Larry Dablemont Outdoors

From One to Forty-Two Percent…

2012-02-20T12:19:00.003-08:00

On a little tributary to Truman Lake last week, I surprised a flock of young turkeys. There must have been close to twenty of them and I got fairly close. I didn’t see a hen or mature gobbler in the entire group. It appeared to be nothing but jakes, with short beards maybe 3 or 4 inches long. I think every one of them were from last spring’s hatch, about as encouraging sign as a turkey hunter could ask for. They were big jakes, long-legged and sleek, just perfect for eating.

Of course, hunters this spring would not opt for a jake. Most of the time, jakes don’t gobble and strut much; it is the older toms that do that. But there have been times in the spring when I have seen jakes gobbling and strutting. In fact, I have pictures of a young gobbler strutting in September, when he was only a few months old. But he didn’t gobble. I wrote about seeing a couple of jakes gobbling in December late in the evening before flying up to roost.

You have to be happy about seeing that many jakes in one spot, hoping that there are many more groups of young gobblers all across the Ozarks. But it doesn’t necessarily mean there are. Nesting success is a local thing, or at least regional. That area around Truman lake, all the way west to the Kansas border is always pretty well stocked with wild turkeys, while some of the eastern Ozark counties don’t seem to have so many. That’s why it is tough to say what is a good hatch and what isn’t, talking about an area the size of the Ozarks, or even the whole state of Missouri.

I had to laugh when I saw a state conservation “media specialist” on a local television station last October, declare that we had a “one-percent” increase in the spring hatch, repeating I suppose, what he thought some biologist had determined. I notice now that in their turkey hunting regulations book for the 2012 spring season, the conservation department believes we have a 42 percent increase in turkey numbers. Wow! From 1 percent to 42 percent! As I said, it will depend on where you are hunting. In some areas of the Ozarks, hunters will be arguing with that figure in late April.

Only three or four days after seeing those jakes, I watched 6 gobblers come across a hillside near my home in a light rain, clearly not as dry as they wanted to be, with feathers fluffed up, shaking the water from their plumage as they walked. There was a fallen log nearby with a branch coming up off the main trunk, running parallel to the ground about four feet high. Two of the gobblers walked over and jumped up on that limb, using their wings to gain that vantage point.

Clearly, one viewed himself as the boss, though he had no larger beard or body size than the others as far as I could tell. He sat there and tried to dry himself a little, like you often see buzzards do, with his wings held out just a bit. The others milled around looking for food, scratching and pecking. Finally they just all stood around as if having a conference.

He held his high spot, and the second gobbler, appearing to be his next-in-command, stayed on a lower perch, for about 30 minutes. Then they became aware of me, trying to get a good photo, and the whole bunch hurried away. It is unusual to see a gobbler hop up on something like that and stay there, but once many years ago I was calling a tom which jumped up on a two foot high stump and strut there for about an hour, eighty yards from my gun barrel. He never left it until I got impatient and decided to hunt somewhere else.

Speaking of buzzards, I was on the White River this past week trout fishing, and that country is plagued with black vultures. These birds are a little smaller than our regular turkey vultures, and their heads are black rather than red. They don’t seem to venture very far north of Bull Shoals and Norfork Lakes, though I did see one in a flock of regular buzzards last year on Pomme de Terre Lake.

This species of vulture is fairly aggressive, and on Norfork Lake they have actually attacked parked pick-ups, as many as 8 or 10 vultures together, scratching and pecking at the paint and doing several thousand dollars worth of damage. In north Arkansas there are growing hordes of them.

We have a fish fry scheduled on April 14 to set-up and organize an Ozarks-wide Conservation group we call Common Sense Conservationists. I’ll give a location for that in a future column. The Enforcement Chief for the Department of Conservation, Larry Yamnitz called me this week to say he will indeed be there to talk with outdoorsmen about problems that have developed with innocent hunters and fishermen being targeted by Conservation Agents.

But our group will stand for much more than just attempting to defend innocent people in court, we want to shine a light on much of what the Department is doing, on our public lands, and in the spending of money which all of us pay in to them, in tax money and license money. There is, and there has been, in my opinion, a steady decline in the integrity and efficiency of this state agency, one of the richest conservation departments in the entire country.

If someone doesn’t start looking closely at what they are doing, they can use their power to reverse much of what has been accomplished over in the early years of what we knew as the Missouri Conservation Commission. It is happening because so few no what they are doing. Not many of our state’s sportsmen and outdoor enthusiasts, see public areas they manage as I do, and this past week I saw one such area, once full of rabbits and quail, where acres and acres have been reduced to barren ground that can support no small game whatsoever. If there is a plan behind it, it escapes me.

Anything that reduces the number of rabbits and quail on public land is certainly not conservation. In timbered areas, heavy logging seems to be accelerated, and if you like forests, you may not see them in the future on our state-owned lands. Some of these areas are being devastated, and it is not for wildlife management, it is for making money, through logging and leasing ground to crop farmers.

Millions of dollars are being wasted through questionable grants and gifts, like that 155,000 dollars given to an ex-employee to write a book. What a farce that is!

We have scheduled local Common Sense Conservationists meetings on March 6 in Mt. Grove, Mo. and on March 22 in Lamar Mo. I will give more information on that next week, but this past week I met with a committee of a dozen of our members to draft a missions statement for our organization. Among those are a 28-year veteran conservation agent and a biologist who has resigned from the MDC.

