ears, reminded me of some little Australian
marsupial I have seen photos of.
But its fur was a brown and golden color, with a white underneath. The tail is not bare, but with a short
silky coat of fur, which tells you he is just as close to other native rodents
as the squirrel and chipmunk as he is a rat or mouse.
If
I had named him I think I would have spared him the name of rat.
The muskrat ought to be called
something else too, because his name mistakenly identifies him as something he
is not. Muskrats are fairly
good to eat. In the old days in
the Midwest, lots of families along rivers and wetlands ate muskrats. There’s nothing dirty about them, and
there is nothing dirty about a woodrat.
The one I watched for so long had a beautiful coat, and if you knew his
diet, you’d agree with me that he is nothing similar to those house-rats or
house-mice we all despise. Those
two creatures, like starlings and carp, are not native to our country.
Then
I sat down against a big tree and had to remove a flat rock to make my spot a
little more level. Beneath it was
a small dark-brown scorpion, a little less than three inches in length. Not many folks have ever been stung by
scorpions, but I have, and its sting is about twice as painful as anything else
I have ever stung by.
Thirty
some years ago I had taken my family over to Bull Shoals in the summer to swim
and I had on a pair of tennis shoes that got good and wet. I left them in the boat that night,
with a couple of really pretty pieces of driftwood I had picked up for Gloria
Jean’s flower garden. The next day
I went out and retrieved the old tennis shoes because I intended to go fish
Crooked Creek that afternoon.
Without
any socks, I slipped the shoes on and my right foot began to burn on top, just
like someone had placed a hot, burning charcoal chip on top of it. It took me little time to get that shoe
off and there was a fairly large, nearly white, scorpion inside it. It burned like that for most of the
day, and I didn’t go fishing… I sat around hurting and moaning. Nothing I could apply to that sting
alleviated the pain!
When
I was a young park naturalist, a camper from the city came to me, absolutely
scared to death. His little
boy had a scorpion crawling up his leg.
That fellow was a great father because he thought scorpions in Missouri
were poison, and yet he grabbed it and was stung, trying to protect the little
boy. He came to me to ask how long
I thought he might live if he couldn’t get to a hospital in time.
I
told him that our scorpions weren’t poison, that only the ones down in southern
Mexico and Central America were poison.
But he wouldn’t believe me until I dug out a guide-book which told him
in print that he wasn’t in danger.
I have never seen a man so relieved. His wife and kids were scared to death and crying, until I
convinced them, and then it was like I had pulled them all from a burning tent.
I was a hero, for a short time!
I
am not admired greatly by a lady who read my column a couple of weeks ago,
which stated in jest that I thought people who bow-hunt for deer in September
were crazy. She took it seriously and got very mad, leaving me a message saying
that I was “full of crap” and didn’t know what I was talking about.
Sure
I do, m’am. I have been there and
done that. But you shouldn’t be so
upset. Just go out there in the
weeds and mosquitoes and heat and hunt all you want while I relax down on the
river and catch fish in the shade and cool water. And don’t be so sensitive about being called ‘crazy’. I’ve been called crazy for years for a
lot of what I have written.
When
I head off out into the duck marsh when it is 20 degrees and I have to break
ice to set out decoys, people say, “Man you’re crazy!” When I spend the night sleeping on a
gravel bar in a tent you can’t stand up in, people tell me I am crazy. When I get up at three o’clock in the
morning just to get to a place a hundred miles away where I can hear turkeys
gobble at daylight just like they are doing the same morning down behind my
house, folks think I am crazy.
I
get called crazy all the time for a lot of things… eating some mushroom I never
tried before or trying to fish Ontario’s Lake of the Woods in a thirty mile and
hour wind, or paying fifty dollars for a young setter that is scared to death
of the sight of a shotgun. It
never has bothered me. But one thing
I won’t do. I won’t gut a
deer when it is 85 degrees and the flies have to be shooed away while I am
doing it.
I’ll
hunt deer in December when it’s too cold to be fishing. At such a time, when the snow is
blowing and the temperature dropping and ice pellets sting your face, it makes
perfect sense to be huddled high in a tree stand, shivering and waiting. And lady, if you go fishing in that
kind of weather, you’re crazy.
There
are about three-dozen newspapers in three states using this column. From time to time I write something an
editor doesn’t approve of and it is omitted. Occasionally papers have a space problem and they have to
cut some of it. Some papers never
have room for photos. In order to
see this column and the pictures with it in it’s entirety, you can see it each
week on my website, wwwlarrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com . That is if you are a
computer-savvy person, which I am not.
If
you think computers are something you can trust and depend on you should try to
find the Wikipedia thing which tells about me in a very humorous but insulting
way. I think it was put in there
by someone in the state conservation department! It states that I married Tonya Harding. Don’t I wish…I always thought she
was gorgeous and I always wanted to learn how to skate. Please don’t tell Gloria Jean.
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