A ‘Squirrel in a Bucket’ Story

 

In my dad's pool hall, the old timers occasionally referred to a tall tale as a 'possum in a bucket’ story. When my curiosity overflowed, I asked Ol' Bill where such a term came from. He told me that years ago one the old coon hunters had claimed he found a grown possum in a five-gallon gas can, with only the two or three inch nozzle at the top of the can open. The old coon hunter said he figured the possum had fallen through that small hole at the top of the can when it was a little baby and its mother had just been feeding it as it grew older. 

This column, therefore, could be 'squirrel in a bucket story'. It started when I was sitting on my back porch a few years ago and watched a mother gray squirrel carrying a very small baby squirrel from one tree to another when she dropped him. I would have thought the little fellow would have been killed by that fall, but he wasn't. I watched, thinking she would come back to get it, but she didn't. Finally I couldn't stand listening to the little fellow cry for his mama, and I knew he would soon attract a hawk or some other predator. So I went out and picked him up and told him everything would be okay. Looking around for a box to put him in, I could only find a minnow bucket sitting in my boat. I lined it with leaves and he liked it. We took him in and fed him from a bottle until he developed a liking for peanut butter and he grew into a fine young adolescent squirrel. We would lock him in the minnow bucket at night on the screened porch, so nothing could get him. 

Eventually we just set the bucket on the rail of our back deck next to the big white oak tree and he started hauling white oak leaves into it on his own to make himself a nice soft bed. 

I kept him safe by leaving the bucket out there where he could be free and well fed, and every night I closed the lid and every morning I opened it. He would come in the house at times and sit on my shoulder while I wrote, and become one of the gentlest, nicest little pet squirrels I ever had, and I have had a bunch of them over the years. 

I could bring the readers of this column to tears by saying that I went on a fishing trip to Canada and forgot to open the lid and when I got back he had shrunk up to the size of a weasel and didn't have the strength to crawl out of the bucket. I could go on about how I nursed him back to health with the aid of an old retired veterinarian who had become a hermit, and how he had one day met a girl squirrel and raised a family in that same bucket. 

But none of that happened. He must have been around here for a couple of years before he took off with a pack of migrating gray squirrels. I think he ended up in north Arkansas. 

Gray Squirrels are great pets. Fox squirrels are too, but they get cantankerous as they age and bite just a little, then run off to seek their fortune. I had a bunch of squirrels I raised from babies because Uncle Roy McNew would so often cut firewood in February and there'd be a litter of them in a hollow place high above the ground, which he hadn't seen. I don't want anyone thinking Uncle Roy would have intentionally cut down a den tree, it was always an accident 

My mom did let me have several wild pets, maybe three or four different crows. One of them, old Joe was the main attraction in a pet parade in Houston, MO. Mom and grandma made him a little vest and a hat and I tethered him to a roosting bar I could hold and Joe and I marched down main street with him cawing all the way. We won second place, and it was a crime. Some little girl and her ugly cat took first place, only because she was the mayor's niece!  You can never escape politics.

 

The promise I made to tell deer hunters about what the Missouri Department of Conservation is doing to charge and fine hunters with a technicality in order to illegally take and keep trophy deer antlers and capes was suppose to have been printed in my blogspot last week didn’t make it. I apologize for that but it is in there now. I hope you will read it, because what those agents are doing is a crime and I mean that literally! The site is ‘larrydablemontoutdoors’ on the Internet.

 

 

Column from 2008: In a Tree

 

I am writing this column from the deep woods, about 25 feet above the ground in a self-climbing tree stand attached to a big white oak. (It is early November 2008.) I am using a really nice manufactured surrounding-seat stand I bought many years ago on sale in the sporting goods section of a discount store with birthday money.  You can work it way up a branchless tree in a matter of minutes. 

I have had some enjoyable days in tree stands like this one, and have seen some really unusual things, and a killed lot of deer this way. Someday I might be able to write a pretty good book on what I have observed and experienced in a tree stand. Once about 20 years ago, I ran one of these self-climbing tree stands up a big oak and the sound of the metal scraping against the tree caused a buck to come running toward me thinking he was hearing another buck scraping his antlers against a tree, and he came to within 40 yards, his ears all perked up and his tail twitching, snorting just a little.  He was a nice eight-pointer, and obviously not the smartest buck in the woods. But I never worry about whether I get a deer or not. I usually do, but not a trophy. I don’t hunt for trophies.   I feel a little sorry for those who do. Some of them are my friends and we argue a lot about how nuts they are for doing    that.

I can’t fall out of this type of tree stand and that simplifies life somewhat.  When I was younger I fell out of one that I built once.  I have built a bunch of them. Without that worry, here there is a freedom which can be felt, but not easily expressed, especially with a cold pen and a half-sized notebook.  Everyone wants this freedom of the soul that I so often find alone in the woods or on the river. But it doesn’t go well with making a living unless you like venison as much as beef and chicken. Out here in the woods I quite often thank God for so many blessings I never had a regular job and I feel a little bit like an Osprey that sits in a dead tree watching the lake for a fish. Like him I don’t know what is happening elsewhere in the world nor what is in my bank account, nor do I care. Honest!