We want to exceed 1000 members this year, to establish a force the Conservation Department cannot ignore. You can complain about what is going on, or you can join us and help create some change. To join, simply send your name and address to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613, or e-mail it to me at lightninridge@windstream.net

Visit my website, where you can leave your own opinion… www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com

Eat More Rabbits

2012-02-13T12:05:00.006-08:00

It is Elmer Fudd's favorite sport... And when there is snow, an energetic beagle and a few cottontails, winter ain't so bad.

Jackie Smith,(far left) well-known tight end who played for years in the NFL, tells me about the kayak he designed for hunting and fishing. We will be trying it in the Ozarks in April. Also shown is David Gray, husband of LROJ Editor Sondra Gray.

It is snowing up here on this wooded ridge-top where I live and work. First time this year we have had a real snow… maybe four inches or so, and still snowing heavy toward noon. I have fed my Labrador puppies, and filled the bird feeders and intend to go hunt rabbits with my good friend and his beagle, before the season ends in a day or so.

By the time you read this, the snow will likely be gone, and I will have eaten the last fried rabbit of the winter. If you don’t eat a fried rabbit or two each winter, you aren’t living right. There were so many of them when I was a kid, and from December until February, rabbits and quail kept many a farm family well fed.

Eating rabbits makes you sharp-eyed and hones your reflexes. Rabbit meat makes you more resistant to the cold, and it makes your legs stronger. We were watching a college basketball game the other day and you could tell that those players descended from rabbit hunting families. If you see really short-legged people who can’t take the cold it is because they haven’t hunted rabbits enough.

I can’t see as well as I once could, and can’t walk nearly as fast or as far, and my reflexes aren’t as good. I blame that on the fact that each year I hunt and eat fewer rabbits. Correspondingly, I think eating more fish, as I seem to be doing as I get older, gives a person arthritic elbows and sore shoulders. The fish I catch are awfully big! I have noticed something about my fishing buddies… the more they fish, they more they stretch the truth. I think eating fish causes that too but it hasn’t happened to me yet.

Up here on Lightnin’ Ridge, where I live, there is a little rough-edged road coming up to my house. As I drive up that little rocky hill, I have a garden off to the left of the drive, about the only open place on this whole oak-hickory ridge-top. At night this time of year, especially when there’s some snow, I often see four or five cottontails cavorting and playing around my garden, getting ready for the mating season. In the moonlight, I sometimes watch them running and jumping over one another.

That isn’t necessarily because they know they’ll be eating my green beans in a few months. That leap-frogging is a mating ritual, indicating how close spring must be.
There are more rabbits here because my Labradors, in kennels close by, keep coyotes and foxes and bobcats away from my place. A great horned owl is not so leery, and he quite often roosts in a big oak right beside my office. I lose a rabbit or two to that owl and his mate, and they get some flying squirrels too. But it is the way it is.

God created all things, great and small, gentle and fierce, and he sees value in all wild things. That gives me hope, as I use to be a little wild. But not anymore… I have quit howling at the coyotes and shooting at house cats and I haven’t been out running and jumping in the snow in quite a few years. I envy those rabbits!

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In a recent column I wrote about the Kastnings from Seymour Mo., targeted by a conservation agent who asked Mrs. Kastning to let him see her freezer (with no search warrant). Their case was dismissed in court just last week. The agent wrote them 475 dollars worth of tickets for not having 78 packages of ground meat labeled and numbered properly. Her and her husband had violated no laws in killing and checking three deer on their property.

After I wrote about what had happened to them, a TV station out of Springfield, interviewed Mrs. Kastning and aired it on a Friday evening. Following that, I received a phone call from MDC enforcement chief Larry Yamnitz who works out of the main offices in Jefferson City. He says he wants me to contact him about such matters, and wants to work with a growing group of outdoorsmen I started, known as COMMON SENSE CONSERVATIONISTS. We talked for more than an hour, and I told him how disappointed I was when I called him concerning other cases just as frivolous, which he had not been able to help with.

I will say this, I believe Yamnitz would indeed like to do something about the situation of agents writing technical violations to innocent people. As to whether or not he can help, I don’t know. I suspect if he does much, it might endanger his job. Yamnitz was a good agent himself, back 30 some years ago. I am hoping our group can get him to come to some meetings and we can indeed work together.

The Kastnings had to spend 300 dollars on a lawyer to go to court for them, because the prosecutor wouldn’t talk with them. That isn’t right. We need a system in the Ozarks where prosecutors and judges will listen to innocent people who are being targeted by MDC agents, without having to spend so much money on lawyers.

Our COMMON SENSE CONSERVATIONISTS group is raising money as we add members, to help defend people who don’t have the money to hire a lawyer. At Greenfield this past week, concerned sportsmen packed the community center to join the group and form a local chapter there. On March 22nd there will be a similar group formed in Lamar.

What we have to do now is pool our money in a CSC account where a committee of good honest people will control it and use it properly. We need to formulate a strong missions statement, and grow our membership. And we need a regular newsletter to keep everyone informed and shed a light on what the MDC is doing. If you want to join this group, you can contact me, or you can come to our Common Sense Conservation Fish Fry on Saturday, April 14th and join there. It will be an all-day event held in Bolivar, Mo. Hopefully, Yamnitz will join us on that day, and talk with outdoorsmen who make up our group.
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I am anxious to tell you, in a future column, about meeting with NFL tight end Jackie Smith, who played for many years with the St. Louis Cardinals and Dallas Cowboys. He is a grizzled old outdoorsman like many of us, who grew up in Louisiana, fishing and hunting since boyhood. Now he is promoting a hunting and fishing Kayak, and he nearly has me sold on trying it. That’s saying something, knowing how resistant I am to change. I have to see it before I believe it.

