Speaking at Newport Arkansas

I met some great people down at Newport, Arkansas, speaking Saturday night to a large group attending a banquet there, at the first baptist church... I love speaking at various events where folks are trying to raise money for those who are in need.

Journal of the Ozarks -- Current Issue only...

We have 50 extra Journal of the Ozarks magazines which can be sent out just for the cost of postage. All of our mailing will take place next Thursday, so to get one free just send your address and two dollars to journal of the Ozarks, Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613. We have to have it by then. Or call us to do it by credit card 417 777 5227. I Only found out about this today.. Corning Printing told us they have to mail out 50 more to reach a mailing quota. larry dablemont

Ain’t February Grand?

             At my corn feeder here on my wooded ridge-top, a pair of deer fed while it snowed, and in the cedars around it, there was a covey of quail, nine birds.  In the cedars, about 20 mourning doves sought shelter and fox and grey squirrels were gorging themselves.  Out on my Panther Creek ranch about 30 miles to the northwest, I have three corn feeders, which would be illegal if it weren’t something the Conservation Department hadn’t told me I could do in order to kill a pair of deer between now and March15.

 

            They want to test them for TSE (I refuse to call it CWD).  If the deer are not diseased, I will give the venison to a family of seven that needs the meat, and that is the only way I would be agreeable to this.  It might ordinarily be strange to be hunting deer in February but with all the cold and snow this year, it isn’t as weird as it normally would be, when I might be making a trip to the White River to fish for post-spawn brown trout or fishing some local lake tributaries for pre-spawn walleye.

            But if I can get out in the outdoors where I can be alone and not see or hear any people I am happy, regardless of what I am doing.  One of my late winter hobbies is exploring caves along the river I grew up on.  I am not so much interested in going back into the depths of such caves, but looking for signs of those bluff dwellers from an age gone by, or finding the artifacts of early Ozarkian settlers, left behind.

            In a cave not far from the river which has a little creek flowing out of it, I found an old washtub a couple of years ago with holes punched in the sides of it, down the slope along the creek. What a thrill it was to realize I had found one of my grandfather’s live bait containers from my boyhood.  I could remember seeing that old washtub hanging on a nail behind his little cabin.  He used it to keep trotline bait alive in the spring, summer and fall. 

            He would camp in the cave and catch chubs and sunfish from the creek, and put them in the tub with a screen cover over it.  Then he would take the bait out when he needed it for his trotlines.  With them he would catch big flathead catfish, which he also kept alive in a small inescapable pool in that creek.  It was one of his favorite places, and he might stay in that cave for several days, until he felt he had caught the biggest flathead in that eddy, up to 35 or 40 pounds.

            I found a rusty old pistol frame in front of one such cave, no cylinder in it.  I would give a lot to know its history.  My grandfather never carried a pistol, ever.  He considered them useless.  A double-barreled shotgun or light .22 rifle was with him on all trips, and you can bet he never left much behind, except something like that old tub.

            Most of today’s woods-walkers… probably 90 percent, will not be found in the deep wilderness where no trodden trails are found.  But places where you can follow a game trail fascinate me.  And I am absolutely ecstatic when I find a cave, because of the unknown history it holds.  Some that grandpa showed me are so hard to find you never see a human foot print in them.

            I won’t enjoy hunting deer in the next week or so over a pile of corn.  When the weather warms, I will likely be doing something else. It is coming soon, the first buds of spring, migrating blue-winged teal, a little bit of warming below the shoals drawing fish from perhaps miles down the lake.  It is something when you can walk out on your back porch in early March and hear a roosting Tom turkey gobble at the approaching sunlight in the east.  Once, from my porch you might hear 6 or 8.  Last year I never heard more than 2 on any morning.  I haven’t seen any at my feeder but my daughter gave me some encouragement when a month or so ago she saw 6 or 7 turkeys in the woods down below my home, but they were all hens and young of last year.  There were no gobblers.

            That is worrisome, because you could regularly see 25 or 30 turkeys down in the woods here only 8 or 10 years ago.  Something bad is happening to wild turkeys in many many areas of the Midwest.  I am not looking forward to a spring with wild gobblers sounding off in all directions, there just aren’t that many now.  But I will be out there anyway… as I said, I find a peace and contentment far from the crowds that is just as good today as it was years and years ago.  Maybe more so now than ever, knowing there are not as many such days left as we all get older.

           It is cold here today and a good day to build a nice fire in the fireplace and work on a book I am trying to finish.  But winter beckons too; different than any other time of the year for what an outdoorsman can do and see.  You can’t say it isn’t a good time.  Today is a day that the Lord has made… rejoice and be glad in it, if you have some warm boots and a heavy coat, gloves and fur-lined hat.

            On Saturday the 23^rd of February I will be speaking at a wild game banquet at the First Baptist Church in Newport Arkansas.  Church officials wanted me to tell readers that all are invited.

