Attacked in Canada

 

      I took my daughter Christy to Canada on October 7 to fish some wilderness waters near Nestor Falls Ontario. We got there at midnight, got a good night’s sleep and woke up just after sun-up to the dawn of a beautiful day.  Or so I thought!

      I looked out the window of our cabin to the gentle waves on the lake and began to plan the day.  But the Good Lord had other plans, I reckon!  I was suddenly hit with a hard bolt of pain at the left center of my chest and there was no doubt what it was. In minutes my daughter was driving me back to a small hospital in International Falls Minnesota, an hour or so away. 

      A doctor there gave me some medicine to   stop the pain and it was a tremendous relief.  About four hours later he had a helicopter landing just outside and finally they loaded me into it and we headed for Duluth where there was a nearly new hospital with several cardiologists. 

      We landed just after sunset on the seventeenth floor of Duluth’s St.  Mary’s hospital overlooking Lake Superior.  I   was whisked into ICU and met the senior cardiologist who began all kinds of testing and told me they would do surgery the next morning.  Twenty-four hours later they added three stents where there had been two put into small arteries many years ago.  I guess maybe they had rusted out! At any rate I thank the great Creator that there was no damage to my heart.

      My daughter drove down to Duluth in my pickup and stayed there in the hospital to be of help to me and the nurses and doctors there were wonderful. On the third day a heart doctor spent an hour with a black board diagramming what had happened and what they had done to me. When he found out it was my birthday he brought two pieces of cake in for Christy and I.  For four days they made sure there was no lasting affects and then dismissed me. We finally headed home.

      I am feeling great now and will head back to Canada this weekend to get my boat and   camera and fishing gear.  If it doesn’t come a blizzard, the fishing will be great and Christy will finally get a chance to sample it.

Remember that I   had that heart attack a full day before it was fixed   and yet there is no lasting affect.  If you   experience that   heart pain, get it examined quickly   and be confident that   you will recover as I did.

What Sounds Like a Trumpet?

This is a column I wrote years ago that I thought today’s readers might enjoy.

We decided to take a short float trip one November afternoon, down the river bordering some public hunting land.  We have killed several deer in such a manner; just drifting along so slowly and so quietly you are scarcely noticed by wild creatures along the stream.  Often we cover the boat with a blind, but that afternoon, we didn’t.  Not much reason to disguise it when the occupants are wearing blaze orange caps and vests.

An hour into the trip, we passed a harvested cornfield, and I heard an unusual sound, something like a Canada goose honking, but louder, coarser, a longer note.  In a matter of a few seconds, big birds soared up out of the field and turned upriver at treetop level.  One of them continued to uh, well… sound a little like a trumpet.  It was the first time I have ever heard a trumpeter swan, and though I have seen a few at a time on the water in various places in the Ozarks and in Canada over the past twenty years, I have never seen a flock of them that large. 

But there they were, eleven trumpeter swans in a line just over us, big and graceful. Trumpeter swans are rare sights, but they gather in the winter in good numbers at a semi-refuge in Arkansas, south of Greer’s Ferry Lake.  Obviously they are gaining in numbers little by little.  That flock of eleven is something I will not forget seeing.

We didn’t get a deer that afternoon; in fact we never even saw one.  We did see a wild gobbler and a half grown wild pig, coal black, and hard to see in the underbrush.  Had I seen him in time we would have some pork in the freezer tonight.  Squirrels of course were thick.  If you are a squirrel hunter you should have a good year, with all the acorns and nuts and berries we had this fall.  They should be fat and good to eat. It occurred to me that I ought to pass along more wild game recipes with this column, so here’s one I call ‘squirrel pizza’.  The first thing you do is fry a couple of young squirrels and take all the meat off the bones.   Then buy a pizza and remove all those little round pieces of meat that you always see on pizza, about the size of a half dollar.  They are not good for you, and you need to take all of them off.  Then distribute the squirrel meat all over the pizza and warm it up a little.  There you have it.  Next week I will perhaps give you my recipes for duck pizza and rabbit pizza!

