Squirrels

 

         Today I love to watch both gray and fox squirrels from my porch, and there is one tree just a ways from my office where baby gray squirrels are born every year.  They emerge from the hole in the early spring and are so small they look a little like chipmunks.  They venture forth, and at the slightest movement of a bird or another squirrel nearby, they dash back into their nursery as fast as they can go scared to death of the big world they are just becoming aware of.  

         In late summer I often watch both species cut leaves and build sunning nests high in the forked limbs of oaks and hickories, where they may nap and rest in midday heat.  It takes me back to those days as a boy, hunting squirrels with a seriousness I just can’t muster now.  And squirrel hunting not only taught me so much about the outdoors, it provided memories in abundance, like the time I was walking slowly through the woods hunting and a fox squirrel fell out of a limb right above me, brushing my shoulder and hitting the ground with a thud.  

         He must have been watching me from a limb above and lost his balance.  No squirrel ever retreated any faster, but he was a goner if I had squeezed the trigger on my little single-shot 16-gauge Iver Johnson.  I didn’t, because Dad had told me that when you shoot a squirrel running away from you, you fill the back legs with shot and ruin the meat. Besides that, he was going to fast for my ability with a shotgun, and I didn’t want to waste an eight-cent shell.  I have seen many squirrels fall, from limbs or electric lines, but I never seen one killed by a fall.

         Of all the mammals I am aware of in the Ozarks, and birds too for that matter, the squirrel is the only one I know of that both hibernates and migrates.  Think about that!  In the fall, or even late summer or early winter, when food supplies dwindle as they do in years of poor mast (nuts and acorns) you can actually see a migration of squirrels for perhaps as much as twenty or thirty miles.  In the early 1980’s I saw thousands of squirrels swimming across Bull Shoals Lake over a period of two or three days, from the northern shores to the south, and from the western shores to the east.  Hundreds of them drowned.  

  
 

      Several rodent diseases affect them, but their biggest enemy is likely birds of prey.  Fox squirrels get into a den or nest fairly early in the evening but gray squirrels will be seen roaming around and active when it is getting so dark you can barely see the sights on your gun.  So grays are a favorite prey of great horned owls, maybe only second in an owl’s preference to skunks, which owls love to eat.   

         I will end with the story of a young girl who grew up in the city and married a young man who was so much a hillbilly that he ate squirrels like chickens eat June-Bugs… with enthusiasm.  They had only been married a couple of weeks when he presented her with two nice young fox squirrels, cleaned and ready to cook. He told her how much he’d like to have some squirrel and dumplin’s like his mother made.  Having a mother who had been a country girl herself, this new bride called home to find out what a dumplin’ was and how to make it.

         Her mother went through the whole rigamarole of how to mix the ingredients and make it into a big dough ball, but somehow the conversation got distracted and the young wife never got the idea that the big ball of dough was to have little hunks of dumplings pinched off and flattened the way that old time cooks did it.

         That night the young outdoorsman, who looked a lot like me, noticed that while the squirrels were delicious, there was just one dumpling, a little bigger than a softball.  The young girl, who really looked a lot like my wife Gloria Jean, got all upset and cried because she would never be a good cook.  And she was right; she never was a really good cook, like my mother and grandmother.  But then again, I never was the squirrel hunter my grandpa was.

 

More about squirrels in next week’s column…

Crawdads for Fishin’ and Eatin’

 

 

     The crawdad, or crayfish, is an unusual creature, always looking back where he has been, and going where his isn’t looking.  Quite often where he has been appears quite safe and there looms a bass or walleye or catfish where he is going and he winds up not going as far as he thought he would. That’s why the crawdad, or crayfish is you prefer, spends most of his time under rocks. You may be standing in the knee-deep water of a small stream or good-sized creek and not see a crawdad anywhere while there are dozens of them around you. Turn over the rocks and they start scooting off backwards.

       I point this out because this is the time of year that bass fishing can be very good if you have a bucket of crawdads and a gentle wind. Drift a crawdad over a lake point in 15 or 20 feet of water…sometimes a little shallower and sometimes a little deeper, depending on the lake…and you may find out that summer bass are easy. Smallmouth and Kentucky bass are especially fond of crawdads, and they’ll take them any time of day. If you can stand the heat, you can catch bass on crawdads.

       There are things you have to know first. Maybe this is a type of fishing better suited to spinning gear than the traditional bait-casting outfits us big time bass-mastering, lunker-busting, hog-hustlers would ordinarily use, compete with 12 or 14 pound line. Crawdad fishing is finesse fishing, and I like 6 or 8 pound line with medium action spinning gear with a fairly solid rod. You’ve got to set a hook and put some pressure on a good bass from time to time. I don’t use a really large hook, a number one or even a number two hook will work, with a light split shot about two or three feet above the crawdad. You want to get the bait down there on the bottom, and move it. A still crawdad is usually a crawdad which gets under a rock and stays there, so if you aren’t drifting over the points, keep the crawdad moving a little.

       You hook the crawdad, or crayfish, through the middle of the tail, from the underside of course. And beware of those pincers, they work. Sometimes they can hurt a little, but not usually. If you are the kind of person who calls a crawdad a crawdad, you’ll never notice, but if you call them crayfish, let somebody else handle the crawdads!

