Woe Is Me and My Knee!!

 

         I have had no outdoor adventures lately. It has been three weeks since I came down with something called RSV, which stands for “respiratory something virus”.  It took me two weeks to get over that. Right behind it was a scheduled knee operation, made necessary by the fact that I jumped off the front of my boat last year, as I have done for decades. But that most recent time, I tore something called a meniscus. I don’t know what it is, but it’s a major part of walking found inside your knee…and what you can’t do without it is, you can’t wade in the river where there are big rocks, because it hurts badly when you do and you often fall.  You also can’t bend over to catch a frog, or get on your knees to take a catfish off a trotline.

         Being a grizzled old outdoors veteran, I can take a tremendous amount of pain, but limping around like you have a ten-penny nail drove into your knee gets aggravating. So I get over the RSV problem and go right in to have my meniscus took out or sewed back together or whatever, and all this comes about the time I normally do some night-time bass fishing or trotline fishing in the cooler part of the day, which is the night. 

         The reason I am not writing about that is because I am limping around my place wondering why it hurts as much to fix a meniscus as it does to break it! But I am patient so I wait. Like I have a choice? It has been fixed  for three days and I have no recourse but to sit and complain, and perhaps sharpen my trotline hooks as I watch Gunsmoke on television. My knee is just about like it was on day one and day two. The arthroscopic surgeon says I will be good as new someday; perhaps when duck season gets here, I don’t know. Right now, putting on a pair of waders would be next to impossible.

         But I shall prevail… I hope. I am downright determined, defiantly dedicated and dadblamed disgusted!  Life will be different from now on.  Jumping off anything higher than a brick will no longer be done.  My deer stand will be two feet shorter. And using my imagination and sharp-as-a-razor memory, I leave you with what would be happening this week or next, if this darn knee recuperates to full usability.  Here goes…

       “----The heat of the day is behind me. It is substantially dark and upriver a boss bullfrog is bellowing.  I will go after him soon, quietly paddling my boat toward the bank where his bulky body besits. I will shine a broad beam of light in his eyes and grab him with my free hand.  He will go into the burlap bag with a couple of his bellowing bullfrog buddies, bound for a fine frog fry soon to come.  Families of young crawdads along that eddy will rest easier because of his demise. For baby crawdads a boss bullfrog is a bad bully.

         But first, I pick up my rod and cast my jitterbug lure toward the bank in the coolness of fading evening.  The big lure slides across the still water swirling below the shoal and a smallmouth bass of substantial size slurps it under with a surprisingly quiet splash.  My rod is nearly doubled, and I let him wear down as I wait, never lessening the pressure, holding the jitterbug hooks solid in his jaw.   Then I net the rascal and admire his size before I release him; a battling big brown bass, bold and beautiful in the bright beam of my brow-light there on the bottom of the boat.

         Again the bullfrog bellows upstream.  Should I go after him or try another cast.  It is a difficult decision, one an outdoorsman like me must make on a regular basis.  But I am up to it… such is the ways and the plight of a grizzled old veteran riverman! Right or wrong, I will live by such decisions which must be made… once this darned knee gets back to normal!!!  But I sure as heck won’t ever decide to jump off the boat!

 

         If you like to read, I have a new short story book coming out, and a new magazine too.  You can get copies or information about either by calling my office, 417 777 5227.  Normally you would have to talk with my secretary, Ms. Wiggins, but while this knee heals, you likely will get aholt of me.  I may answer in a somewhat pained voice.

         Read past columns on www.larrydablemont.outdoors and write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613

The Poison Fish.

 

Longnose Gar Fish

A Question from a reader…   Is a garfish good to eat?  Some say they are.  

 

         Answer…   There are four species of gar in the Midwest but only one is the scourge of Ozark streams. That is the long-nose gar, which wasn’t seen in the clear clean Ozark rivers a hundred years ago. Now they are thick in some of our best rivers, something of a leftover from prehistoric times that just outgrew the slow muddy waters along the Mississippi. They eat small fish of all species.  

         Ozark streams are full of long-nosed gar, which often grow to five feet in length and up to 25 or 30 pounds.  Some will tell you that anything you can cook is good to eat.  But I wouldn’t go through the job of skinning a gar to eat one.  I have tasted the meat and it is passable.  But then I ate so much fish as a kid I am not a big fan of any meat from our fine finny fish friends.  The best fish I have ever eaten came from the waters of the small mountain streams of Colorado where you catch 10 to 12-inch brook trout with either very light short rods or fly rods.  Those little fish are so good to eat I could never get enough of them, when fried in a skillet right alongside the small creeks where they are found or anywheres else.  Comparing gar meat to a fried brook trout is like comparing mud pies to chocolate cake.  

         Gar and paddlefish are good eating for many, but to me they are not anything worth bragging on…. just not all that good. Why would anyone eat a gar or paddlefish if they can get any of the other fish that are found in the same waters?  Gar are so numerous they harm the spawning waters of other more desirable species.  Bow fishermen and giggers who kill and dispose of gar and carp are doing fishermen a big favor although you can, if you work at it, make them edible.  To me, eating a gar is like going into a bakery and passing up all the donuts and cake and pie and having them fix you a biscuit!           

         Here’s more advice from my expert experiences eked from an environmental existence and ecological education… ANY fish meat you eat should have ALL red meat removed.  That red meat really does give fish an undesirable taste.  But I have been told that red meat is a source of good fish oil, which is desirable for humans. Yuck!!! My advice is, do not eat gar, throw them up on the bank for the coons or bury them in your garden to make good fertilizer.

