Larry Dablemont  column  12-8-25

 

The Wind and the Oaks

 

The opening of the doe season was only a few hours away and the wind was blowing through the oaks up here on Lightnin’ Ridge. “Shucks” I thought to myself, “There won’t be a leaf left on my oak trees!”  

I am sensitive about such things.  I had watched those oak leaves bud out on the big white oak beside my back porch, only a few months ago. First there were the tassels hanging down, shedding a yellow-green pollen all over my porch, a thick dusting of it that caused me to sneeze.  

How wonderful spring was, if I can remember right. But finally those squirrel-ear-sized leaves began to pop out and it was easy to see summer was on its way.  In no time, they were fully formed and bright green and it was great to sleep at night with the windows open and hear the rain dripping through that thick canopy. 

In September, I abruptly awakened to the sound of acorns bouncing off my roof.  I smiled to myself knowing that those first acorns meant the bass would be smashing buzz-baits and topwater lures on the river. In no time, you could hardly sleep at night for the sound of bouncing acorns off the roof. It was one of those Octobers where you had to sweep the porch every couple of hours.   

October flew past, the sun began to set earlier and earlier, and those beautiful green leaves began to turn, and yellow, and gold and red and finally, brown.  In the last days of that wonderful month, I began to sweep some leaves off the porch as well as acorns. 

Ten or fifteen years ago I would have likely shot a doe during this season because I like to eat venison. For some reason, it is harder to want to now that rocks beneath the oaks are harder to sit on. And my camera is lighter than my rifle.  I can now gaze through the woodlands before me, at squirrels busily gathering the acorns they so willingly ignored when hickory nuts were plentiful, and I can see, in my minds eye, the first skiff of snow, and hear some distant church bells ringing out a Christmas carol, as deer season is forgotten.

I can feel the cold mornings of January, and see falling snow that gets deep enough to make for good photos and good rabbit hunting.  Even beyond that, I gaze into the future and imagine the coming of longer, warmer days and those first oak stamens which will make me sneeze in April, just when some long-bearded, gobbling tom is easing through the woods, scratching at old dead leaves which were bright green a few months ago.  What a picture I will get then, as  I  lean up against a big oak tree.

It feels good to be in the woods, no matter the season and no matter the reason, waiting and listening and thinking. There will be many more oak trees to sit against, I hope. I think I’ll keep bringing that old camouflaged boat cushion with me to soften the rocks.  Make no mistake about it, it will not soften me any!  And make no mistake about it, I’ll get that hat-rack buck yet, with my camera, sometime before all of today’s oak leaves are blown away and decay. I’ll get him and some of his sons with my camera.  Maybe.  If there’s a soft spot against a big oak, and a layer of leaves to cushion the rocks…

 

      I made a big mistake in the article I wrote about our Christmas event coming up soon.  I said it was Saturday the 22^ndof December when it is actually Saturday the 20^th from 9 to 3.  On that date we will have a big sale of lots of   art and other items and I am going to be giving away one of my outdoor books to children who like to read.  A neighbor of mine has given me some beautiful big wooden bowls to sell as Christmas gifts and they are sold for high prices in gift shops at various places in the Ozarks. At our event they will go for fifty percent of original costs.  There will be lots of tackle boxes, fishing rods and reels and likely 200 or more fishing lures, plus a portable depth finder that is brand new.  If you have an office or den you would like to add some color to, there are several large framed pictures of wildlife for sale, done by world renowned artists, and  a beautiful mounted deer head as well.   The address  is 1640 South Highway 63 at Houston Mo. Hope to see you there! Come by and get a free Christmas magazine.  See my websites… larrydablemont.com and larrydablemontoutdoors.com

The address is  P.O. Box 22, Bolivar, mo 65613 and the  email address is lightninridge47@gmail.com

 

 

 

A Christmas Event

          

The fire had burned down in the fireplace, and it was a trifle warm, so I stepped out on the back porch to feel the coolness of the oncoming winter, looking down on the dark river valley. The moon was faint, shining through the clouds and it was so still you could have heard a coon cough. Down in the timber below I could hear an old hound on the trail of something. Its deep baying was mournful, and beautiful in the still night. 

It made me wish I was sitting on a gravel bar somewhere, before a roaring fire, with a few of those old-time coon or fox hunters who would rather listen to the baying of distant hounds than listen to the music of the finest choirs or orchestras.

Oh I know that if you have never heard it, you can’t imagine it, or appreciate it, but baying hounds in the night are a kind of music you can become addicted to. I have never owned a coonhound or foxhound, but my dad and uncles had some and I cannot forget what a sound it is when they are trailing something through the hills of the Ozarks. Every man knows the sound of his own hound, no matter how large the pack. 