       Everything eats crawdads, bullfrogs and coons and snakes and fish and wading birds and even humans. They are crustaceans, just like lobsters except different…the main difference being the size. But out in deep water in most of our Ozark rivers and lakes there are some big ones, and they can be caught in specially made crawdad traps baited with raw chicken necks or hot-dogs. And those crawdad tails are delicious. An old friend and fellow outdoor writer from Arkansas came up here a few years ago to fish all night with me on my pontoon boat, and be brought with him about 10 pounds of Louisiana crawdads. During the afternoon he set up a big pot out on my back deck underneath a big oak tree and boiled those crawdads with seasoning, whole potatoes, whole onions and whole roastin’-ears.

       When they were done, he drained all the water and put it all in a big plastic cooler, which in that case of course became a big plastic heater, and I ate so well that night I nearly forgot to fish. It has to be fairly simple to make crawdads delicious, because if you knew that guy you’d swear he couldn’t make a good baloney sandwich. Crawdads have to be boiled live, and if they aren’t curled when you peel the tail, don’t eat them. Straight-tailed crawdads aren’t good for you.

      I caught recently caught a nice bass late on the river one evening using an artificial crawdad and a Carolina rigging, fishing slowly out from a gravel bank which sloped off fairly rapidly. The big one, about 5 pounds, picked it up when I stopped it, and fought hard. He was in 10 or 12 feet of water I suppose, out 20 feet from the bank. If you don’t have live crawdads, they have some on the market now which look and feel so alive they will work nearly as good as real ones.

       In case you are wondering, a Carolina rig is swivel tied in, about 2 to 3 feet above your plastic lure, with a sliding bullet or barrel-type led weight of an eights to a quarter ounce in size above the swivel which won’t slide down past it, and never gets close to your lure. When a bass picks up the lure, he doesn’t feel the weight, because the line slides.

What I Learned From Rufous

 

                                                            Large Camouflaged copperhead

Rufous Still must have been in his late sixties or early seventies when I met him. I expect he was born around 1900 or just a few years later.   I was the head naturalist for the state park system in Arkansas, assigned the task of setting up interpretive nature programs in several of the state’s parks.  The best state park of them all was the one on the Buffalo River called Buffalo Point and Rufous worked there.  

He lived a few miles away and had spent his whole life in that beautiful Buffalo River country, and truthfully he was likely the most important person in that big state park because he could do about anything that required a little common sense and he was a treasure trove of information for me about the north Arkansas Ozarks and the creatures and the people who lived there.

Rufous and I had many long talks about the Ozarks and the Buffalo. One of the things he talked about was venomous snakes, and the problems they caused for mountain people who had no doctors within reach, no anti-venin. Rufous said that he remembered that death from snakebite was not unusual in his youth, that he remembered many people dying or becoming maimed by a lost hand or foot, or a limb that never functioned properly for the rest of a person’s life. 

Rufous said the worst time to be in the woods in Arkansas, if you were worried about timber rattlers, was September and October.  In years to come I found out he was right. I know how the book-trained naturalists tell you that if you will just not bother a venomous snake, you have nothing to worry about.  Rufous told me that most everyone he knew when he was young who were bitten by poisonous snakes were not making any effort to disturb them…  most just didn’t know they were there.  He recalled people going into their cellar being bitten by copperheads, small children playing barefoot around the old cabins where they lived, wood-cutters trying to get a store of firewood cut in late summer and country folks on their way to their privy on a late summer night.  He said he remembered a lady who lived alone being bitten in her old cabin by a copperhead that found a way to get under her bed.  

        He said that if you were bitten by a copperhead you certainly seemed to have a better chance than if you were bitten by a timber rattler or cottonmouth.  The best possible treatment back then was just what they tell you not to do today.  You took a very sharp knife just as soon as possible, cut into both fang marks and sucked out all the blood you could, knowing you had a chance to remove much of the venom if you did it in a hurry.   Rufous said there wasn’t a doubt in the world that worked on many occasions, but it had to be done quickly, not an hour later. He said people who had chickens would kill and cut open a chicken and try to wrap the opened carcass around the bite location, wrapping it with rags, tightly on the arm or leg.  It was also commonly though that you could draw out venom with rags soaked in coal oil and placed on the bite.
        When you hear self-proclaimed naturalists who have spent more time in a never fatal, they have no sense of history, and they just haven’t been ‘out there’ enough.  Our conservation department here in Missouri had a website and a printed pamphlet saying that no one in this state has ever died from a snakebite. A camper at Sam a. Baker State Park died from a copperhead bite three summers ago, and it may have been because he read that pamphlet and was just slow to get medical attention.   Common sense asks anyone, why should a copperhead in my lawn be protected by law, while no laws protect red wasps, brown recluse spiders, black widow spiders or scorpions?   On the first day of August, I killed a 28-inch copperhead in my garden, about 30 yards from my front porch.  Every year I kill a couple, up here on this wooded ridgetop where I live.  

I am a naturalist who grew up in the outdoors and then worked for a salary as an interpretive naturalist for more than a dozen years in two states.  Many, many times I came across venomous snakes out in the wilderness of Arkansas while working, studying wild areas for the State Heritage Commission. In those wilderness places, where they were no threat to humans I didn’t kill any of them. Those places were their natural habitat, and I wasn’t there to change anything, but instead to study and report what was there.  But when I and other naturalists were working on new trails for the State Park Department and we came across copperheads, cottonmouths, or rattlesnakes we dispatched of them because we didn’t have time to catch them and transfer them to some far away place, and they represented a very real threat to hikers who would use those trails.