Jackie is coming down in April to fish with me, and I will try one out for the first time, with an open mind. I am trying to get Jackie Smith to let us publish his life story. Maybe I can get him to come to our swap meet. That reminds me, I have a lot to tell you about what is going to be sold and displayed at our big Grizzled Old Outdoorsman’s swap meet on March 17th at the Brighton Assembly of God Gymnasium.

We already have forty tables filled, and I will let everyone know what will be there in an upcoming column. For one thing, I’ll bet there will be 2 or 3 thousand fishing lures sold there, some new, some antiques. You aren’t going to believe what we will have there. I can’t hardly wait, and I ain’t exaggeratin’ one bit when I say this will be the biggest swap meet I ever was involved in! It is free to the public, so set aside that Saturday.

My e-mail address is lightninridge@windstream.net, and the regular address is Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613 See my website at www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com

Affordability

2012-02-06T10:43:00.005-08:00

/ Without any limbs to attract him, this crappie appears to be lost. You can almost hear him saying... "gee I wish I had a cedar tree".

Some fishermen go to extreme lengths to create crappie fishing cover.. And it works.

Amongst fishermen, the new rave seems to be something known as an “Alabama Rig”. It is a contraption best described as a set of lines branching from a single swivel which carries several lures or jigs, spread apart to resemble a school of small fish swimming. I haven’t used it, but it is something that has been tried before by trollers, and it is said that fish find it irresistible. As you might imagine, it is a difficult arrangement to cast, but the manufacturers of this new idea have made it possible to do so, and they stand a good chance of getting rich, since it sells for about 40 dollars or so. In time, fishermen like me who can’t afford to pay 40 dollars for something you might lose, will come up with their own way of doing it. In the meantime it has been said that this new way of fishing has been responsible for winning some big fishing tournaments and therefore is being considered by the tournament people as an illegal method of fishing. Nothing will sell it better.

I don’t know what fishing is coming to, but in a Bass Pro Shop retail outlet store the other day I saw crank-baits selling for 10 to 15 dollars and I realize that I am way behind the times. I am not about to pay that for a fishing lure. I have hundreds and hundreds of fishing lures which I can catch fish on, and may never buy another. At swap meets or garage sales here and there, you can find used lures which look as if they have never been used for a buck or two.

The cost of being up-to-date hunters and fishermen today is going out of sight, and I guess there are enough younger outdoorsmen who are willing to pay the price to make it work, but to tell you the truth, I am not one of them. I’m not paying those prices! Two hundred dollars for the latest camouflaged rain coats! Four hundred dollars for a compound bow? Seventy-five dollars for a pair of hunting pants for turkey season?

Fifty dollars for a turkey call? You have to be kidding me. I can hunt and fish for the next 20 years with what I have in the closet, even if it has frazzled edges and a few patches here and there. It ain’t like I’m wearing any of that stuff to church!
I can make the best turkey call I ever used in about ten minutes with a nickel’s worth of materials. And I have an old compound bow that will kill deer at my shooting distance just fine. I like it, because it has experience, and ambience and it isn’t likely to be stolen. No one would want it but me…

Chest waders can be patched, thirty-year-old decoys still attract ducks, and graphite rods with thirty-year-old Ambassadeur casting reels catch bass for me that will make a bass pro’s mouth water. All I require is what I use is workability, efficiency, effectiveness. And that doesn’t necessarily cost a fortune. It is a good thing Cabelas and Bass Pro Shops and Gander Mountain aren’t depending on me, or the economy would be in bad trouble.

It isn’t easy to change anyway. I still love to float the rivers in an old Grumman canoe from 1970 and a Lowe Paddle John from 1979. They work great. This coming Saturday I am going to the St. Louis Sport Show to sell some of my books and give away some of our magazines, and when I get there, some folks are going to show me a kayak they make for sincere fishermen and hunters like me. I told them I will listen, but the thing can’t be red or yellow and it has to be stable and hold a load to be a good craft for hunting and fishing. They say they have one. I can change, I suppose, if I have to.

Stay tuned. If you see me in a kayak, that geyser at Yellowstone may quit erupting anytime. If they can convince me, I may start speaking again to my daughter Christy, who bought a kayak last year without even consulting me.

Folks who fish for crappie a lot quite often are folks who fish for nothing else. Fanatics! You see them making crappie beds in mid-winter, hauling used Christmas trees with bits of tinsel clinging to the branches, out to a secret spot on their favorite lake. It is a job to make good crappie beds, and they say that a fishing dock the Conservation Department constructed on a lake close to me, with sunken cedars out in front of it, is a great place for people without boats to catch crappie most all year. However, branches of those cedars are said to be covered with brightly colored jigs, and broken lines in the water has become a real problem for those who fish there.

There is a new idea for crappie beds which seems to be working both as great fish attractors, and a way to keep from losing your lures. It is made of a plastic pipe, a main large length several inches in diameter and four or five feet long, filled with concrete and sunk at strategic locations, with smaller, three-quarter inch plastic pipe or conduit, rising from that horizontal base like branches. I saw one that some folks had made, and it resembled one of those playground ‘jungle gyms’ that kids love, where bars go up and out and around, for them to climb through. If you go to that trouble, and construct a pretty elaborate plastic fish attractor, you need the connectors, corner elbows, whatever, to make it a maze of plastic tubing.