Hearing that one made me feel something so nostalgic and fine that I didn’t want to leave. In time, he faded off into the darkness way off to the west, and I wished I could have followed. Ozark houndsmen are the last of a breed of real outdoorsmen. 

 

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

         If you have a youngster between the ages of 9 and 15 who likes to read I    have a free book for them. The name of it is  ‘Dogs, Ducks and Hatrack Bucks’.  It is a book of short stories about the Ozarks outdoors which I wrote several years ago. I will be signing that book to boys and girls who might   like one for Christmas.  It sells for 15 dollars but on Saturday December 20 it is free and I will sign it to your youngster for a Christmas gift.  You can pick one up between 9 and 3 o’clock that day at my Big Piney nature center… 6410 South Highway 63, about one mile south of Houston, Mo. Despite some health setbacks I am going to work to put up displays about the river and I’m looking for volunteers who want to help with that.  I actually hope too open it to the   public three days a week next spring.  

         Back in September we had an open house with all kinds of stuff for sale hoping to raise some money. Lots of folks came, but a heavy rain hit about noon, which ended the whole day.  So now I have a roomful of good items for Christmas gifts, which   includes fishing lures, rods and reels and carved duck decoys.  There are also several valuable framed wildlife paintings and other art.  You just might find something special for a Christmas gift.  I will have all twelve of my books there, selling for a 4-dollar discount, and some antique magazines.  My new Christmas magazine will be there too, on sale for 5 dollars.

         If I can get them there I will sell a really nice NuCanoe kayak and a 19-foot square-stern Grumman canoe as well as a 20-foot boat trailer.  All proceeds will go toward finishing the nature center for next spring.  If you would like more information, call me at 417 777 5227 or email me at lightninridge47@gmailcom. You can read past and future columns on the Internet at larrydablemontoutdoors and see all my books and magazines at www.larrydablemont.com.

 

 

Don’t Be Fooled

 

         Deer hunters need to know that some conservation agents come to the homes of those who telecheck large antlered deer and ask to see the place where their deer was killed. If a hunter complies they will be cited for some technical offense or charged with baiting even if no baiting has been done.  Always, 100 percent of the time, if you take an agent to the place you killed a deer, you will be charged with some type of offense! Always, 100 percent of the time, it will involve a large antlered deer that will be   confiscated.  It happened to me a few years back.  Two agents stood on my porch for a half hour questioning me about a buck I killed. I eventually closed the door on them and they left.

         Often bait is found at such a site that comes from the uniform pocket of the agent!   They will only do this if the antlers are large enough to warrant being confiscated.  If you have an agent come to your door do not let them in, and DO NOT take them where you killed a buck or cleaned it unless they present you with a signed search warrant. 

         I now have forms which have been given to me by the Department’s Chief of Enforcement with which you can file a complaint against an agent or agents who violates your rights or tries to coerce you to reveal where you hunt or who asks you to allow inspection of your property without that search warrant.  If you want to fill out a complaint, which can be filed with the MDC and kept secret or made public, notify me. I will fill it for you, use it in my column and protect your identity.

 

         A local taxidermist says that a woman conservation agent spends lots of time in his shop trying to find a reason she can confiscate deer heads and antlers brought to him.  He says she ought to spend as much time in the field as she does in his shop.  I once wrote that hunters might consider checking an unusually large set of antlers as smaller than they really are so that they will not be the object of an agent’s attention.  Now she goes into taxidermy shops and tries to find antlers that are in any way different or smaller than reported. She can and does take hunters deer heads or antlers from a taxidermist’s shop with no ones approval but her own.  It isn’t right, but a hunter who loses his deer head that way has no choice but to pay a fine and lose a legally taken deer head if he cannot afford a lawyer.

         As an example… a taxidermist tells me that a deer head was brought to his shop by an agent who declared it to be illegally taken.   He said he wanted it mounted for educational use in an MDC office.  Instead, he hung the mounted head, paid for by the   Department of Conservation, in his own home.   If there are those who think I am making this up, I can tell you the name of the    agent and of the taxidermist.

          What they call “Sunshine Laws” don’t apply to the MDC.  Agents who violate laws or are proved to be in violation of MDC policy are never publically named, and some have even been promoted. The MDC paid out a million dollars years back because two agents violated the laws and illegally searched a home. They were never disciplined.

         I am told no one in the MDC can comment on “Personnel Related Matters”.  I can name illegal acts and violations by individual agents that they were never questioned about.  It is beyond belief.  Are they so powerful that they can never be questioned or investigated?  This 18-million dollar construction boondoggle, that has destroyed for good a fantastic wildlife area named Schell-Osage, likely involves the violation of state laws and certainly has allowed for tens of thousands of dollars in interest going into powerful individual’s pockets, both in and out of the MDC.  But it can never be investigated by anyone.  In time cost over-runs will amount to several million dollars more than the 18 million supposedly given to someone who will never finish the project, and it is likely that waterfowl will never come there in appreciable numbers again.