Rufous and the old-time Ozarkians in his Buffalo River community had what the world lacks today… common sense.  And every time I hear someone remind people that it is illegal to kill any snake, and that they are not ever aggressive or dangerous, I wish I could tell them about the times I have seen just the opposite. I would like to have them on an Ozark river in August and show them the temperament of a cottonmouth. 

Remember that from mid-August into early October, all snakes, which are cold- blooded creatures, seek out warm places as cool nights come on.  In the dusk or dark, be careful on concrete or paved driveways, on gravel bars or rock ledges, where the warmth of a hot day is stored into the coolness of the night.  If you live in the country, as I do, don’t leave a basement door open.  Seeing a copperhead or cottonmouth first is your best defense, so be aware.  

Too Soon Old

 

Grandpa McNew and me - 1953

    My maternal grandparents, Bert and Hilda McNew, had a little farm out southeast of Houston, Mo a few miles. I was born in their old farmhouse. They were wonderful people whom I dearly loved.

    Scratching out a living with a few milk cows and chickens and a hog or two was a difficult thing in those days, so Grandma sold some eggs and milk and butter, tended a big garden and canned and sewed a lot. Grandpa did a little work on the side when he could find it. One of the things he did for a while was pick up trash from businesses along Main Street to haul to the city dump in his old faded 1940’s era red Chevy pickup. 

    When I was only five or six years old I would go with him on Saturday mornings, and it was a wonderful thing to go through that trash as he raked it from the bed of his old truck into the city trash dump three miles south of town. Grandma always wanted him to look for jars she could use for canning, and I would look for comic books and magazines. There were a bunch of them, and they always had the top few inches cut off of the cover. I guess the stores had to do that to prove they hadn’t sold them, and that’s the way I came across my first outdoor magazines, which fascinated me. 

    But one day I found a little oblong wooden plaque, obviously cut out of a small pine tree, with the phrase printed on it, “Ve get too soon old, and too late smart.”

    I clung to it like a valuable prize, and wrapped it up and gave it too my dad on Father’s Day. It was the first gift I ever gave anyone and I was tremendously proud of it. For a while Dad hung it in the kitchen, and it seemed everyone was amused by it. Dad said it was advice he could use.

    In time of course I forgot all about it, and recently, going through Mom and Dad’s photos and things after they had passed away, I came across so many old things I had forgotten. And there was that little plaque in the bottom of a box! 

    As I held it in my hands, it brought me back to that time long ago when I rode in town with Grandpa, looking so forward to driving down the alley with him, behind the Main Street businesses, to load up and haul off someone else’s refuse. And it was a time when I realized that someone’s trash could be someone else’s treasure.

    But the words of that old plaque had such an impact on me now… “Ve get too soon old and too late smart”. My gosh, there is so much truth in that. 

    I wish I could go back and do things differently. I wish I had gotten smart long before I got old. Well I’m still not all that smart! But one thing I remember well was the words from old Bill Stalder, who listened to me late one summer evening about July of 1950, going on about how I couldn’t wait until duck season came and I could hunt ducks on the Piney with Dad.

    “Don’t wish your life away, boy,” Ol’ Bill said with a sad and solemn look, remembering I am sure, his own youth. “It ain’t tomorrow that overtakes a man, it is the years beyond it.”

    He told me to enjoy each day, and use it to accomplish something. For a man with almost no education, it was wisdom way beyond my years. I learned, there in that pool hall my Dad and Grandpa McNew had acquired when I was only 10 years old, that there is a big difference in possessing intelligence and gaining wisdom. If only I could go back to my boyhood I would indeed grow too soon old, as I have done. But I would not grow too late smart.

 

****************************************************

In closing, I can vaguely remember a time when I was a little boy on my grandparent’s farm, and my grandmother told me she once had a small container of prunes, which had become moldy! She said she threw them out the back door by an old revolving-blade lawn mower, the kind you had to power as you pushed it. A blue- jay landed on that mower handle and eyed those prunes and finally flew down to pick one up. He flew up on the lawn mower handle and struggled to eat it, but he finally got it down. Over an hour or so, he must have flown down to retrieve five or six of those moldy prunes, and ate every one. 

When they were finally gone, he sat there awhile and then finally tried to fly off to the adjacent apple orchard. He only made it a few yards, and then he fluttered to the ground and died. Grandma told me I should learn a lesson from that. “Don’t go flying off the handle,” she said, “when you are full of prunes!” 

I did a lot of that flying off the handle when I got older. Wish I’d have listened closer to my grandmother.  But, I got too late smart!

 

LIFE AND POETRY

 

         It dawned on me recently that the way to know if your life has been a success is by being able to hire someone to mow your lawn when you have become too old to do it yourself.  You cannot be a failure if you have a lawn to look at and a porch to sit on while you watch some neighborhood kid mow it for only ten dollars.  But you are a big-time success in life if you can talk him into mowing it for five.  

My dad never had much money because my mom had things to do with it before he got it, and he had to pay my sisters a quarter apiece each week just to be good.  It was hard even then, to make them be good for a quarter.  He never paid me anything, and bragged often to his friends that I was good for nothing.

