Arm-Chair Fishing

 

       

My daughter, Christy, with a nice crappie

         About an hour before sunset I maneuvered the big pontoon boat across the wide and windy waters of Stockton Lake. I found a good spot of calm water out of the wind, off an eastern-facing bluff. I stretched a rope between two trees sticking up out of forty feet of water.  I have done a similar thing over the past forty years in Bull Shoals, Norfork, Beaver, and Truman lakes.  I could write a whole book about those nighttime trips in which many species of fish have been boated.  

         It is fascinating what happens at night from that pontoon boat with submerged lights radiating a bright glow from beneath the boat.  I had food and coffee and a bed arranged in the back of that covered big camp-style boat.  I would spend the night there.  A big cooler with ice in it most often gets filled with fish by one or two in the morning.

         But there I sat that night on Stockton, watching the little water creatures swarm around my light while darkness settled.  By ten o’clock, there were swarms of tiny gammarus, (fresh-water shrimp) clouding the water around the lights,  with small fish only an inch or two long.  I had my rod setting there beside me, with a live minnow on a hook, 26 feet beneath me.  Nothing had touched it for an hour and a half.  On the bank, a trio of young coons came by and passed, searching for an easy meal. A heron flew by and squawked at me. I thought I heard a whippoorwill across the lake.  They are rare anymore, especially this early.  In the distance, a boat motor roared past.  The Coleman lantern hissed a little, and insects began to swarm around it, so I turned it off, no light now above board.  At 10:30 I still hadn’t had a strike and I was getting sleepy.  The sleeping bag seemed more attractive as each minute passed.  I got up and drank a cup of hot coffee as the night cooled… put on a jacket too.

         I wasn’t going to sit there fishless much longer!  Seemed as if it would be one of those nights.  Maybe I would climb in the sleeping bag, which one of my fishing partners jokingly refers to as a ‘fartsack’, sleep a couple of hours and then sample the waters beneath the light again.  Then about a quarter to eleven, it happened.  The tip of my rod bobbed ever so slightly and the taut line beneath it slacked just a mite.  I grabbed it and set the hook and the resistance below me told me I had a crappie.  He stayed right beneath me, as crappie do, and I lifted him up to admire a 13-inch black crappie which meant that the sleeping bag would wait a good while.  

         Five minutes later, with a fresh minnow dropped into the depths, I was wide awake and holding on to my light action rod, when I felt a slight jolt.  Another crappie, this one a little bigger than the last.  I put him in the ice chest and nailed another, then another.  By midnight, there were seven or eight crappie flopping around on the floor beside me.  I just didn’t have time to quit baiting a hook and bending that rod, as I fought the results of a crappie school beneath me.   Then a fish nailed the minnow hard and headed for the main lake.  White bass do that, and you know what it is when you have hooked one beneath the lights. White bass really outdo a crappie and it took a couple of minutes to tire him.  He was too big to lift aboard.  I netted him and admired a two pound female white bass that was full of eggs in early May.  Weird, but that’s the way it is.

           Often you will catch egg-laden whites that should have spawned up some tributary back in April.  But there are those that stay out in the lake and spawn on rocky points or perhaps not at all, reabsorbing eggs for some reason or another.  We could discuss scientific reasons for that but not tonight.  Tonight by 2.a.m I have my limit of crappie and none are less than 12 inches long.  Two are 15 inches in length and most between 13 and 14 inches.  In that ice chest there are a dozen white bass and none are under two pounds. I threw back smaller ones. A couple of them exceed three pounds.

           There is also a 19-inch walleye.  I realize that if I keep fishing I might land another walleye, maybe two.  But the fart-sack will be warm.  It is easy to drift off to sleep with the slight bobbing of the pontoon boat in gentle waves.  Just after first light, the noise and the waves of a passing motor boat wake me up, but so what, I will sleep longer and wait for sun rays to hit the pontoon through the fog.  There are some cinnamon rolls and warm coffee to heat up on the camp stove.  If there was room here I would tell you about the stripers caught in Beaver Lake beneath the lights, or the big trout we use to hook in Bull Shoals, or where you catch the night-crappie in Truman Lake.  I would love to tell you about the threadfin shad that only exist in Arkansas waters.  What a bait they are when you fish beneath the lights.  I use to catch many species of fish there on those threadfin shad, including a 16-pound walleye a partner landed on night in May of 1975.