                                               

Outdoorsman's Swap Meet

Our grizzled old veteran outdoorsman's swap meet will be Saturday March 16. want to help? we are having a meeting about making this the biggest and best one we ever had. we could sure use some help. if you want to join us in any way, come to the coffee room at the Brighton Assembly of God Church in Brighton Mo at 7 p.m. next Monday evening( February 25). Mark Cross and i will be there planning everything and we need you. if you want to help but can't make it, contact me. we have plenty of these fliers to be posted on bulletin boards around the area.

Spring Magazines are Completed and Ready To Go Out

BOTH MAGAZINES FINISHED... will be on the newsstands soon, mailed to subscribers in about a week. if you want to subscribe or just get one of the two, or both, call Ms. Wiggins, my executive secretary at 417 777 5227. one magazine has 96 pages, the other 72. Kathy Freeze, Mary Randolph and Dorothy Loges did a heck of a job on these. Gloria Jean and Ms. Wiggins are really having a hard time gettin along so i may fire one of the two. I think gloria jean is smarter, but much more expensive to keep around!

The Pet Deer... and MDC

       Common sense isn’t used much anymore.  I was recently involved in something of a comedy that could have used a little common sense. It happened just after the gun deer season closed.  A farmer from Halfway Missouri by the name of Larry McCarthy called me to say that there was a big buck in his field wandering around and he was afraid he might be sick, perhaps with  the dreaded cwd he had heard so much about.   He said he had called the local conservation agents and they had advised him to just shoot the deer and let it lay.  McCarthy didn’t want to do that because he feared if it had that chronic wasting disease (actually known as transmissible spongiform encephalopathy) that it might affect local livestock.  He asked if I would come and look at it and I did.  Was I ever surprised!  What a set of antlers the buck had!  I walked up close to him and took several photos.  He wasn’t sick at all… he was just another tame deer and I have seen many of them. I knew immediately what was going on.  I have seen several bucks with cwd or tse, whichever you want to call it. And I have also seen a bunch of pen-raised tame deer!   That is exactly what that buck was. He showed no sign of any problem at all acknowledging me with curiosity, and then he went about doing what buck deer do, eating and walking about looking for a better mouthful, browsing from here to there.  His coat was clean and healthy and he was fat, very well fed.  He had been raised somewhere from a little fawn, and had no fear of humans. When I went back to where Mr. McCarthy waited by his pick-up, I told him the deer wasn’t sick, but tame, likely pen-raised somewhere close, by someone who had raised him from a fawn and wanted to make money from him by selling him to a hunting enclosure somewhere, where he would be killed by a hunter paying a considerable amount of money.  I asked if there were many Mennonites or Amish landowners nearby and he said, “Maybe that’s why so many of them have been buzzing around here this morning so interested   in this buck.”  Sure enough there was a Mennonite deer pen not far away.

       “The buck is healthy,” I told Mr. McCarthy, “and his head and antlers are worth a lot of money to some wealthy trophy hunter.  They are exceptional, not often seen in wild deer.”

      A conservation official arrived then and I took a photo of him just in case someone doesn’t want to believe this.  He looked like a swat team member after a shopping mall shooter!  He had ear phones, and a plastic face mask at first; and an automatic assault rifle, with a special uniform and military boots. He saw that buck and it is my opinion he couldn’t wait to shoot it, even after I told him it was tame, not sick.

       Mr. McCarthy didn’t want to believe me.  A buck deer that acted like a pet calf had him spooked.  He wanted it gone.  I suggested he go to town and get a landowners archery permit and shoot the deer with a bow or crossbow so that he would get to keep the antlers and perhaps sell them after having the head mounted.

        

  

     He started to think about that, but the MDC shooter didn’t want any part of that.  He was sure the deer was sick and I think he wanted to try his weapon on a 100-yard shot.  I told him that since anyone could walk up and pat it on the flank, he could allow Mr. McCarthy to shoot it with a bow or crossbow, tag it and possess it AND THEN HAVE IT CHECKED FOR CWD, like all other hunters were doing.

       The shooter wasn’t buying that… he said he was going to shoot the buck and take it with him.  That’s when Mr. McCarthy said ‘wait a minute’.  I told him how an area taxidermists were insisting to me that they had dealt with some local agents who confiscated big deer antlers, had him mount them at cost, paid for by the MDC,  and then sold or kept the deer head for themselves to sell for some big money.         I said “Mr. Mc Carthy, the Missouri Department of Conservation Enforcement Division They should not get that deer head. It is on your land, not theirs.”  To my surprise he agreed with me, saying that they had targeted him a number of times over dove hunting, even hand-cuffing him at one time.  And thinking about that, he told the MDC employee that he wanted the antlers.  The  MDC’s shooter said ‘no’.