No doubt this will attract crappie, and likely bass and bluegill as well. Your hooks will slide around and over the plastic tubing, without becoming hooked. It isn’t something I like to think about, lakes filled with white plastic contraptions, but if they are placed right you shouldn’t see them, and in time they will be covered with algae and fit in. I suppose with the junk in our lakes today, plastic bottles and aluminum cans and the like, we can learn to live with a jungle of fish attractors situated like mazes all over the lake.

Such a fish attractor would work with nothing but eight or ten plastic pipes sticking up six or eight feet off the main larger section. You wouldn’t even need cross pieces. But they would need to be spaced a couple of feet apart, and you’d need to be sure that the base didn’t roll over when on the bottom. You’d also need to try your best to keep your crappie bed a secret as long as you can, though one of my crappie fishing fanatic friends insists that other crappie fanatics are always out there watching, trying to figure out where secret crappie beds are. I think he is a little paranoid.

But the answer is simple; the state fisheries biologists should make a hundred or so of the fish attracting contraptions and space them around particular arms of each lake so all crappie fishermen can find one and use it without any chance of ‘crappie fisherman animosity’.

It would be fairly expensive… might wind up costing a few thousand dollars. But they could take a few thousand out of that one million dollar bear-counting budget and do something for a great number of fishermen. Or, you can do it yourself. Just get it done soon, and haul it out there late at night in the cover of darkness, to keep your new hotspot a secret. Call me and I will help you and promise not to tell a soul.

By the way, our February-March issue of the Lightnin’ Ridge Outdoor Journal just came out and it has a beautiful painting of two crappie on the cover, by artist Al Agnew. If you’d like to find out how or where to get a copy, call my executive secretary, Ms. Wiggins, at our executive offices… 417-777-5227

My website is www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com and my e-mail address is lightninridge@windstream.net. Write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613

Breaking the Drought in Louisiana

2012-01-30T10:31:00.004-08:00

Also known as White-Fronts, these Speckle-bellied geese decoy readily and are common in south Louisiana.

With a top-notch Labrador retriever, hunters seldom lose a crippled duck. Lady brings in a mallard drake.

The blind hunters hunt from is sunken, waterproof, and extremely well hidden. Lady stays outside and is well hidden by vegetation as she watches for ducks to fall.

From one year to another, the things an outdoorsman depends on will change, sometimes just a little, sometimes drastically. This spring for instance, the white bass run will be different entirely than it was last spring. Two years ago, one little tributary I have depended on for twenty years had no white bass spawn whatsoever. For the first time I can remember, the fish never came.

I’ll find them this spring, but the fishing will be a little different this coming year than ever before. It is the rule of nature; ‘things stay the same season after season, but they always change’. That only makes sense after you have spent a lifetime studying nature and the outdoors. Take mushrooms for instance. One year you will find a place in the woods where there are dozens of them, and the next year, one or two, or none. You may find some this year where you never saw them before.

In the fall, the migration of wild ducks and geese is a certainty, but what they did last fall, where you found them and how they flew and fed and all that, will not be the same this next fall. I never saw more ducks ever, on any Ozark lake, than I saw on Truman Lake this past fall and early winter. Most of the time though, even with all those thousands of mallards, the hunting, at least the way we once did it with so much success, was entirely ineffective.

A river which harbored unbelievable numbers of ducks last January had only an average number of flocks this year. I remember when I was a boy, dad and I would float the Big Piney River where I grew up, in a johnboat with a blind attached to the bow and we found mallards and wood ducks aplenty. The Piney never has many ducks nowadays, but then, that was a time when Truman Lake and many of the state’s waterfowl areas didn’t exist. I remember one year, when I was about 14 or 15, when there were pintails and widgeons and gadwalls on the river for a couple of weeks, species I had never seen before. But it only happened one year. I never saw but a handful of individuals of those species in any other year.

I always feel a little cheated as I grow older because the duck season is shorter than it used to be. What I mean by that is, three months today has a lot fewer days in it than three months had when I was a boy. If that doesn’t make any sense to you, you are probably too young to be reading this column, written by a grizzled old outdoorsman.
If you are growing older, and live in a rural area of the Ozarks, you have noticed it. Whether it is morel mushrooms in the spring, tomatoes ripening in your garden, or crappie spawning… a month has fewer days in it than it did when you were younger!

Since we love to hunt ducks so much, my good friend Rich Abdoler and I took a little trip in mid January to Louisiana to hunt waterfowl. It came about when I talked to a young lady by the name of Megan Monsour Hartman, from the Louisiana Tourist Bureau at a meeting of outdoor writers back in October. I told her I had never hunted or fished in Louisiana. Megan set out to rectify that, and scheduled me a hunting and fishing trip with a place known as Calcasieu Lodge near Lake Charles, which is about as far south as you can go. Such places are usually way too expensive for people like me, although I have a few readers who can afford that kind of thing. The Tourism Bureau paid most of the expenses, as I promised I would write a good story (with only the facts of course) about the trip for my magazine, the Lightnin’ Ridge Outdoor Journal. I was hoping the facts would be that Rich and I got to fish for and catch some redfish and speckled trout, and kill some ducks.

I have no doubt it would have worked that way, but on the day we got there, driving down all the way from Arkansas in a pouring rain, south Louisiana got six and a half inches of rain. When you consider what a drought they had been having, with only 30 inches of rain in 15 months, six and a half inches in one day would tell you that Rich must be a Jonah, a genuine jinx of the highest order. There was way too much water to go out and catch any fish, and a wind that put three foot waves on Lake Calcasieu.