         But you can learn about all that in my book “Recollections of an Old-Fashioned angler, a 288-page book about 70 years of fishing experiences. That book or any of my others can be ordered from the Internet, www.larrydablemont.com or you can call my office, 417 777 5227.  E-mail me at lightninridge47@ gmail.com.  I urge readers to read what I have written lately about the Missouri Department of Conservation, which cannot be printed in newspapers.  You can find those columns on www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com.

The River… Diversity

 

 

 

          The best time of the year to take a two- or three-day float trip is during early May, if you  can plan around the high water and thunderstorms this time of year.

         It is usually warm enough during the day for wading shoes, but you need dry clothing and a jacket during the evening hours. There are many migrating birds to see, some nesting eagles and wood ducks guiding their ducklings to cover as you pass. In the spring, fish begin to hit a lure just as well during the middle of the day as they do early and late.  And if you set a trotline baited with live bait, you will have a good chance of catching a big flathead catfish at night.  When you float rivers through National Forestland, you can hunt turkeys too. 

         Several years ago when there were still a few gobblers to be heard, I floated a river not far from home in early May and had a great day fishing. I was catching fish on everything from topwater lures to spinner baits. I took my shotgun along, and my turkey call, hoping I might get a young gobbler to answer me.  As we floated along, I'd use the call every now and then, and then go back to fishing.  Along about 10 one morning I picked up the call, stroked it a few times and I'll be darn if I didn't hear a reply in a small field beside us.  I didn't hear it very strong, but it was for sure a gobbler I had heard.

         I got out on a nearby gravel bar and set up in a fringe of big trees beside the field, hid myself well and began to call.  In thirty minutes, they were all around me, two young jakes and several hens. I picked out a Jake that looked fatter than the other one, and a while later, took a photo with a hefty stringer of bass and the turkey, laid out on the gravel bar.  

         If you take a notion to float a river for two or three days in May, make a check list before you go, so you can travel as light as possible and still have what you need.  Don't load up with canned goods and canned drinks; bring a good supply of water and mixes that give you what you need to have good meals.  But traveling the river isn't like backpacking; you have room to take enough supplies and gear to live comfortably.  A light tent needs a plastic cover over it if there should be heavy rain.  Use that cover to protect your gear during the day from any rain.  Take some dry clothes, but not a suitcase full.  Take raingear, a good flashlight and lantern and a camp stove and a camper's cook-set.

         But for Pete's sake, don't tackle two or three days on the river in a 17-foot double ender canoe, the capsize and chaos craft made for going fast and getting wet in. I use an 18 or 19-foot square stern canoe, or one of the paddle johnboats that Ozark float-fishermen use.  If you haven't learned to paddle a canoe or johnboat from one side all day long, you are at a real handicap.  But anyone can learn that with some practice.

         Recently I caught a 16-inch smallmouth, which fought like a tiger, then shortly afterward, a 21-inch largemouth, which gave a short struggle and gave up.  With his length, he should have weighed five pounds, but he was long and skinny.  His head made up seven inches of his 21-inch length.   He was an old male, and I'll bet he was 10 or 12 years old.  No doubt he had accounted for restocking the river with thousands of young bass, but he was too tired to fight much.  Most anglers know that in the spring of the year, it is the male bass that guards the eggs on a bed, and protects the young fry which hatch.  You could see that responsibility had taken a toll on him.

         Sometime this spring, try using minnows the way Canadians fish for walleye.  Use a 1/8th or 1/16th ounce jig head, and a long shank hook, which can be passed through the minnow's mouth, out the gill opening and through the back below the dorsal fin.  If you do it right, it keeps the minnow alive, even though it sounds very uncomfortable for the minnow.  But in such a manner, you can cast a minnow and retrieve it with a light action rod and spinning tackle.  You'll need lots of minnows, as the one you are casting gets jerked off the hook and time and may get fairly bedraggled after 8 or 10 casts.  But on the retrieve, the minnow looks very lifelike and it's deadly for walleye and crappie both.  At least it works very well in Canada.

You can contact me by email… lightninridge47@gmail.com.  I urge you to visit my site… larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com to read a special article there.

 

Let Your Will Be Done

 

                  Uncle Norten with good-sized largemouth bass

         When I was at the swap meet a couple of weeks ago, there was a young man there by the name of Conner McCarthy from Buffalo who was selling bass jigs he makes.  I had used some before and they are darned effective if you attach a pork rind or rubber crawdad and fish them deep and slow.  He is only 16 but has made those jigs for three years now, selling them mostly at his dad’s tire shop in Buffalo.  I’ll bet he makes a big time business out of it, because they are better than any I have ever used.  If you are a bass fisherman, call Conner and get one to try.  His number is on my website, or you can call the McCarthy tire shop and talk to his mother if Conner is in school.