      Someone sent me an outdoor page recently, from a large daily newspaper in the Ozarks that showed a photo of a big hornets nest that had fallen to the ground.  Their outdoor writer called it a wasp nest, obviously not having spent enough time outdoors to know what it was.  He dutifully noted that he had left it there because it was a part of nature.  It won’t be part of nature long!

Hornet’s nests are collected in the winter by many, who know that woodpeckers and other birds will tear them to pieces trying to get the larvae inside. No hornet’s nest I ever saw survives the winter.  But if you take one into the warmth inside a building, you need to be sure those larvae aren’t going to mature and create a swarm of hornets in your home next spring.  That has happened on occasion.

      No newspaper would allow glaring errors on their sports page. If a sports writer didn’t have better than average knowledge about basketball, football and baseball, he wouldn’t last long. There was a time when outdoor writers were men who grew up outdoors and had a great deal of experience in their field.  Those days are nearly gone.  Today if an ‘outdoor columnist’ makes glaring errors, who knows?  Newspaper editors in larger cities don’t know a fly-rod from a flatfish, so if mistakes are made they seldom see it.  And I doubt they care much because they figure readers don’t know much about the outdoors either.

      In a couple of weeks I am going to put one of our better photographers in a special camouflaged and covered boat, and drift down one of our rivers with me at the paddle, to see what kind of photos we can get.  I’ll have to leave my gun at home or I would be tempted to shoot some ducks for duck pizza. 

      The Winter/Christmas edition of my Lightnin Ridge  magazine is being printed in a week or so. If you would like to have a copy, call my secretary, Gloria Jean, at 417 777 5227.

 

How to Spend a Fall Day

 

What a banner year it is for walnuts and acorns and hickories.  There are nuts everywhere!  If I can just get my daughters and grandsons out here on Lightnin’ Ridge picking up walnuts I will sell enough of them to pay for my duck stamp.

The best parts of the year come and go so quickly.  Fall is like that, more than any other season.  It is my time of the year.  Half of October is gone and I haven’t yet picked up my .22 or shotgun for a hunting trip.  I realize now that it is time to spend more time in the woods or on the river than ever before, to try to see and experience as much as possible while it is still here.

Tonight I need to put some new line on a couple of reels, because over the next 3 or 4 weeks there will be some great fishing in the Ozarks.  Fish feel that cooling water, and begin to abandon the shallow water, heading to deeper spots.  But they do not yet reach that point where metabolism decreases.  

Fall fish feed in deeper water, but they aren’t on a diet yet, they are fattening up, sometimes eating more than they can hold.  It is primarily in the fall that I have seen white bass, and black bass gorging on shad, to a point where they attack a lure and have more shad or minnows in their gullet than they can get down. 

If you want to catch a big bass on a reservoir, fish deeper points and bluffs with a brown or black jig, with one of those salty rubber crayfish added to the hook.  But if you have some pork rind, up to four or five inches long, that will work too.  Some folks use nothing else but the pork, attached to a jig.  For big bass, I am not talking about small jigs, I like the big heavy ones that will fall quickly down over ledges into deep water, or scrape against the standing timber ten or twelve feet down.

Crappie fishermen love October, but I seldom fish for them after I catch them in Canada in early October.  I like smallmouth, and if I have a day to fish, I’ll probably be floating down a river, fishing a buzz-spin or a spinner-bait.  You would be surprised to see how big the smallmouth are on some of our Ozark rivers if you fish those waters without the bright canoes and kayaks seen there in the summer, banging and bumping by.  

The buzz-baits and topwater lures still catch fish in the deep water below the shoals, but they won’t work much longer.  Smallmouth later in the fall will be deeper, gorging themselves on crayfish, and anything that looks like a ‘crawdad’, as Ozark anglers call them, will attract smallmouth, Kentuckies and largemouth bass on our rivers. 

If a fisherman doesn’t have a knack for those jig and pork-rind combos he can do well with crank-baits that imitate crayfish.  Trouble is, in the fall, you have to fish a crankbait deep, but slow.  It takes a while to master that too.