We did however, get to go duck hunting, and really enjoyed ourselves, although Rich wasn’t shooting as good as he used to. That’s something else I have noticed, all my hunting buddies, as they get older, are a little bit slower with the shotgun. Rich used to hit a lot more of what he shoots at than what he did in Louisiana. He would want me to point out that last September I went dove hunting with Rich and missed eleven straight doves while he killed seven or eight. Normally I only miss about 80 percent of the doves I shoot at! That ought to prove he’s a jinx of some sort.

For both of us, there was a first as hunters. We both killed some speckled geese, also known as White-Fronted geese. They pass over the Ozarks in October by the thousands, in high wavering noisy formations, but seldom stop here.

Several are in my freezer now, and I have been told they are amongst the best tasting of migrating waterfowl. The fellow who told us that was, a great young fellow there by the name of Steve Stroderd, who works at a refinery nearby part-time and guides hunters and fishermen the rest of the time. Steve was only about 30 years old, but an old hand at duck hunting. He had the best Labrador I have hunted with in many years.

Her name was Lady, a four-year-old yellow Lab that was devoted to Steve. She was an example of what all duck hunters who own a young retriever, hope to see eventually. I thought of my 9 month old Labrador, ‘Lightnin’ Ridge Bolt’ back home, knowing full well he never will be that effective and efficient. There just aren’t enough ducks in his future. Because of Steve’s job, and the duck hunting he has there, with flocks of mallards and pintails and teal and gadwall and widgeon, Lady will just get better. If you ever want to travel to Louisiana in the winter and experience some great duck hunting with a fine young man and a great dog, get in touch with Steve.

I like the duck-hunting part of Louisiana, but those cypress swamps and alligators and the Spanish moss all over is a different world. I didn’t see any Cajuns, but we ate some Cajun food while we were there, thanks to Megan. It was a nice place to visit, and I hope someday to actually go back and catch a redfish, and write an article about that in my magazine and this column. But the Tourism Bureau may have learned by now that as an outdoor writer, I am a little more like Rodney Dangerfield than Dean Martin, doggone it. But a fellow who can end a drought with those kinds of results ought to get a little respect.

Check my website… www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com, or e-mail me at lightninridge@windstream.net. The mailing address is Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613

Diversity and Change

2012-01-24T07:35:00.001-08:00

How I loved the old days. A little country church in the Ozarks filled with people who were the salt of the earth, a river that was clean enough to drink from, a time when things couldn’t get better than they were. We were kids being raised by parents who wanted us to have it better than they did, and never thought about how quantity doesn’t always equal quality. They are nearly gone now, that generation which stood up against an evil force in a terrible World War, and could not be defeated. They were strong people who grew up close to the earth, without much luxury, grounded in faith and values and an ability to take so little and make so much out of it.

Before them generations had come and gone without changing much. My grandfather lived with so little that he threw away nothing, wasted nothing. While he lived in fear of the earth destroying him, our grandchildren will be able to destroy the earth! My grandfather’s generation was the last to live something like their ancestors. His was the last age when men talked the same language as those who lived a hundred years before them.

My grandchildren speak a different language entirely, than I do. I don’t believe they can understand what I mean when I tell them that their children or grandchildren may need to be more like my grandfathers were to survive. Men of tomorrow may need to change back a little, but right now no one is buying that.

Men of today, especially those who lives are engulfed by society and politics, are always clamoring for change. But is change always good? In nature, no species maintains skyrocketing populations for long. High numbers will cause that species to suffer and a natural control such as starvation and disease will drop those numbers drastically. The earth will also not support a constant increase in human numbers. Water will be a problem, food will be a problem, and in some places air to breath will be a problem. What the earth can provide to us isn’t limitless. Timber, food, oil, even water, is limited. We will have to devastate the earth to support ever-increasing numbers of people. And it isn’t always what we have to have, but what we WANT.

Most of today’s men have one problem; nothing is ever enough. I don’t remember that being the way it was when I was young. Seems my grandfather’s generation was far less greedy. We aren’t so much like that today. We never have enough money, a new enough car, a big enough, or fast enough boat. On a smaller scale, we don’t have fishing lures or fishing equipment that is ‘good enough’. Have you ever noticed that about all of us? What came out last year isn’t good enough this year.

My computer is only a few years old, but the world is telling me that it isn’t good enough any more. If I get a new one, it won’t be good enough in a year or so either. We had grandfathers here in the Ozarks who lived with one pair of overalls for twenty years, and a whole lifetime with one shaving razor.

Could our grand children survive if they were to have to live as those people did almost 100 years ago? Up here on this wooded ridgetop where I live I could survive without any modern technology if we had to go back in time. It would involve working a lot harder, but it feels good to know that I still have some of my dad and grandfather in me. I couldn’t make it in New York or Chicago or Los Angeles.

In the midst of those wonderful places men have made, we have insured that the masses cannot survive a catastrophe which removes our technology. If those cities had no gasoline and no electricity for a few weeks, men would be killing each other in an attempt to survive. Just think about that! We are living with the assumption that we will not ever have to live without electricity or gasoline!

If we get to a point where computers control us enough, we are way out on a big long limb that can too easily be broken. And truthfully, I don’t think anyone knows how fragile that limb might be. We climb out on the end of it and forget what is behind us. It seems to me as if, while we clamor for change, no one can see the value in some never-changing things. As rivers shrink, as forests decline, and tornadoes and earthquakes and droughts and natural disasters increase and climates change, we just can’t figure it out. You keep hearing, “I wonder what is happening all of a sudden”. It hasn’t happened ‘all of a sudden’. And some of us know exactly what has happened, you just don’t dare say it in this modern world.