 

         I also found some really good small-sized spinners good for everything that swims and has fins.  They are made by some folks from Brighton, MO.  All you have to do to get a couple of them is check the internet for their company…  those little lures are also great for smallmouth and rock bass.   Add a split tailed thin pork rind to them.

 

         I remember something that happened about 15 years ago when I was fishing an Ozark river with my uncle Norten, the old bass fisherman and guide who caught his first bass in 1929 when he was 6 years old. That day, many years back, he tied on a lure called a “schmoo”.  He immediately landed a couple of nice bass, a surprise to me because we hadn’t caught anything in an hour of fishing.  I borrowed one from him and fishing those two lures, we just kept catching bass. I have lots of old lures from the 30’s and 40’s that we used when I was a kid, in the 50’s and 60’s.  Many of you likely remember them, the lucky-13, bass-oreno, flatfish and lazy ike, didget midget and river runt.  Those all were fish catchers, before the first Rapala and rebel lures were made.

         I am going to use each and all of them this summer and will let you know what happens.  I still have uncle Norten’s schmoo, but this is sort of strange… that day years back we likely landed 15 or so good bass on the lure, and since then I haven’t caught one bass on them, despite using the lure for a half hour or so each time.  Norten has been gone for a dozen years, but I still feel like he is there with me at times when I am fishing alone.  In 1911, he caught his last bass fishing with me.  You can see a picture of him and that final black bass on my website, www.larrydablemontoutdoors. He was 88 years old then. 

This is the last bass, my uncle Norten ever caught, one month before his 89^th birthday on an evening trip in September.  To   find out more, get a copy of the book, “Ridge Runner, from the Big Piney to the Battle of the Bulge” third printing… revised edition from April, 2024

        We are finishing the 3^rd printing of his biography, the book entitled ‘Ridge Runner… from the Big Piney to Bastogne’.  I have been told I will never write a better book.  I know many have read it.  If you haven’t, then call my office to get one of those new revised editions.  417 777 5227.

 

         When you have to get up early to go fishing or hunt turkeys, it keeps you from getting to bed early if you have lots of folks to pray for at bedtime. If the list is long, it is hard to stay awake to get to all of them.  I have that problem.  But I believe a good indication of the kind of human God sees you as, depends on that list, followed up with the last sentence… let Your will be done!  I don’t catch fish on every trip and I had a rough year hunting ducks, but I am seeing a miracle in the making in the progress of the Big Piney River Nature Center, which He and I are building in Texas County.  When God’s will is done, wonderful things happen and I believe it is happening here.  Sometime this summer I will be inviting all you folks to come and see it. I think His will is being done there.       There will be no charge, no profit, not even a cash register…  just a tribute to some great people from another time and to one of The Creator’s greatest works, the Big Piney River where I grew up.

Write to me at P.O. Box 22, Bolivar, Mo 65613.  Or email me at lightninridge47@gmail.com  

 

 

Bad News for Turkeys

 

Dan's captive turkeys, growing poults in mid summer.  

         An old man in the rural part of St. Clair County successfully worked to keep wild turkeys plentiful on his place. For 15 years he did a heck of a job!  His name was Dan Besser. He bought some incubators and raided several wild turkey nests each spring, hatching the eggs and raising the turkey poults in a pen inside a barn. 

         Dan knew that if he left a couple of eggs inside the nest and took only four or five, the hen turkey would continue to lay eggs in the nest.  It is a fact that wild turkey hens will lay lots more eggs if the nest is destroyed.  An Arkansas biologist told me years ago he had known of hens laying one egg a day for most of a month and a half, when the nest was raided.  Hens have been known to hatch eggs at all weeks of the summer, but it is also a fact that some poults that hatch in late summer are often too small to survive the winter. Likely, poults hatched in August have such a high mortality rate that few ever see the next spring.  

         Dan knew a lot about wild turkeys and he usually could find a couple of nests and therefore incubate 8 or 10 eggs or so.  The survival rate was good, as he knew when to rotate the eggs and when to moisten them.  Most hatched, and by the time the poults were feeding around his house and sheds on their own, Dan was trying to keep them in protective pens at night. 

         He’d release them at the appropriate age and they would stay close, roosting in his trees.  By September they were wild birds. Most young birds he hatched lived into the following spring. 