 

It is awful when a poem-making compulsion plays over into your daily life. I myself have been into poetry since I learned to write and as I go through my daily life I make up short poems for the situation. I stopped in a café the other morning to have breakfast, and the poor lady waitress, who had the demeanor of a lady who had too many old timers telling her jokes that week, asked me what I wanted. I told her I wanted bacon and 3 eggs.  She asked how I wanted them cooked.  I told her I would like them even better that way!  She didn’t even smile so I added a poem in good humor,  “If my bacon is all floppy, it won’t make me very hoppy, and if my eggs are soft and runny, you won’t get any money.”  She just looked at me as if bored, and walked away with my order.  Later when I got ready to leave her a quarter for a tip, I asked her what she thought of my poetry. With a bored look on her face she answered in prose… “Men look really weird, when they have egg yolk in their beard!”         

 

Since I am from the Ozarks, and growing older a great deal quicker than I once did, I do not like to be told what to do by some machine.  I put my debit card in a gas pump the other day and it told me to remove it quickly.  Well I didn’t and I’ll be darned if I will do anything a machine tells me to.  I removed my card at my own pace until I couldn’t get the gas pump to give me any gas, so then I sped it up a little.  But every time I go there, I take my card out of my billfold really slow, and put it back my billfold real slow, hoping that machine is watching.

Actually I have lived all of my life without credit cards, but I have one now because the bank told me they would give me two and one-half percent interest on the money I have in a checking account, if I would take something they call a ‘debit card’ and use it only ten times in a month.  I got to figuring… if I maintain somewhere between 100 and 200 dollars a month in my checking account, which is what I have had on occasion when times are good, that interest comes to almost a dollar every couple of months.  It is hard to turn down a free dollar when you have grown up in the Ozarks.  

 

I am having that big “sell everything I have got” sale up here on Lightnin’ Ridge this fall. It was scheduled for September 26 but the heat worries me so I am rescheduling it for Saturday, October 24. If it rains I will have it a week later on October 31.  So mark that on your calendar.  If you want a list of everything that will be sold that day, let me know via email lightninridge47@gmail.com, or send me a mailing address. My address is P.O. Box 22, Bolivar, Mo 65613.  In a month or so I will post all that on my website, larrydablemontoutdoors.  Mostly it is boats and trailers and fishing and hunting gear and wildlife art and hundreds of antique outdoor magazines.  There is a lot of stuff I have used and accumulated over the years of my life that I have no one to leave it too. The real prize is some of my grandfather’s sassafras paddles he carved before I was born and a couple of his old guns. My age and health have convinced me I won’t be using much of it in the future, and I can’t take it with me when I leave to go float heaven’s rivers with my dad and uncle Norten.  I can imagine someone in the future saying, “This fishing lure is one used once by that outdoor writer, Larry Dablemont.”  And someone else saying, “Who the heck was he?”

 

Bullfrogs in the Snow

 

         Bullfrog season is open!  I might go down to my pond soon and grab a couple to eat. Usually, when you read a natural history account, it discusses the basic things you find in a nature book of some type, like when the bird or animal migrates or hibernates, how many young it has, and what it eats.  People who write such things often live in a town or city and get their information from a book someone else wrote long ago.  When  I was a kid I read where bullfrogs lay about five or six thousand eggs and I set out to see if that was correct.  I found a big bunch of frog eggs in a little backwater slough and began to count them, and I was up around four or five hundred when something distracted me, so I never did get a completed count.  I have decided to go with what the book says.  

         I can say for sure that tadpoles hatch from the eggs and begin, in time to sprout legs and slowly, throughout the course of the summer, become a small bullfrog.  The book says that in about two years, that little frog will be a full grown, eating-size bullfrog about 5 inches long.  It says that bullfrogs only get to be about 6- or 7-inches long, and I don't buy that at all.  I know I have caught some that were 8 or 9 inches long and 18 inches long with their legs stretched out.  

         Ol' Bill Stalder, down at the pool hall when I was a kid, said he had seen 'em 24- inches long when he was younger, and I can tell you that Ol' Bill knew more about river critters than whoever wrote those books.  You remember seeing that picture of the heron trying to swallow a bullfrog, and the bullfrog hanging out the big birds beak with it's front feet wrapped around the heron's neck trying to choke it to death...?  Well Ol' Bill actually seen something like that happen once.

Bullfrog eating a fish
       I know from studying bullfrogs on my own that they will eat about anything they can, and they eat both at night and during the daytime.  I never recall ever seeing one asleep; never saw one that wouldn't eat whenever the opportunity presented itself.   They really can unroll that tongue out there and nail an insect before them, and they can also swim up to a crawdad under water and eat it too.  I imagine they prefer crawdads to about anything when they can get them, but then, a pond bullfrog which has no crawdads in his pond has to settle for insects or small fish or small snakes.  A bullfrog is a little like some of my relatives on my mother's side, he will eat whatever he can get, whatever
comes along that looks capable of being swallowed.

         Bullfrogs usually fatten up and hibernate in the muck or mud somewhere, and that is to me one of the most amazing things when you think of it.  They just sense when it is time to burrow in somewhere and when spring comes along they wake up and get back to a normal life.  Think about that this Christmas when there's about a foot of snow on the ground.... down at the river, there are dozens of bullfrogs snoozing away in a foot or so of frozen mud, not breathing or eating, with about one heartbeat every three days.