I know that my grandsons will learn more than I can ever know, but I know too that they need to retain what my grandfathers once knew, things like growing our own food, and knowing how to live without oil and electricity and water which comes from a faucet. I hope it isn’t too late to teach them to live from the land, to go back to a way of life and values that ensured our survival.

I still believe the key to man’s survival in the future is not intelligence, but wisdom. I don’t remember if there were many really intelligent men out in the rural Ozarks where I was as a boy, raised so far from the changing world. But I knew about wisdom. I saw it in them. I don’t see much of that today. It doesn’t take wisdom to run a computer. Still, I don’t think the computer will be here forever, as everyone else seems to think it will be.

Man will be here, I think, in some form or another, as long as the earth survives, as long as God wills it. But to tell you the truth, I am not at all sure that some generation centuries from now will not be made up of people who are living more like our grandfathers than our grandchildren. When I was very young, I watched a sidewalk being poured, and an old man told me, “Son, you don’t know it now, but when you are my age, that sidewalk will be crumbling… broken apart by little soft blades of grass.”
It sounded crazy to me at the time, but thirty years later there were weeds growing out of the cracks in that sidewalk.

I know there are those people reading this column saying, “This guy is crazy.” But what I hope this column might do is to cause a few people to turn off the computer and go out into the woods somewhere far from civilization, looking at things around them just like it was when their great grandfather was their age… realizing how important it is that some things do not change.

If you have kids or grandkids, teach them to catch sunfish this summer. Teach them to hunt squirrels, how to skin one, clean it, then fry it and eat it. Show them how to plant a little garden with tomatoes and green beans. Hunt mushrooms and arrowheads, explore caves and pick blackberries. Keep them outside and maybe you can keep away from the computer and television for awhile. It’s called diversity… and change!

My website is www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613 or e-mail lightninridge@windstream.net

NEVER INNOCENT ENOUGH

2012-01-16T09:36:00.003-08:00

Note that the charge written on the ticket was 'failure to label deer meat when not personally attended'. And 'failure to identify' Each package was indeed labeled, and meat inside a freezer is as well attended as it can get.

The Kastnings and their deer tags, notched, numbered and kept with the deer meat until it went into their freezer.
Steve and Laurie Kastning own 40 acres of land near Seymour Missouri, where they each killed a doe deer on opening weekend of the deer season using their landowner tags. Steve Kastning also bought two deer tags so he could hunt on his neighbor’s land, where he killed a button buck and checked it on his purchased antlerless tag, as you are permitted to do with a buck which has no antlers.

As you are supposed to do, they notched their tags and promptly called in each deer, and wrote the confirmation numbers on their tags. At noon Sunday they took their deboned deer meat in coolers, with the tags, to a deer processing business in Seymour, and the lady in charge said she would do the meat immediately. Steve left the three tags on the counter and went back to his home to get his checkbook. Returning, he wrote a check for $48.10, and he and his wife took the 70 one-pound packages of ground deer meat and their three tags and returned home, where they put the meat in their freezer. You couldn’t do things any more legally than they did it.

That Sunday afternoon a Missouri Department of Conservation enforcement agent came to their home with another man in plain clothing, and said he was doing a routine spot check. The Kastnings let both of them in their home, and said the agent was very friendly to begin with, but his demeanor changed as he quickly found something wrong. He said the tags had not been punched on the day and month the deer were killed! Mrs. Kastning patiently showed him where they had indeed been punched, just as they were suppose to be. His mistake seemed to anger him, then he complained that Steve should have checked his button buck as a buck, and said he was getting tired of hunters checking them as antlerless deer. Of course, a button buck IS an antlerless deer, so he couldn’t write a ticket for that. So then he left and went to the processing plant, and returned to say the plant indicated they hadn’t processed any meat for the Kastnings. Of course, that processed check proved they did, and the packaged meat was marked in packages, as the processing plant marked it. Personally, I think the agent knew that all along.

“I work at the department of corrections on Sunday afternoon,” Steve Kastning said, “so I went to work and when he returned, I was gone. My wife took him to the basement and showed him the meat in the freezer and he called me and wanted to know where the hides and heads were. I told him I had dumped them at the back of my place. That seemed to make him mad, and he wanted to know if he could find them. I told him I would take him and show them to him when I was off work. He really was belligerent over the phone, and told me that if he could find a reason to write me a citation, he would. All that, knowing we had done nothing wrong, and I told him that.”

One week later, the agent returned on a Sunday afternoon and gave Steve Kastning two citations, for not having his tags with the deer meat which he referred to as ‘unidentifiable’ which was packaged in the freezer. He gave Laurie Kastning one. And then he proceeded to tell them how to pay the $475 in fines. All this time, the tags were there, they just weren’t in the freezer with those 70 packages of meat. How in the world, one might ask, would any hunter be able to identify which deer was in which packages after it came back ground up by a processor? What deer hunter with meat in his freezer would not be subject to some kind of petty and malicious charge as this agent came up with.

Mrs. Kastning made a mistake by graciously taking the agent down to her basement to show him the processed meat, the only way she knew how to prove to him they had indeed taken it to the processor. To legally look in that freezer and go into her basement he would have had to have a search warrant had she not voluntarily taken him to prove they had done nothing wrong.