 

       Mr. McCarthy said there would be no more done until he knew he would get the antlers.  So the swat team fellow goes to his vehicle and gets on the radio and talks awhile and comes back and says an MDC official somewhere said McCarthy could have the deer head after the buck was tested.  I left then, imagining the sound of automatic rifle fire behind me.  And though I heard the MDC shooter tell Mr. McCarthy he could keep the skull and antlers, I would bet he never ever sees them.  And by the way,  a young boy living up the road from me told me about the Mennonite deer pen operation nearby.  I have yet to be able to find and talk with that Mennonite deer pen operator about whether one of his deer or several, had broken out of their enclosure.  I know his name and would like to know if his operation is all legal. I know this, he lost a bundle of money when that MDC shooter refused to take the time to go ask if the buck had escaped from his place. And I know I could have wrapped a rope around that bucks neck and carried a bucket of food before him and he would have followed me anywhere.  What a beautiful animal he was.  But he was the victim of a complete and total lack of common sense, and the fact that big deer antlers, created by feeding pen deer a diet of bone and meat meal, are worth so much money to those sick people who are looking for ‘trophies’.

       Mr. McCarthy told me later that from 30 yards, the MDC rifleman had missed the buck the first couple of shots, then gut-shot him.  It took the deer awhile to die.  It isn’t a pleasant story, but it is the truth, and in most newspapers, this story cannot be printed.

 

Contact me at lightninridge47@gmail.com or write me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo 65613  My office phone is 417 777 5227.

Exploring Your Own Trail

deep inside a small cave, I found what appears to be a prehistoric petrified jawbone

        I have found the jawbone of a prehistoric animal in a southern Missouri cave.  But it is part of a limestone wall back in the depths where no daylight can reach.  In that cave years ago a friend and I found about ten or fifteen projectile points on the floor of the cave just within it’s opening.  Caves fascinate me.  I love to hunt for them, and I like knowing that I know where many are which few modern explorers have entered.

         If you think about it, today’s people who live their lives in the massive herd of humanity we have created, seldom see a day when they are completely alone in some far reaches of the outdoors.  Modern hikers walk trails that thousands upon thousands of feet have trod before them.  In the late 1970’s I myself was an outdoor hiker in the Ozark and Ouachita mountains of Arkansas.  I laid out and built some trails for the Arkansas State Park System but I never walked established trails. Some trails used today in the Buffalo National Park are trails I laid out. And I was there exploring the wilder places of the state as a naturalist for he Arkansas Heritage Commission. At that time in my life there weren’t many hillsides and ravines I couldn’t climb or navigate. Some of that country was the

 5-inch pink projectile point I found in a remote AR cave

ruggedest wildest mountain country I have seen in the Midwest.  And the things I found, sometimes a full day’s hike into the mountains, were astounding.  Caves and waterfalls, old home places and ancient graves, moonshine stills from another time, and names carved into flat rock knolls that were used by troops in civil war times… were among the things I discovered.  I will always remember walking into a south-facing cave with a dry floor, and looking down to see about a half inch of a projectile point sticking out of the floor.  I just knew it was the broken end of an arrowhead, but I took my knife out and began to scrape away the dirt to reveal a spear point nearly five inches long, a bright pink perfectly-formed weapon made perhaps thousands of years ago.  I stood there holding something that had been made by a man I scarcely could envision in my mind, a man who perhaps lived in that cave with a family.  Maybe nothing has ever made me feel as insignificant and small.

In such caves I also found evidence that early settlers had lived within sheltering rock walls, who knows how long ago.  I recalled times when I had spent nights inside a sheltering cave on the river where I grew up, sometimes escaping the cold, sometimes just staying dry  before a campfire while listening to a pelting rain and the crack of lightning bolts just outside the entrance. When I was in college I caught a pair of live ground mammals in a cave that turned out to be a species never known to have been found in my Ozark region.  That story is related in the spring issue of my outdoor magazine if you care to read about it.

 

But it may be that the caves of the Ozarks in three states will someday shelter families again as they did for hundreds and hundreds of years.  It could happen as our technology threatens a progressing, modern life in the future.  So many have springs flowing in the back of them, and controlled temperatures that give you a chance to stay warm in the worst of blizzards, or cool in the midst of an August heat wave.

  

For modern-day outdoor visitors it is probably best that you hike the worn trails of a thousand others who walked them in the few months before you, and photograph the same rocks and waterfalls and outcroppings that thousands have photographed before you.  But there are still, in the huge tracts of national forestland in Arkansas and Missouri and Oklahoma where you can make your own way following no trails at all, in semi-wilderness areas, seeing sights you may be one of only a few to see and experience.  

And you might find a remote cave this time of year where the only tracks across it’s dirt floor are of the black bear hibernating in a deep dark, confined passageway.  Or you may stumble into a small deep cave where bats are roosting by the hundreds, and there are blind crayfish and salamanders.  I have done both, and there isn’t a mapped, used trail I ever want to see again.

Now is the time to go where others do not, when vegetation isn’t heavy and you can see farther and better and there are no rattlesnakes and copperheads to watch for. In such places, your cell phone won’t work, so plan well and be sure you don’t end up needing something you could have taken in a backpack.  If you want to see and feel the best of it, take camping gear and food light enough to pack and spend two or three nights.

Email me at lightninridge47@gmail.com, write  to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613 or call our office at 417 777 5227.