 The old man's efforts produced gobblers like these twelve years ago.  There are  none today

        Dan allowed no fall hunting and marked them with a loose, colored collar around the neck so he could tell how many survived and recognize them. He said that usually the survival rate to adult birds was a little better than half.  Some would say he should never take wild eggs but that can be a real boon to the wild turkeys. Laws making it illegal to do so are not all that wise, because Dan Besser had plenty of wild turkeys. Many farmers have learned to do that.          Ten or twelve years ago I would stay in a small cabin of his, on Panther Creek and I eventually bought his place.  We turned his 50 acres and cabins into a retreat for poorer churches that wanted to help underprivileged kids.  In those times, I would get up before dawn, drink a cup of coffee on the porch looking over Panther Creek and hear 4 or 5 gobblers up and down the creek as they came off the roost.  Today there are none there... None!  Dan passed away and they began to decline.   

         There are no biologists today who would even try what he did.  They should try something, but they do not.  Now they have decided to allow all-day hunting.  There is a reason the really competent professional turkey biologists I met as a boy would not consider all day hunting.  Biologists of today are young, come from suburban backgrounds and are poorly educated.  

         They may be inept, as one I interviewed had no idea whether young poults were precocial or altricial, but if they were the best they could be, they would have to follow the puppeteers who tell them what to do, thinking first of how much revenue the wild turkey can produce.

         The harvest figures that become lower, as hunting numbers soar, is something that in time will cause hunters to stop buying tags. I grew up in a time of great turkey hunters who knew the birds as if they themselves were biologists.  There were the old-timers like Clyde Trout and Nolan Hutcheson and others whose names are forgotten.  But those men were in on the first restocking and resurrection of wild turkeys in the Ozarks when they were next to extinct in the 40’s and 50’s.  

         I wrote about them in my book, “The Greatest Wild Gobblers, Lessons Learned from Old-Timers and Old Toms.”  I hope you will read that book.  I would recommend it to the Conservation Department’s turkey experts.  You can find that book along with 10 others I have published, on the website, www.larrydablemont.com.  

         Wouldn’t it be something if the MDC would accept my invitation to a debate, just me against all the experts they could muster, at some venue in the Ozarks where outdoorsmen could come and ask questions.  I have asked them to accept that challenge for years, but they never answer.  Maybe some newspaper will help organize that someday.

         Check my other computer site from time to time, www.larrydablemontoutdoors You can email me at lightninridge47@gmail.com or write to me at P.O Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613.  Let me reiterate that I do not live in that town, but out in the woods miles away.  You can come and visit me if the crick isn’t up, but the road up to here is a rash of rocks and potholes so don’t bring your really good vehicle.  I recommend a good mule! 

         

A Befuddled MDC Agent

 

         I encourage old time turkey hunters to refrain from buying a turkey tag this spring and hunt them as I do…with a camera.  I just don’t want to kill any more gobblers.  I have killed them for 56 years, sometimes six or seven a year, and that is enough. I never want to go through cleaning and cooking another one.

         Did you know that there are laws in various states that make it illegal to have a wild turkey in your freezer after sometime in May?  The silliness continues!

         Years ago, I announced in my newspaper column that I would be having a wild game dinner and fish fry at a local church and that I would deep fry a gobbler that I had killed that spring. The big event was to take place in early June. A Missouri game warden called to tell me I would not be able to do that because it was illegal to have one after a certain day in May. 

         I was already a heinous violator for having it that long in my freezer. I told the warden I intended to proceed with my plans. He could come to our dinner, take a bite of the turkey and tell me if it was wild or tame.  He said a test on the meat could tell him that. Likely he had one of them DNA testers. So I asked him if it was legal to keep a cooked wild turkey in my freezer, like leftovers. He said he would have to find out by calling the front office and he would get back to me. He called back to say that it was indeed unlawful to have an uncooked wild turkey in one’s freezer, but it was likely going to be a problem fining me for having a cooked wild turkey in my freezer. I assume that perhaps you can’t get an accurate DNA test from a cooked turkey.

         I decided to have some fun out of that local game warden, so I went out and got a store-bought turkey and boiled it for about ten minutes. Then I called him and told him I needed him to call the front office and ask them how long a wild turkey needed to be boiled to be considered cooked. I got around to telling him that it had already been boiled for ten minutes and had turned fairly pink. I invited him to come to my basement freezer with a search warrant to take a look at the turkey. Cooking it that little while, I felt, should make the gobbler legal for the church dinner, which was to be held a good two weeks after the wild-turkey-in-the-freezer deadline. The question is, how long does one need to boil a turkey to call it a cooked turkey? When I asked him that, the game warden uttered an expletive and hung up.