         From my own experiences with bullfrogs, without consulting the books, they are very prolific, lead a fairly boring life, miss the whole winter sleeping but stay awake all summer, can jump the full length of a johnboat, eat almost everything that is smaller than they are and feed almost everything larger than they are including me. Their deep bellowing call adds a great deal to an Ozark river on a summer night.  It wouldn't be the same without them.

         I was watching one of those nature shows from the British Broadcasting channel and actually saw this or I wouldn’t believe it either. They showed big bullfrogs in the French Alps, which is where my ancestors came from, poking their heads up out of a snow bank in the spring, coming out of hibernation.  There were a dozen or so of them and they emerged to slide down a hillside of snow and into a small pool of freezing water.  They seemed to enjoy that slide over the snow.  Watching slick, wet bullfrogs sliding several hundred yards down a snow covered hillside was a jaw-dropping experience for a naturalist like me that thought he knew everything about bull-frogs.  Even Ol’ Bill Stalder wouldn’t have believed that.

 

         Read my future columns and back columns on the computer under larrydablemontoutdoors.  See my books and magazines at www.larrydablemont.com

 

A Floater From the Fifties

 

         I tried my best to create a Big Piney River museum and Nature Center near my hometown of Houston Missouri.  But it was not to be and now I have to empty it in hopes that someone else can take over and use that building, there in a beautiful, wooded setting a mile south of town, for something useful and lasting.  It could have been something great with all the Big Piney artifacts I have from 100 to 60 years ago.  I planned all kind of exhibits and a Big Piney aquarium filled with river creatures. I thought God wanted me to do it but I know that sometimes I have tackled things I thought God wanted me to accomplish when it wasn’t His idea at all, but just a product of my own misguided enthusiasm.

          It was all something I had done before with great success, in the 1970’s when I was Chief Naturalist for Arkansas, working on those nature center projects in State Parks.  Trouble is, when I started thinking about a Big Piney Nature Center I was in my sixties.  In Arkansas I did all that back then I was only 20-some.  I didn’t realize, ten years ago how quickly I would start approaching 80, and I was stupid enough to believe I was still going to be feeling young enough to make it all work despite health problems that would come my way due to my age.

 

        So here I am with a pair of old antique johnboats that I have to do something with.  In the 1980’s I built a wooden johnboat 15-feet long that is a duplicate of the ones my dad and granddad built for the Piney and Gasconade rivers between 1920 and 1970. For many years that boat I built was on display at the Jim Gaston White River Museum.  Now it is a good old antique, with the paint wearing off and the wood deteriorating.  It will be great for a display in a museum or old country store or perhaps one of the Ozark river resorts.

         The best part is, I will give it away to someone who wants to come and take it. I also will give away two display cabinets, one that is 8 feet long and made from Ozark walnut.  Both need glass tops but I couldn’t get that done.  A lady at the local glass company said they were too busy to mess with it.  Again, I will give all of this away plus some other items too numerous to mention.  I can provide pictures of the old wooden boat and display cabinets.

         Many springs ago I was hunting turkeys at a ladies ranch in the Ozarks when she showed me an old aluminum johnboat her late husband had bought that was made for the old-time Missouri Conservation Commission in 1950.  I noticed that the serial number was 0001 so I started investigating and found that it was made in Richmond MO by a fellow named Appleby. Mr. Appleby had come to my grandfather’s home on the Big Piney to watch him make wooden johnboats. He then decided to try to make one out of aluminum that was much longer, for the MCC to use on the Current and the Gasconade Rivers.  

         I was so fascinated by it that I bought it and the custom-made trailer and the little 3-horse Mercury motor that was on it.  It is on display now at that Big Piney nature center I built, but will be removed shortly.  I paddled it down two or three Ozark rivers that would accommodate its 20-foot length. It is just like the old White River johnboats from the days of Jim Owen and Charlie Barnes, the men from Branson who made Ozark float fishing famous in the early years of the last century.

           Appleby went on to establish an aluminum boat company named the Richline-Appleby Company at Lebanon, Mo.  He had a daughter named Diana Lowe, who took over the boat company after she was married.  Her son Derrick created a branch of the Lowe Company called Generation Three Boats.  I have a custom-made hard-topped camping-pontoon boat that Derrick put together for me in 1988, and a Lowe Paddle-Jon river boat made in 1969, which nearly duplicates my grandfathers wooden boats.  In the ‘70s and ‘80s I used a half dozen aluminum Lowe lake-boats and got to know Diana and Derrick. Just last week I visited the Marine Center in Joplin Missouri (which I believe is the best boat company in the Ozarks) and there were a bunch of new Lowe boats of all sizes.  May the company last forever!  

         See the first boat Mr. Appleby made in 1950, my camping boat and some of the other Lowe boats I owned years back on my internet site … larrydablemontoutdoors.

 

Pork Rinds and Blackberries

    There have been many innovations since the use of the first fishing lures, including the advent of the many varieties of pork-rind. Probably the use of pork-rinds all came about when some old-timer couldn’t find any fishin’ worms, and turned as a last resort to a strip of thin-sliced bacon. My uncle, an old time fishing guide, swore that the most effective lure in Ozark reservoirs over all seasons was a large jig with a long, slender port-rind eel. Leave that eel off, he told me, and the effectiveness of the jig is reduced considerably. He told about landing a ten-pound bass from Table Rock after the hook pulled free in the last foot or so. The fish fell to a tough pork-rind eel wrapped around the bony structure beneath the gill.