         Newspapers and television stations tell me that they can be closed down by reporting on the MDC because the powerful agency can shut off much of their advertising other funds that they depend on.  If you doubt that I can give you the name and station manager of the news media station, which told me, and I quote… “The department is awfully upset that we had you on the air last week…they give us an awful lot of money to control what is said about them!” When a state agency controls what newspapers and televisions can report, that is full-scale corruption.

 

I had an interview in Jefferson City a month ago with director of the MDC, Jason Sumner and the enforcement chief, Travis McClain.  In a future column I will write about what is going to come from that meeting that may be a big benefit for Ozark rivers and those who own land along Ozark rivers.

 

Drones For Deer Hunters

 

       

       I have a friend who grew up in Wisconsin who was a very good deer hunter.   He liked to bow hunt in early October where large unharvested cornfields stood...his name was Al Narveson.  Al had found a good number of big bucks by walking along cornrows into the wind, and coming upon bedding deer deep inside the cornfields.  He said that in midday they would hide in those cornrows and    you could walk right upon them. I got to thinking about that.  Al lives in Arkansas now and it has been many years since he has seen a cornfield. But what a difference today would make on that kind of hunting. Al wouldn’t have to walk through a cornfield, he could just buy a drone and fly it over a field and find the deer in a hurry, pinpointing where he needed to stalk one.

       Would drones work in the Ozarks for deer hunters?  Well right now with all the foliage left on the trees, probably not, but when the muzzle-loading season arrives you are dealing with bedded down deer during the day and the foliage is gone.  Deer would be fairly easy to find with a drone, especially with snow on the ground.  I am not sure how to find Al now, but I wonder if he already has figured this drone thing out.

       It is amazing how our seasons are changing.  Ducks that once lined the Ozark Rivers in early November now come to the Ozarks two to four weeks later than they    once did.  I keep an eye on Ozark ponds because that tells me when the mallards begin to arrive.  Last year they didn’t ‘arrive’ they just pretty well passed us by. This Thanksgiving I will have to watch the situation while I fry a turkey out on the back deck because leaves will be falling in the cooking oil.  In twenty years I predict we’ll see the fall foliage at it’s brightest around the first week in December, hurricanes in November, ducks arriving in the Ozarks with the new year, turkeys mating in June and the first tomatoes becoming ripe in July. For the past several years, wild turkey spring mating and egg laying has been two to three weeks later than it was in the 80’s.  

       I have acquired seventeen bound volumes of the “Ozark Mountaineer” magazine, which I will put to good use.  They begin in the early 1980’s. In my own magazine, “The Lightnin’ Ridge Journal”, I have used some old recipes from a hundred years or so ago that came out of the Mountaineer. In future issues I will reprint material from those old historic issues that tell so much about the Ozarks. My Christmas issue of the “Lightnin’ Ridge Journal” has just been printed and you  can get  your  own  80-page issue by calling my office… 417 777 5227. 

 

An Arkansas reader by the name of Phillip Rice sent me this note….        

 

Be sure and mark November 8th on your calendars for opening day of river-otter season. You are allowed two per day, daytime hunting only. The Game and Fish Commission wants you to tell them your hunting strategy, how many days per year you focus solely on hunting otters, and how many you annually harvest. What a joke. Why does AGFC not recognize that managing otters should be right up there at the top of the list in getting our rivers back.  A river the size of the White should support 2 to 3 otters per river mile. There are sections that easily have 10 times those numbers. They eat 15 to 20 percent of their body weight every day. I’d say the average weight of otters is in the twenty- to twenty-five-pound range. Take 10 twenty-pound otters per mile for the 44 miles between Bull Shoals Dam and the confluence with the Norfork River, and the number of fish they are killing is staggering. 

Since we have had one knee jerk reaction, why not have a 2nd and let us put the hammer down on these predators. And throw blue herons in there as well...

       

       Pond owners in the Ozarks are learning to shoot any otters seen around   their ponds if they want to keep their fish. Stocking otters years back was one of the crowning   achievements of the Missouri Department of Conservation’s way-too-young-to-know-what-they-were-doing biologists.   Seemed like such a good idea!  They didn’t know that the otters would end up in north Arkansas rivers destroying fish numbers as well as they did in the Ozarks of Missouri.

Send me comments or messages via email at lightninridge47@gmail.com, or send me a letter to P.O.  Box 22, Bolivar, MO 65613.