         That’s a true story!  

         Our Wild Game Dinner at the church came off without a hitch. The game warden didn’t come.  He missed a really good fried turkey.

         

Fewer Wild Gobblers… More Hunters

 

Two gobblers feeding on corn in front of a youth blind

     The decline in wild turkey numbers over the past ten years is due to many things.  The main cause takes place next weekend, the youth season, what one hunter has referred to the weekend best used to teach youngsters to lie and break game laws.  I spend more time outdoors during the winter than any of the states young biologists and I can tell you that in some areas, gobbler numbers are down as much as 60 to 70 percent over what they were 20 years ago.  In some areas the decline is only 30 to 40   percent.  In those areas, private landowners do not allow hunting.  To accomplish that, those landowners keep youth hunting off their land, and they own enough land to keep down hunting pressure.  You can’t do much with less than 140 acres with a good part of it timbered.

     What I think is ahead for the wild turkey is the same situation you see now with quail, a base number of turkeys that does not increase much.  The Department of Conservation could do so much with a shorter, delayed spring season, a fall season cut in half or eliminated, reduced limits from two birds to one, and a youth season at the conclusion of the regular spring season instead of early April.  Right now, they fail to realize there is a change in what the wild turkey is…the fact that mating seasons are quite a bit later than they were in the 70’s and 80’s.  They also fail to realize that there has never been a poacher’s tool greater than the youth season. If a father wants to teach his kids to hunt, if he wants to spend valuable time with his children, tell me why a youth season in May, after the end of the regular season, is not just as good as the one we now have. 

     Those who complain the loudest about doing that, are the ones who use the youth season to kill an easy additional gobbler.  Youth seasons so often consist of elaborate blinds where corn has been scattered all through the winter.  You’ll see some fathers doing things right, but too many use that early season, as it is said, “To teach their youngsters to lie and break laws.” Some southern states are doing things to change spring turkey hunting in ways to help bring back gobbler numbers.  Why does it not become a priority of the Missouri department?  One answer… MONEY!

     Without the records to tell me, I will bet you will find, this spring, more hunters buying tags than ever, but low numbers of killed gobblers which may be more inaccurate than ever.  It takes little to figure, if ten hunters in the 80s killed 3.2 gobblers, and ten hunters in 2024 kill .6 gobblers, something needs to change.  That is a figure the MDC should make known… but they won’t.

 

Lightnin’ Ridge  Publishing Company will print a book for a 90 -year old man who was, for most of four decades an employee of the Missouri Conservation Commission, and then an employee of the Missouri Department of Conservation.  The  1/8-cent sales tax made the latter agency a bureaucracy that cannot be regulated.  He calls the MDC a mafia, a state within a state.  When you read what he saw and experienced, you will have a hard time ever believing anything that bureaucracy tells us.  He is not someone without the knowledge, he was a high-ranking employee.  No newspaper or television station would allow what he says to reach public ears.  You   can read the book of this honest man and make your own decisions.

He tells me the female MDC director is about to be replaced and doesn’t want to go.  I interviewed her once for 4 hours, and can tell you that amongst the inefficient directors the MDC has had, she is the worst.  But as for a replacement, he or she will be as bad, a puppet controlled by that ‘mafia’ as Mister _____ calls it.  You will know who he is later this year when one of the most revealing books ever written about that state agency is made available to all.

 

     I have to go to court next week to counter charges made by the local Wal-Mart because of what I have written about them and the local police. Being a writer who tells the truth is a dangerous occupation. Come support me at that if you believe in the first amendment.  Or read about it on the website below, along with other columns

I write, and see photos I take, like those two gobblers I shot this week. All on www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com  my mailing address is P.O. Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613   the email address is lightninridge47@gmail.com. You can call my office, 417-777-5227

 

THE GREEN GROUNDHOG

 

      Mont Cleary was not well-liked. Folks said he had killed a man in the 40’s after a poker game on the river by pushing him over a bluff.

      Argis Blackfern was a good old boy that everyone in the pool hall liked and had fun with. Argis, who was known as Argie to everyone, was mentally slow, but happy. I think he was the one who ate a whole jar of mayonnaise after Rube Wallace bet him a dollar he couldn’t do it in less than a minute. 