I lost my train of thought there for a moment.  A button buck just walked by about thirty yards away.  He would have been awfully tender and tasty, but there wouldn’t have been much of him to eat.  I don’t know if you have thought about this, but even though the loin of a mature buck makes about three times more steak than that of a button buck, it is about half as good to eat.  Even up here in this tree, there are some pretty weighty decisions to be made at times.  It isn’t for everybody… you have to be fairly quick witted.

What I really would like is a good two-year-old buck, with antlers enough so that I could lie about them just a little bit in the story-telling afterward, without having to feel really guilty and having to confess to anything later. I recall sitting in a self climbing tree-stand once during the peak of the rut with my bow when two very heavy-antlered bucks met not thirty yards from me, one going north and one going south. There was too much brush for a shot.  I thought to myself, “boy I am fixin’ to see one heck of a fight now!”  To my surprise they came together at a fence, touched noses and stuck them way up in the air.  Then one jumped the fence and they walked off away from me, heading east.  It was as if two old cousins came together and one said to the other, “let’s go eat some acorns and drink some stumpwater and chase women!” 

Most of this afternoon it has been overcast and just a few minutes ago the sun broke just below the clouds and just above the horizon.  It bathed the woods in an eerie sort of orange-glow with deep shadows, and now it is about to disappear. I hear some turkeys making putting and perking noises as they get up the nerve to try to make it up to that first big limb, a good place to spend the night.  It is soon going to be too dark to write and it is getting cooler. I don’t envy those turkeys, I don’t think I’d want to be up here all night, although I have been in tree stands pretty late at times, like that one time I couldn’t get the safety harness buckle to unlatch, and then that time Ol’ man Parker’s bull got loose.

Right now I think I will just run this thing down the tree and go to the house and build a fire. And see if I can write something while at my desk, while warmer.

 

The Trophy

 

I was lucky enough to get a photo of this 10-point buck while I was hunting with a camera instead of a gun.

            He was easily the biggest buck I have ever seen in    the Ozarks if you are talking about antler size.  And there he was filling up the scope of my rifle at 45 yards, broadside and stone-still.  I watched him for more than a minute, until he turned and walked back into the woodlands.  I didn’t fire because less than thirty seconds before he walked out into the open, I had dropped a smaller buck at the edge of a small   pond. I was looking over from my tree stand at a waterhole deep in the woods. It was getting a lot of attention from deer during that dry year, probably 25 years ago.

       I remember him well, a gray-muzzled old guy with thick-beamed, high spreading antlers, perhaps with several more tines than ten.  I don’t know what the Boone and Crockett measurement numbers would have been; I have never gone in for that kind of thing.  He was actually no larger in body than the buck I had just killed. That deer was a young one, and fat.  What I wanted wasn’t more antlers but some good loin steaks, a smoked ham, ground venison to combine with pork to make summer sausage and chili, and maybe some good jerky for the rest of the winter.  I had that in the seven-pointer that had dropped in his tracks.  

       Who knows what happened to that big-antlered rascal. I only wish I had been able to get his photograph, because I would rather get pictures of live big bucks than dead ones.  Especially now, and it has been that way for four or five years.  I will hunt keep hunting deer… but likely never again with a rifle or bow, as I have done for five decades.  I shoot lots of wildlife now, with my camera.

       Oh yes, I have seen some monstrous record-book wild bucks, but they were in Manitoba, Canada, where deer live in the bush country to the north of the great flat croplands there where I once went to hunt ducks and geese. I saw deer there that were 60 to 80 pounds larger than any I have ever seen in the Ozarks, or even Iowa or Nebraska.  I found a shed antler there once while hunting snipe, that I could scarcely believe. It had 6-points with a beam like a hickory fence post.

 

       I have many good friends and even relatives that are trophy hunters and they would give anything to hunt deer like that, but to go there and do it you would have to have permission to hunt private land and the trip and tags will cost you a fortune. I could have done it but I was so into waterfowl and goose hunting that it was all I wanted to do when I was up there.

 

       I have seen monstrous antlers on deer in the south too. There are oodles of them in deer farms where people raise them from little tame and bottle-fed fawns to be slaughtered via rifle, much as you would do a hog or steer.  Some of those bucks bring tens of thousands of dollars.  The biggest of them are raised in Texas on hundreds of deer farms, by people who have made a fortune because of it. It comes down, I guess, to what you want to do with your life. And it is the deer farms that created Chronic Wasting Disease by feeding deer animal by-products, although some I have interviewed say they don’t do that. 

        I talked once to a man by the name of Larry Bade who worked on a deer farm in the Ozarks who told me it bothered him to bottle feed a little fawn and watch it be turned loose in a killing zone four years later to be shot by some millionaire’s kid from a tree stand overlooking a corn zone emptied only a day before they arrived. 

       “Those who kill the deer seldom eat them anyway,” he told me,  “some are just thrown away in hot weather or the MDC takes the meat and it is put into a program they call ‘share the harvest’.  The people who eat that meat have no idea how many chemicals I have injected into those nearly tame bucks, with bottles that clearly say, ‘not for human consumption’.”  Bade quit the job because of that.

       All around the Ozarks this deer season there will be hunters going after bucks with big antlers! Me too I hope… with my camera. If you are a deer hunter you need to read some articles I am putting on a website this week.  They concern the Mo. Dept. of Conservation and cannot be printed in the news media. Go to my blogspot larrydablemontoutdoors, and read about those things that can save you from fines you do not deserve, and keep you from losing deer antlers and even firearms to MDC agents.