Canadian Adventure

  

Canadian  Adventure 

 

            What an adventure I had recently in Canada!  I took my daughter Christy Lynn to Tinker Helseth’s place for a week of fishing in Lake of the Woods in mid-October. We drove all day, pulling my boat full of fishing gear, and got there about eleven p.m.  I awakened the following day to a beautiful sunny morning, looking forward to a day of fishing. As I looked from our cabin out across a wind-chopped bay it came to me that something was going to be   different from the way I had planned things. A hard pain hit me to the left of the center of my chest and I knew in a second what it was…a heart attack. 

       With the pain hammering me with each heartbeat, Christy took over, and drove me back to the border, to International Falls, Minnesota. There was no doubt what was happening… the pain was tremendous.

       They waved us through the border gate and in minutes we were at the small International Falls hospital—small but tremendously efficient.  A very obese doctor walking with a cane came in and two nurses gave me tests and some medicine, which instantly took away the pain. In minutes I felt back to normal, and even thought maybe there would be a chance to go back and go fishing.  No such luck.  Wired up for what they called an EKG, the test showed something was wrong and a blood test had enzymes that proved I was indeed having a heart attack.  

       The doctor was great… he kept treating me and told me that he would have a helicopter there soon to fly me to Duluth where a brand new hospital had several heart doctors to take over my treatment.  I think I went to sleep for a while or they had me so relaxed I didn’t know how the time flew past. It was about four in the afternoon when I saw that helicopter land just outside.  I told Christy to find out where the hospital was in Duluth and drive my pickup there, a three-hour drive to the shores of Lake Superior. Surely we could get back to fishing in a day or so.

       The helicopter trip, which I always dreaded the thought of, was something I will never forget.  They bundled me up and slid me in through a large back window and propped me up so I could see out. A very pretty nurse sat next to me all the way and talked to me via earphones that even let me hear the pilot. When that helicopter got started it felt as if it was vibrating to pieces but in short order I watched the hospital fade away and my daughter Christy climbing into my pickup far below.  I was worried about her, Duluth was 3 hours away and Christy does not drive in large cities.   Fortunately for her the city overlooking that huge great lake is not very large. Fortunately for me it has a great hospital only three years old with several top-notch cardiologists.

       But first let me tell       you about the helicopter ride.      My uneasiness due to fear of heights, known as heightrophobia, quickly went away.  For the first 30 minutes, I looked out from 2000 feet in the air at a landscape bathed in the light of the setting sun, then in the coming darkness, which showed hundreds of lights everywhere.

       I hadn’t been told that the new hospital was 17 stories   high.  When it landed that helicopter was on the very top of the building.  They put me on a gurney that was on wheels, and it appeared that the edge of that roof was only about 30 feet away.  I prayed that they would hold onto that cot-on-wheels as my heightrophobia came back strong.  It wasn’t that I dreaded so much what a 17-story fall would do, it was more the apprehension concerning what a long time I would have to think about it.

         They took me to a room and I met with the head cardiologist, a Dr. Shultz, who got me prepared for surgery early the following morning.  Christy got there just afterward, a big relief to me.  They told her that she could sleep in the hospital room on a folding couch, which was another big relief. That operating room the next morning was impressive, but I didn’t get to see much of it.  

       As I talked with a couple of nurses, I fell asleep and woke up just an hour later.  Christy was there, smiling, which told me I hadn’t had to have any kind of bypass.   A nurse explained I had received three stents, something they do when small arteries are blocked up.  I had some blockages amounting to 90 percent but thank the Good Lord in Heaven, no heart damage.

       The nurses and doctors and people there were good folks, it seemed to me.   On October 11, my birthday, a heart doctor spent about an hour in my room with a drawing board showing me everything about my heart, what had went wrong and what they had done to fix it. I learned a great deal from him about what I need to do to keep it working right.  He talked a little about diet, then brought Christy and I, a couple of pieces of birthday cake an hour later.

       A week and a half after we returned home, I went    back to Lake of the Woods to retrieve my boat and gear and to see my old friend, Tinker Helseth and his family. Two years ago I was up there on my birthday fishing some little-known lake by myself and caught a 6-pound smallmouth, my biggest ever.  Thank goodness I didn’t have my heart attack me then.  If I hadn’t had Christy with me, I don’t know what I would have done.  But the poor girl never got to fish.  Her younger sister, Leah Noel and her mother, Gloria Jean got to go back a week later with me, and the weather was great.  We just caught walleye one right after another.  We brought back fish and gear and the boat!            

       Christy says she brought back something of greater importance… ol’ Dad.   Might be that no one else would value this old timer above three days of good fishing.

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.