      Argie’s old mother came to the pool hall once madder’n hell because Argie had come home in his socks!  Mont Cleary had taken his boots in a bet of some sort.  They were nearly wore-out boots, as I recall it, who would want ‘em?  Mont did just because he could laugh about Argie walking around in socks with holes in them.  

      You might remember me writing about how Argie came into the pool hall once limping badly. Someone asked him why he was limping and Argie replied that he had gravel in his boot. When asked why he hadn’t removed it, Argie replied that “he jest hadn’t had the time.”

      Well as it came to be, that worthless Cleary had won five dollars from Argie in a bet and was laughing about it. The unbalanced young man never had much money and the whole thing angered Doc Dykes and Jerald Jeffries, two of the more intellectually-advanced members of the front bench regulars in dad’s pool hall.  

      Argie had come in one Saturday evening in the spring, telling a story about how he had seen a beaver run under his mom’s barn. Ol’ Mont bet him five dollars it wasn’t a beaver, so on a bright Sunday evening he and two or three of his ne’er-do-well buddies went out to Mrs. Blackfern’s barn with Argie.  They found a pair of groundhogs feeding out around the jonquils and emerging clover. Mont yukked it up about how he had won five dollars from Argie and it angered Doc and Jerald enough that they cooked up a plan.

      The following Saturday, Jerald gave Argie a hundred dollar bill and told him to wait ‘til Mont got there and swear that he had seen a bright green groundhog emerge from under his mom’s barn on St. Patrick’s Day.

      Things pretty much went according to plan after that.  Doc Dykes hoorahed the story of the green beaver. Mont joined him of course, as Doc bet Argie100 dollars that there was no such thing there at the barn. As he had been instructed to do, the  befuddled Argie said little and took out that hundred-dollar bill, and Doc produced his. Jerald was to hold the money.

      Mont was suckered badly that day, begging to add his 100 dollars to the bet as all the front bench regulars whooped it up and slapped their knees and laughed derisively. Now Jerald held three 100-dollar bills and Doc and Mont decided that when they took Argie’s 100, they would split it 50-50. But if Argie could in fact produce a green woodchuck sighting, he got the whole 300.

      The trap was set. I don’t think it could have gone any better. Argie just kept his mouth shut and Doc and Jerald said that if, before church the next morning there was no green groundhog to be seen, Argie lost the bet and Mont and Doc would be 50 dollars richer. 

      Doc of course, was the brains of the deception and he couldn’t have prayed for it to go better. On Friday, Jim Splechter and Ol’ Bill Stalder went out and live-trapped a groundhog under the widow Blackfern’s barn. They spent a considerable time there, having coffee and a slice or two of her oven-baked sweet-tater pie and flirting with the old widow. That gave a young groundhog time to emerge from beneath the barn to go in the trap to get the carrot it was baited with. And he was caught!

      On Saturday, the week after St. Patrick’s Day, Ol’ Bill handed over the live-trap cage and after a good spraying with bright green paint, they had the green whistle-pig that would cost Mont Cleary a hundred dollars.

      Sometimes though, perfect plans go awry and when Doc and Jerald and Mont and Argie and a half-dozen of the pool hall’s front bench regulars went out on Sunday morning to witness a green groundhog…he had escaped from the pen inside the barn. Doc and Jerald had forgotten that there are two things woodchucks can do…dig and chew!

      How much of a barn floor can a woodchuck chuck, if a woodchuck wants to chuck wood under his pen?

He was gone! Mont was ecstatic as they walked out of the barn with Argie’s head held low and Jerald fishing in his pocket for the 300 dollars, of which he only had two.

      And then came the miracle still talked about today. It was Ol’ Jess Wolf who saw it and exclaimed, “Looky Yonder!”  And there, well below the barn in the creek bottom, feeding amongst and patch of clover 400 yards away, was a bright green groundhog.

      There almost was a fight, as Mont figured things out, but there were too many there for Mont to whip, so he just resolved that he had been tricked and cheated, flamboozled and deceived!

      Doc got his 100 dollars back and Argie got Mont’s 100 dollars, probably the most money he ever had at one time. The groundhog eventually got the green paint to wear off, I guess. One of the front bench regulars said that they saw him before it did, on the other side of the crick downstream a ways in Morley Ryker’s field.  Morley’s son hunted groundhogs in the summer and the family ate them. They all chuckled when thought of Morley’s son shootin’ and bringin’ home a somewhat-green groundhog.

      But I’ll bet a hundred dollar bill that none of that family would eat a green groundhog!  It’d be sort of like shooting a sacred white buffalo!