    Fishing with him years ago on the War Eagle River in northwest Arkansas, I watched him cut a two-inch long razor-thin strip of white pork-rind to adorn the rear treble of a Flatfish lure. Using a similar deep-running wobbling crankbait, I came up with the idea of two thin strips on two of the three rear hooks. With the lure wobbling through the water, those strips looked like tiny white legs whipping and flagellating behind the lure.

    I caught several nice Kentucky and largemouth that day and took the same procedure to Bull Shoals Lake to experience success there. In mid-summer a year or so later, I used the same set-up  on a Wiggle-Wart lure to tempt a pair of big smallmouth from an Ozark stream. Almost any deep-running, wobbling lure becomes twice as effective with one or two thin strips of pork rind on rear hooks.

    Such thin strips are a favorite too of experienced fly fishermen. At times nothing more is needed for panfish, trout and bass. Fishing the Big Piney as a boy, I was taught by my dad to use small white fly-strip rind, about ¼ inch wide and two to three inches long on a small spinner and jig. We would split the tail of the pork-rind, and the combination was more effective against smallmouth on that little “Shimmy-fly”, than any other lure.

    Now there are so many types and colors of frog chunks and rind available that you can’t get them all in your tackle box. But it you had nothing else to fish with, the pork-rind baits would allow you to catch fish almost any time, anywhere.

Black Raspberries

    Ol’ dad would just as soon never see another blackberry thicket. In boyhood days back in the Ozarks of southern Missouri, cousins Dave, Darb, Butch and I picked enough blackberries to fill a dump truck. We were forced into the thickets by cruel mothers who saw such outings as social occasions, and canned more blackberries than the fruit cellar would hold.

    Back then I didn’t eat many blackberries. A couple of old men in the pool hall said that eating raw blackberries caused appendicitis because of the seeds. I swore back then that when, and if I ever grew up, I’d never be caught in a blackberry patch…unless it was the dead of winter and I was hunting rabbits or quail.  But I loved the blackberry pie my daughter Christy baked for me over the Fourth of July weekend. I didn’t have to pick any, just eat the pie.  Therefore I got no chiggers!

    I only knew one blackberry picker who wasn’t bothered by chiggers. His name was George Halley and George was a professional. He picked blackberries all summer and sold them door-to-door to folks in our rural community. My cousins and I looked up to George. He didn’t take baths, or make his bed, or have a regular job and we figured he had to be the bravest man in the world to wade through a blackberry thicket looking only for berries and no snakes.

    He sometimes traded blackberries for home brew, which was one of the local farm products in Big Piney country at that time. Uncle Roy the father of Butch, Dave and Darb   made some hisself.  Us boys I talked it over an decided that it was the home brew that kept George from being over run by ticks and chiggers, so Butch got a sneaked a pint jar of it from his dads cellar and we medicated ourselves with it. It’s been years, but I can tell you from clear memory that if home brew in the blood won’t kill ticks and chiggers, nothing will!

    That experience with alcohol may be the reason I have drink nothing stronger than ice tea and lemonade my whole life-long. In the back of my mind I can’t help but wonder if less fortunate souls may not have been steered toward alcoholism by thoughtless mothers bent on hording blackberries.

    I have two computer sites now, one is ‘larrydablemontoutdoors’, which carries my columns and photos, and the other is ‘larrydablemont.com’ which shows all my books and magazines which you may order.

 

 

I Am Serious...Wasn't Lying

 

            One of my readers told me recently that he thought my newspaper column last year about how I love to eat the buds of those orange day-lilies, which are thicker in the summer than thorns on a locust, was all a tongue in cheek effort to try to get gullible folks to do something silly.  But people, I am as serious as three-day blizzard when I say that those buds, cut just before they bloom, are delicious.

            He remembered the column I wrote telling folks I had envelopes filled with nearly invisible morel mushroom seeds for sale for a five dollars each and the one where I said that raw gizzard shad soaked in catsup tasted just like sardines.  I regret those feeble attempts at humor but that’s the truth about day-lily buds.  Sautee them like asparagus or roll them in eggs and flour and fry them and you will be amazed how good they are. In fact they have been called ‘poor man’s asparagus’.  They grow all over my place here on Lightnin’ Ridge and I like them so much that hardly any ever get to bloom!  Don’t take my word for it, ask someone who is honest and trustworthy!!!

Lying, and the Benefits Thereof -- According to The Front Bench Regulars

 

          My teachers didn’t really approve of me working after school at Dad and Grandpa’s pool hall.  One of the older lady teachers said I was spending too much of my time in that pool hall with a bunch of aging prevaricators.  I told Ol’ Bill what she said, and he and Ol’ Jim both really got upset by that. I was surprised they took it so hard.  Doc Dykes, the chiropractor, told them it just meant they were a bunch of old liars, and that was something of a relief to Ol’ Bill.  ‘Prevaricator’ sounded bad, like maybe he was some kind of weirdo.  He’d own up to an occasional lie, or at least an exaggeration.