If there was ever a case where completely innocent people have been targeted by an M.D.C. agent, this is it. Mrs. Kastning has an appointment to see a specialist physician on January 30, a long standing and necessary medical appointment. That’s when they are to appear in court. The prosecuting attorney wouldn’t talk with them, they had to hire a lawyer to go to court on the 30th, and he will only enter a plea of not guilty, so that a court date can be set. It is likely that the Kastnings will be in court a short time, be found guilty and have more than a thousand dollars in costs and fines, just because that agent was looking for an easy way to do his job without actually getting out in the woods. He targeted people who were innocent, and I seriously doubt they have a chance in court, even though a jury would doubtless find them innocent. It will be a single judge who hears them, not a jury.

A year or so ago, MDC enforcement chief Larry Yamnitz told me in his office that when this type of thing happens, and innocent people are targeted with petty offenses, he would act to have the situation corrected. We will see if that can be the case here. If this one can’t be overturned, what could be? These people are only one of many such injustices which involve MDC conservation agents. That badge gives them so much power, that some of them freely abuse it.

I am absolutely and completely convinced that the Kastinings tried their very best to do what was right. How ridiculous it is to come back a week later and target them because their meat in their freezer can technically be found stacked in the wrong place or the wrong way! With the standards he used, all deer hunters with meat in their freezer are guilty of something. The MDC ought to be ashamed of this, and that agent should be fired. Any judge and prosecutor should be ashamed to see this situation come to their court. I intend to be there when the case is heard and I will follow up on this and let readers know the outcome.

Several hog hunters were similarly targeted last year when their dogs strayed on to private land. Leaving their guns on land they had permission to hunt, they went on the adjacent land to retrieve their dogs. The caretaker of the land, who later boasted he was paid handsomely when a trespasser was prosecuted, called three MDC agents who came in and found the feral hog bayed by the dogs. The agents instructed the hunters to take the dogs and tie up the hog and take it to where they could kill it and butcher it. They complied, and FOUR MONTHS LATER they were charged with transporting a live feral hog. Of course feral hogs are unwanted, and hunters are urged to kill them. The MDC traps and slaughters all they can catch. But in this case, Larry Yamnitz, Chief of Enforcement told me on the phone that the agents just didn’t know the law when they told the hunters to take the hog away alive. Even though it was butchered and eaten, the agents were told by the local prosecutor, he says, to write the men up for the violation. Each paid 780 dollars in a court without a jury, plus the cost of a lawyer who basically did little more than offer a guilty plea for them. Again, the agents weren’t familiar with the laws, the hunters followed their instructions, and paid dearly for it. The MDC should be proud of such a thing, and if this doesn’t amount to persecution of innocent people, I don’t know what does. There seems to be no end to it until the people of Missouri stand up in mass against it.

My website is www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com and my e-mail address is lightninridge@windstream.net. Write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613

Upcoming Swap Meet and Dinners

2012-01-09T07:53:00.001-08:00

Folks have been asking me lately about the next Grizzled Old Outdoorsman's swap meet which has taken place the last few years, sponsored by my magazine, The Lightnin' Ridge Outdoor Journal. It began six or seven years ago when we had a big fish fry with it at a country church gymnasium here near Bolivar. The church wasn't really large enough to take care of the crowd that showed up, and we almost didn't have enough fish.

So then we held another one in the Community building at Nixa, Mo, without the fish fry, but the building rental was a little more than we could afford, and other activities there made it hard to find a suitable date. Three years ago, we found a perfect place for our swap meet, and we have held it there ever since, due to the generosity and cooperation from a country church congregation with a big gymnasium at Brighton, Mo.

The Brighton Assembly of God church is something of a historical site, because it is built around a small rock church originally constructed way back there. A few years ago they added on a gymnasium to be used for such events as ours, and they ask nothing in return, other than that such an event be held for the glory of God and that money raised be put to good use to help others.

In the past couple of years, the vendors and visitors to our swap meet have donated quite an amount of money. Last year, it was 526 dollars, with nearly 400 dollars added from sales of my magazines and books. The year before, that total exceeded a thousand dollars. We used the money with a half dozen local schools to buy shoes and coats for needy children, and many other causes. Some of it was spent only recently to buy Christmas gifts, mostly clothing, for children whose folks were having a hard time just buying groceries. We avoid giving the money to situations where there are 'administrative costs' and try to see to it that it goes directly to needy children or families.

When you get right down to it, a few hundred dollars which we are able to raise isn't much, but it does some good for some kids who need the help the most. This year we will try to do the same thing again.

And best of all, there are no charges for anyone, all this is free to the public, and the tables are free for the vendors who come.

Tables at our swap meet are filled with fishing and hunting gear, some new, some used, some antiques. There will be wildlife art, carvings, turkey calls, furs, and all kinds of paraphernalia for camping, boating, etc. Last year we had a table full of homemade jams and relishes and another table filled with baked goods. The Lightnin’ Ridge table will be filled with old magazines to give away and I will be signing my books for anyone who might want one at a cheaper price than you can find them in any bookstore. We'll have caps and art and whatever else we can come up with between now and then.

Hopefully, there will be some boats and motors and canoes for sale outside and I'll bet there will be some antique guns and hand-made fishing lures and that kind of thing. Two years ago a fellow bought a fishing lure for five dollars that he learned later was worth ten times that amount. In the last couple of years we have had an authority on old fishing gear there, giving free appraisals to anyone bringing their own old lures, reels, rods, etc.

Best of all, there will be valuable items to be given away by drawings, lots of them, so you might go home with something valuable without spending a penny. I don't know what food will be available, but last year there was plenty of coffee and soft drinks. There were biscuits and gravy for breakfast and barbecued pork with trimmings for dinner. All this is prepared by the youth of the Brighton Assembly of God.