There are few float trips I take in October when I don’t have a shotgun or .22 rifle along.  One of my favorite hunting guns is an over and under, .22-20 gauge combination my dad owned since I was a boy.  The rifle barrel is on top, and the shotgun on the bottom.  You flip a button on the side to determine which barrel you shoot.  

If you want a mess of squirrels to take home and cook on the grill, or with a pot of dumplings or stew, you use the .22.  If you go quietly down a river, you’ll see plenty of squirrels, and they seldom know you are there.  Close, still shots are common.

You do not use the brightly colored kayaks or canoes along a stream if you want to see wildlife, or catch big fish.  In fact, I would never ever hunt from a flimsy craft of any kind, and that’s what 17-foot canoes are, accidents waiting to happen.  My river boats are 19-foot or 18-foot square-sterned canoes, or 16- to 17-foot johnboats.  

In years past I have used my boat, with a blind attached to the front, to bow-hunt for deer.  And when November gets here, I will hunt ducks from my boat, while I fish a little as well.  But as I get older, the most important thing I have as I slowly and quietly move down an Ozark stream is my camera.  You can see some of the photos I have taken from my boat by visiting my website, www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com You can always contact me by writing to me  at p.o. box 22, bolivar, mo 65613  or emailing lightninrige47@gmail.com.

 

Geese Aplenty

 

 

      What a different creature Canada geese have become, with so many of them becoming non-migrators and just staying where they are, raising goslings on every little farm pond where cattle graze on permanent pasture.  Just think about it…. Not all that long ago, we never saw a goose in the Ozarks in the spring and summer and few in the fall and winter.  You seldom saw them, as they’d pass over in long strings, making beautiful music as the nip in the air and the falling leaves told you that winter wasn’t far away.

      Floating down the river in November and December of the 1960’s as a kid with my dad, hunting mallards and wood ducks from our old johnboat, if we saw a few Canada geese on the river, and actually had a chance to bring one home, it was a never to be forgotten experience.  Now, out hunting turkeys in the spring, it would be so easy to fill the freezer with Canada’s.  And while they aren’t as good to eat as wild gobblers; a smoked goose, or a roasted goose, certainly isn’t to be made light of.  It’s the goose-feather plucking that makes everyone think Colonel Sander’s fried chicken is the best route to take for Sunday dinner. But this fall I am going to get a goose or two for Thanksgiving and smoke it in my store-bought smoker.

      What a difference there is in the Canada goose today and the ones I saw as a boy, only fifty-some years ago.  But then again, what a difference there is in this whole world today.  The creeks so full of water, in which I swam throughout the summer, are dry today by the time July and August come around.  The woodlots along the river bottoms have been bulldozed and are now fields of green grass.  Where there were a dozen old cows there are now great herds.  

      But not long ago I saw a Canada goose with her nest in a hollow sycamore limb jutting out over the river 20 feet above the water. I suppose that is evolution. Geese don’t nest in hollow trees, but she did. It was smart of her. Other geese which nest on the ground each spring often lose their eggs when the river rises with lots of rain.  A strain of Canada geese are only 8- to 10-pounds in weight, but another strain, known as giant Canadas, are found nesting in bluffs in the Ozarks.  They may weigh from 14 to 18 pounds.

      I love to hunt geese; one of my most memorable hunts being the last one, two years ago in a grain field in Ontario.  It was a morning when the overpopulation of geese we have today was evident. They came in by the dozens for three hours.  I was with a friend of mine who is Lake of the Woods guide and we brought in a limit of five apiece.  Thirty years ago we hunted Canadas and snow geese each fall in Manitoba. In all instances of goose hunting we would lie flat on our backs in a field with decoys spread where they wanted to feed.  I spent much of that time using my camera instead of my shotgun.   If you would like to see some of those photos, go to the website www. larrydablemontoutdoors.

 

In about three weeks we will finish the winter/Christmas issue of the Lightning’ Ridge Outdoor Journal, a magazine with great stories about   hunting, fishing, conservation and nature.  To get your copy send a check for 8 dollars to LROJ, P.O. Box 22, Bolivar, Mo 65613. To use your credit card call Gloria Jean at  417 777 5227.