         But all the Front Bench Regulars there in the pool hall would have preferred not to be called liars.   It is not exactly a lie if you say you remember catching a 50-pound catfish years back, if it only weighed 42 pounds.  That, claimed Ol’ Jim, was simply a product of not remembering clearly, and as acceptable as saying you had five dollars even if you actually only had four and a pocket full of change.  Because who ever knows how much change you have in your pocket? However, he said, if you actual said you had caught a 50-pound catfish and it was only 10 or 20 pounds, that was an outright lie and you ought to be ashamed of yourself.

         Virgil Halstead came right out and admitted he lied almost every day…to his wife!  But then, amongst the married men, who didn’t?  My dad, the most honest and upright man I ever met, told my Mom he had borrowed a trolling motor to run our johnboat when he had actually paid 30 dollars for it.  Dad said the Bible stated ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’ so he maintained that he had to lie about that trolling motor to maintain the peace. If Mom found out he paid that much for it there would have been no peace in our home for awhile!

                  Sometimes if you say things that are downright absolutely the truth, NO ONE will believe you.  For example, I saw a flying saucer when I was 13 years old! It sounds like a bald-faced lie, because you are thinking of a spacecraft filled with little green men.  But what actually happened was, Mom threw one at dad! It sailed across the room and narrowly missed him when he ducked, tearing a chunk out of the wallpaper. 

         I think I have written about all of this before, and I have given a great deal of thought about whether or not we will all be hanging our heads in front of St. Peter someday recalling some of the lies we told in our lives.  But Preacher Lampkin put it all in perspective for me one summer evening in the pool hall when it was just the two of us and all the Front Bench Regulars had gone home.  

         He said the commandment in the Bible stated, “Thou shalt not bear false witness.”  He said what that meant was no man should be a witness against another in a false manner.  For instance, if you really didn’t like some kid in school and you told the teacher you saw him stick his chewed gum under the desktop when he actually didn’t do anything of the sort, that was ‘bearing false witness’.

         Years later it dawned upon me that in court when you have to hold up your hand and ‘swear to tell the truth so help you God’, that the really bad people, the no-gooders and the worthless, had no reason to ever tell the truth. The truth might render them guilty! Only the good people who actually believe in those Ten Commandments are bound by such an oath. What a disadvantage that gives honest people.  If the judge is a no-account himself, as more and more of them are getting to be, a truthful man seeking fairness is really up the creek.  Knowing that, it is understandable why so often good people are run over and bullied by the bad.

         I think maybe God treasures women above men for several reasons and truthfulness must be amongst them. In general I think the ladies are a little more inclined to be truthful, especially when they get older. In the Bible it says that a good woman’s value is far above rubies.  There is not one statement anywhere about a good man having any value at all! I wish I knew where to go with all this.  Sometimes when I start writing I have a point to make and then in short order I forget what it is.  And that’s the honest-to- goodness truth.

         It is also the truth that you might enjoy reading one of my books or magazines. You can see them on my website…larrydablemont.com.  There are 11 books and more than 100 magazines we call the Lightnin’ Ridge Outdoor Journal.

The Sixteen Pound Bass

 

    In my library there is a volume of Field & Stream maga­zine, in a hardbound cover, from April of 1918 to April of 1919. In these old mag­azines there is some very in­teresting reading, much of it by the great outdoorsman, Zane Grey, remembered for his famed western book. Indeed there is a great deal of difference in the way we hunt and fish today, but some things were much the same back then, in the thick of World War I.

    For instance, Field & Stream held a fishing contest, offering a host of outdoor equipment prizes in various categories. One entry drew more space in the magazine than any other topic but the war. It was a 16-pound smallmouth bass caught by George T. Magraw, M.D.Magraw wrote an elaborate account of the hooking and landing of his fish, and in­cluded a photo that nearly any­one would instantly take for a phony today. Apparently they were less skeptical in that day.

    The fish was said to be taken from a small one-acre lake near Avondale, Pa. Ma­graw claimed it took him one hour and 20 minutes to land the fish and that he had 175 yards of line out at one time. Field & Stream was very trusting, but they sent a repre­sentative to talk to Magraw and see the lake. He found the doctor of high repute in the community, and even com­mented that he never passed a dog on the street without a pat on the head.

    The writer talked to several men who signed affidavits naming them as witnesses to a smallmouth 36-inches long and 26 ¾ inches in girth. Before he left, however, the representative took note that the kitchen wall which was a background for the picture had boards four inches in width. Comparing those measurements with the picture, it showed the fish length would be only about 20 inches. Something was fishy, so Field and Stream asked for the photo negatives. Dr. Magraw became indignant, and stated that the negatives had been sent out of town and could not be recovered. He had, of course, eaten the fish, causing another hint of suspicion.

    Field and Stream went to work on the available picture with an architectural expert who examined the shadows and made elaborate calculations placing the size of the bass at less than 24 inches, and most likely less than 20. By then there was a considerable del­uge of mail from readers, nearly 100 percent against the doctor's claim. One reader said it was impossible for a fish to play out 175 feet of line in a pond of one acre size un­less he wound it around his body a few hundred times.

    Magraw replied that he was being made to look like a liar even after affidavits proved him a respected and truthful man. One of Field & Stream's writ­ers was a judge for the contest, and he wrote consistently about catching bass on artifi­cial baits and floating flies. When he questioned the fish fighting for an hour and 20 minutes, Magraw replied that the fish was taken on a minnow and “did not have a lot of cork and feathers rammed down her throat to drown her in 15 or 20 minutes.”