         While it might be something I ought not to write about, I guess that gar-eaters need to know that gar are spawning through June and the eggs of a gar are poisonous to mammals, of which humans are one of… mammals that is.  If they are eaten, gar eggs will kill cats and dogs, raccoons and possums, and even people.  My dad loved the fried fish eggs of bass and goggle-eye. I am glad mom never knew that gar eggs were poison!  A little humor there. I can see a problem arising with that knowledge, as cats would easily eat those eggs. I doubt that dogs would, and while I don’t know this, I am sure a while a raccoon would eat most anything; they surely have been endowed with the knowledge that gar eggs are to be left alone.

         Anyway, the local sheriffs in the Ozark should know to look for a gar carcass around any Ozark home where some old boy who is married has died a suspicious death.

 

 B Second reader question… Are you putting out new books this year?

         Answer… Yes.. We have one coming out in a month or so entitled… “The Buck that Kilt the Widow Jones… Short Stories about the Outdoors and the Ozarks.”  We will mail that book out about the beginning of August I think.  The first 100 will be numbered and inscribed to the reader and autographed.  To get on that list contact my office.  Two other books, “The Life and Times of the Pool Hall Kid” and “The Justice of St. Clair County” will be ready in December, for Christmas Gifts. There are eleven now, all shown on www.larrydablemont.com

 

 C Third reader question… Would you write about the new tick diseases going around sometime? 

         Answer…. I would, but my daughter Lori, a physician who doctors faculty and staff at Missouri State University, has written a very complete article for my summer magazine, which tells more than I know about tick diseases.  If you get a copy of that magazine you will know as much as she does I suppose.  New tick diseases, like ‘alpha-gal’ disease has been deadly at times and renders healthy people violently allergic to red meat.  If you contact my office you can get that magazine for only postage costs.  But they will be sold out by August.

 

 

         If you need to talk with me, call my office at 417  777 5227 or email me at lightninridge47@gmail.com.  Send letters and questions to me at P.O. Box 22, Bolivar, 65613

 

 

An Odd Duck

 

       I watched as a mother wood-duck crossed an old road high on a ridge top, closely followed by three ducklings which I am sure had hatched that very day.  She was a good quarter-mile from the river, but intent on getting the young ducklings there as quickly as possible.

       Wood-ducks are odd ducks, because they nest in hollow trees rather than in a marshy, reed-covered wetland habitat as other puddle ducks do.  But what is odder still is the fact that very often, that hollow tree is far from the closest water.  Sometimes an old hen will nest close to a pond or river or lake, but often the tree she chooses is on a hillside or ridge, and she has to lead her young ones to water over a good distance of dry land. 

       That hollow in a tree might be 20 feet above the ground, sometimes more.  The ducklings hatch there and spend no time at all inside the cavity where the mother has laid her eggs.  They get dried out, and fluffed up, and then are fixated on the hen, who often is flying in and out, coaxing them to leave the hollow.  They hop up to the entrance and leap out into the great unknown with little hesitation.  I have watched them do that, and they actually appear to be trying to use their tiny little wings, but to no avail.  It seems they just tumble beak over tail feathers to the woodland floor, and it doesn’t hurt them at all.  They have no body weight.  

The hen waits ‘til they all get out, and in the nest cavity above, there may be some unhatched eggs left behind.  That nest may contain the eggs laid by two different hens, perhaps up to 16 or 18 eggs or even more. Once in North Little Rock, Arkansas, I witness a traffic slowdown on a busy thoroughfare while a wood-duck hen hustled at least a dozen little ducklings toward an Arkansas River slough that had to be a half-mile away.

       It was puzzling to see the hen last week being followed by only three ducklings.  That’s about the smallest clutch I have ever seen. It could be that some others were lagging back a ways, but usually they are all right with her.  Those ducklings which lag behind are usually doomed.  When I was a kid on the Big Piney river, I actually saw a wood-duck duckling only a day or so old, and slower than his brood-mates, disappear in a massive swirl on the surface made by what I assumed was a bass.

       We hate to look at it this way, but there is so much waste in nature when you are talking about the young of those creatures that are given the ability to reproduce well, like rabbits and mice. But it really isn’t a waste.  The young of those species cannot survive in huge numbers.  They are meant to be food for the predators, which have to also survive. One group, the eaten, has a high reproductive potential, while the other group, the eaters, have a high biotic (surviving) potential. The creatures which survive well do not produce huge numbers of young, while the creatures which do not survive well produce big numbers of offspring.  It seems as if there was a great scheme to it all, doesn’t it?

In our eyes, a weasel pouncing on a young chipmunk, or a raccoon feasting on the eggs he finds in a quail nest, or a hawk pinning a young rabbit to the earth, represents the ugly side of nature.  But there is no evil there.  All things fight to survive, predator and prey alike.  And in the end, where man hadn’t upset things with overwhelming land change, the whole system worked.  Not so much anymore.  Desirable creatures in the woods or in the water are becoming scarcer, while undesirables, often non-native, seem to be thriving.

       It is likely that those three little ducklings will not all survive.  Some mink will eat one perhaps; maybe some gosh-awful looking snapping turtle will pluck another one from the surface of the river.   But maybe not… maybe they will all three make it and I’ll bag one of them this fall as I hunt the river, grown to a beautiful mature drake.  And if I do, I will enjoy a wood-duck dinner, making me no less evil than a weasel or a turtle or a water snake.

       While heavy rains doom the quail and turkey chicks, the wood-duck ducklings are not at all fazed by a cloudburst like we have been having.  A rivulet filled with a torrent of rainwater will not soak the duckling’s feathers.  They will just be carried more quickly to the awaiting creek or flowing river where they will thrive and grow.   If it had been me doing it, I would have given those same water resistant feathers to the quail and turkey poults!  And I would have the mink and the hawk and bobcat eating grass and acorns and berries.   I wonder why God didn’t think of those things?