All through the fall hunting season, those of us who love to hunt waterfowl prayed for rain. The one thing you need for great duck hunting is plenty of water, and we just didn't have it. It is unbelievable that in surveying dozens of ponds in the Ozarks I never saw a mallard or even a gadwall. What’s happening is strange!
All in all, I think I'll put this last duck season in the "ones to forget" file. Outdoor writers who hunt and fish often have wonderful opportunities and, therefore, some very good trips. We write about those trips and very often keep quiet about the others. But we all have outings we'd like to forget; sometimes we easily forget entire seasons.
About 40 years ago, I hunted pheasants with the publisher of well-known magazine, and as a prospective writer, I wanted to make a good impression. I was using a brand new over and under shotgun. His dog, a German wirehair pointer, worked flawlessly that morning. She pointed four rooster pheasants in two hours, and in each instance, I missed pheasants that rose before me so close I could see their eyes blink. The publisher speculated that I would never write about that trip.
I blamed the new gun, of course, and sold it only a few days later. All I remember is, I dug my old Smith and Wesson automatic 12-gauge out of the pickup that afternoon and killed my limit of birds, all of which flushed wild, halfway across the cornfield. But the dog never pointed another bird. In fact, the dog stayed away from me the rest of the day.
There have been plenty of disastrous hunting trips for me, but it may be, the all-time most embarrassing situation took place more than twenty years ago when I took my Uncle Norten duck hunting on the Sac River. I've hunted rivers since I was shorter than my shotgun. Behind a floating blind, we've floated hundreds and hundreds of miles hunting everything from deer and turkey to ducks and squirrels. Norten passed away fifteen years ago, but he had told me stories about how he began hunting that way in the '30s, and I can't remember for sure when I started.
In all those combined years, no Dablemont ever let his boat get away from him until that one December years back. It happened because we stopped on a gravel bar so my Uncle Norten could walk up to look over a crop field to see if there were any rabbits to be found. I stayed with the boat, adding some more foliage to the blind. I pulled the boat up on the bank and sat down against a log to wait, my back to the river. I dozed off a little in the warm sunshine and my uncle returned and called my attention to the fact that our boat was in mid-stream, heading away with the current. We followed down the bank knowing full well it wouldn't come back, despite my pleading. It drifted into a log on the other side, and sat there, in water ten feet deep or better.
We had one pickup six miles upstream, and another eight miles downstream. We were in big trouble. Fortunately there was a farmhouse on a distant ridge. Getting there in chest waders was something of an ordeal, but I did it and the farmer said he had an old boat and paddle he'd loan me. The ground was frozen, so he drove the boat fairly close to the river in an aging farm truck. I used his boat to paddle across to retrieve mine, and an hour later, we headed downstream again. The farmer had a lot of questions, of course, and I answered them in a somewhat deceptive manner in order to make him think I wasn't some sort of greenhorn, and then I thanked him and told him my name was Joe Smith. He said there was a fellow who wrote a newspaper column who looked a lot like me, and I said I had been told that before. My Uncle Norten accepted full blame. He said he should have never left me in charge of the boat.
Our spring magazine, ‘The Lightnin’ Ridge Journal’ is about ready to go to print. To see the cover go to larrydablemontoutdoors on your computer. To get a copy email me at lightninridge47@gmail.com. Or you can call my office and talk to Gloria Jean about how to get one mailed to you. You can see a very unusual photo on that website of mine this week, a photo of a fish in the sky.
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