    The examinations of the photo, and explanations concerning the length of the bass which more or less proved it to be a hoax, took up four or five magazine pages in three issues, and became so involved and complex most outdoorsmen would have trouble figuring any of it out. Afterwards, the magazine gave Magraw 30 days to dispute the findings, and he did, with mathematical equations and drawings that were so confusing they could hardly be disproven.

    The good doctor wanted that record badly and he sent another picture. This time is was obviously a smaller bass blown up and laid over the top of a picture of Magraw. Even if you stretched your imagination you could not accept it, a smallmouth hanging from a man's waist, extending past his feet.

    Magraw stated that he had little faith in winning the prize because the judges were in the class of mules, and if you "con­vinced a mule of something against his will, he will likely remain of the same opinion." The editor finally took his gloves off, called the new picture an unspeakable fake. The matter was closed for good in the December issues of 1918, after nine months of study and debate by a half dozen experts.

    If the record had been allowed, and it might have been considering sworn, notarized affidavits from respectable men, then today’s 11-pound record brownie taken from Dale Hollow Lake in Kentucky would seem less of a phenomenon.

    It is hard to figure why a prize of a steel rod and reel would cause a man who was said to be upstanding and honest, to stretch things so far. It goes to show…fishermen have never really changed much.

 

Bobbers!

 

       If I were ever asked to list the ten things I have enjoyed the most in my life as a fisherman, not too far down the line I would list, “watching a bobber”.  It was one of life’s greatest pleasures in my youth. You too have likely done that if you grew up in the country.  If so, you know what I mean.

       Grandma McNew and I watched bobbers on my Uncle Roy’s pond, which he allowed no one else to fish except my cousins and me and Grandma and Grandpa.  

       Back then, summer ponds weren’t all filled with the scum and algae you see today.  The water there in the shade of a big oak tree was dark and deep, full of bluegill and bass and a few small catfish.

       And in the summer, Grandma and I often sat there in the shade watching a bobber sit stone-still on a smooth surface.  The fascination I felt was something I still feel, watching that bobber knowing that any moment it might dance a little, throwing out little ringlets on the water, then dive out of sight in a flash, the braided line cutting through the depths.  It only took a jerk on the cane pole to know what you had.  But no matter, it would be dinner the following day; not filets in a skillet but whole fried fish with the head and fins cut off, just scaled and gutted.

       Usually that disappearing bobber meant only a hand-sized bluegill, but sometimes a bass 12 or 14 inches long would pull it under.  Once or twice in every few hours of fishing, it would be a 15-to 18-inch bass or maybe even a catfish, and if you weren’t careful you might break the end off the old cane pole by jerking too hard. You landed a bigger fish by walking backwards and dragging it up the bank.

       Just out of college at the age of 22, I took a job as the Outdoor Editor for the Arkansas Democrat, the state’s largest newspaper in Little Rock.  Believe it or not, we got a little home out in the country about 30 miles north of the city, and I brought down from the Big Piney a15-foot wooden johnboat Dad had built with a sealed marine plywood bottom, which meant it didn’t have to be kept in the water to be ‘soaked up’ as the older ones did.

       On Dardanelle Lake, about 40 miles west of Little Rock there was a small arm on the north side of the lake known as Spadra Creek, about 200 yards wide at the most. The owner of a local dock told me the crappie were spawning, big ones.  So I loaded that old wooden johnboat and went there.  

       One of the local guides by the name of Yarbrough, told me where there was a hump coming up in the middle of that long tributary, and if I could find it and anchor just off of it I could catch crappie beneath a bobber and a yellow jig.  The hump was only about 15 feet across and about 8-feet under the water and everything around it was 15- or 20-feet deep.  I could find it by lining up three trees on opposite banks as Mr. Yarbrough had showed me.

       To make a long story short and happy, I took some jigs and a bobber, and caught crappie with that bobber setting over that hump, letting the jig settle about halfway up from the bottom.  I got to watching that bobber with such concentration and enjoyment, I scarcely noticed the fishing boats that would pass, staring at the wooden boat I had paddled out there to the hot spot in the middle of the creek.  Every now and then I would reel in a huge crappie and in short order I had a limit.

       A day or so later Mr. Yarbrough took me fishing for bass out at the mouth of Spadra, in a fiberglass bass boat, just becoming popular at that time.  He showed me that crappie could be caught without bobbers, but it wasn’t any more   rewarding than the fishing I had a few days before in Spadra Creek.

       The Democrat had one of the best writers I ever knew working at a desk across from mine.  His name was Bob Lancaster.  Bob laughed at
the idea of doing a story for the Democrat about fishing from a wooden johnboat with a bobber.  “Here you are an outdoor reporter for a newspaper with a million readers,” he said, and you’re out there paddling around in a wooden boat with no motor, fishing with a bobber!”

       We both laughed about that, and in a month or so, the newspaper acquired a Mon-Ark fiberglass fishing boat with a 35-horse motor for me to use.  But I told Bob that day that if there were indeed a million fishermen out there reading the newspaper the majority of them started out watching a bobber.  We all had a common beginning as fishermen.

These are my daughters with crappie they caught using bobbers. The first two are my middle fisherwoman, Christy Lynn. The redhead is my youngest fisherwoman, Leah Noel. And the last is my oldest, Lori Jean. I can't really call her a fisherwoman though. She is the Dr. in the family and doesn't have time to fish anymore.