We are hoping that Canadian outfitter Tinker Helseth will be back again this year. Last year he gave away a week-long Canadian fishing trip at his lodge in Ontario, won by two Brighton, Missouri residents who had never been to Canada. When they returned they told me it was the greatest trip of their lives. There will be other activities scheduled which I will let you know about later. The whole thing will take place on Saturday, March 17, at the Brighton Assembly of God gymnasium just off highway 13, about seventeen miles north of Springfield. Vendors who want a table at this event need to contact me as soon as possible. We only have about 40 tables and I anticipate them being filled quickly.

I have a number of inquires each year about wild game dinners and events where I will be speaking, and there are three such occasions in the next month or so. I will be speaking at a big wild game feast at the Meramec Baptist Retreat Center on Highway AA, near Steelville Mo. This is a church-sponsored dinner for men and boys, beginning at 6:30 p.m. on Friday evening, January 27. There is no charge.

On Saturday evening, January 28th I will be speaking at the Community Building in Garden City, Mo. This dinner is hosted by the Freedom Point Church, also for men and boys, and seating is limited. There is a fee for the dinner, but there will be door prizes and gifts after the meal. For more information, contact Scott Smith via e-mail ...smith77@fairpoint.net, or call 816-738-0587.

On Sunday evening, February 19, I will be speaking at a wild game dinner at the Community Christian Church at Camdenton. There is a charge for the dinner, and it begins at five p.m. That event is a fundraiser for "Share the Harvest Food Pantry".

All that pretty much takes up the space for this week's column, but I hope some of our readers find an opportunity to attend one of the dinners I have mentioned. The swap meet date is something you need write down on your calendar. Even if the fishing is good, and it should be by then, find an hour or so to come by and see us. I like it because it gives me the best opportunity to meet and talk with readers of this column. Most of my family will be there helping, and the editor of the Lightnin' Ridge outdoor magazine, Sondra Gray and some of her family will be there as well.

I should have a good story or two for this column in the next few weeks, as I will spend some time this week hunting ducks and fishing in Louisiana. I have hunted and fished in about 15 different states and two provinces in Canada, but never before in Louisiana. Up to now, I have always been afraid of alligators! And I have been told Louisiana harbors wild-eyed creatures which lurk in the swamps and will eat darn near anything. I think they call them Cajuns. I will try to get a picture of one this week, as I have been told we have the same ancestry.

E-mail me at lightninridge@windstream.net. Write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613. My website is www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com

NEWS ABOUT UNCLE NORTEN

2012-01-04T10:10:00.004-08:00

Norten shown with a big bass he caught during his last fishing trip in fall of 2009.

My Uncle Norten turned 88 years old last October. He began suffering from dementia earlier in the year, but it wasn’t severe. He continued to be physically active and had no trouble getting around. In September of 2011, his wife sold their home and all his hunting and fishing equipment. In the next forty days he slept in six different beds in various nursing homes as she and his brother attempted to find a way to have him committed.

It began a year ago when Norten called me and told me he was having some blood in his urine. I took him to a local hospital. He had a urinary tract infection and they kept him there for a few days. While he was there his wife brought papers to him which she told him was insurance papers, according to Norten. They were not! She had him sign over “Power of Attorney” papers naming his brother Vaughn as the person who made all decisions for him. Norten, with only a minimal education, couldn’t read the papers, and yet social services personnel in the hospital followed his wife’s request and had them notarized. I took my Uncle aside and tried to explain what those papers might allow his brother and wife to have done to him and Norten refused to believe it. He said there was no way they could get him to do anything he didn’t want to do. He never did understand those papers.

A neighbor told me what was happening. Vaughn had convinced Norten’s wife Velma that if they moved him to Arkansas, that state would pay them $4000 per month to take care of him in Vaughn’s home. The two of them had actually been planning it all. When they finally pulled it off, Norten and Vaughn didn’t get along, and so Vaughn and Velma tried to have him put in a home for veterans. The facility where they took him, kept him a short time, medicated him to calm him down, and deemed him sound enough of mind to not be committed. They then sent him to a Bentonville, Arkansas nursing home. Very soon, Velma deemed it too expensive, so they moved back to Vaughn’s home. Now with Vaughn’s name on their bank accounts and CD’s, (nearly $200,000 in all) Vaughn had decided he wasn’t going to be able to get the government money he wanted for Norten to receive, and Velma had to call someone to move them back to Missouri. She paid $1000 for the move, without Vaughn’s help.

Back at Bolivar, Mo. Velma arranged to move both of them into a health care facility for a week or so, then had Norten moved into another local nursing home, where he is today. His dementia has worsened, but he still knows everyone, and remembers everything pertaining to his family and friends from years back. He does little but lie in a bed all day, getting up only when I come to see him. Apparently he can indeed leave for short periods, as nurses told me he was perfectly capable of going with me to my home, going for car rides, or to the local river to go fishing on warm days. The problem is, his wife and brother have instructed the nursing home administration to not let him go anywhere with me. He can do nothing but stay in that little room, without anyone visiting him but me. My visits are one thing they cannot forbid, Almost every day I try to have a meal with him, play checkers with him or have him sign some of his books.

I have contacted various government offices and social services on many occasions, and if there is anyone who cares enough to help him, I haven’t found them. After hours on the phone with different agencies, no one will come to talk to me or Norten about what is happening. It is as if he has no value. I have no idea if his money can be used to help him with a hearing aid, or dental care which he needs. Vaughn controls all that, helping Velma to hide much of it apparently, and to keep it from eventually going to Norten’s daughter or grandchildren, whom she has always despised. As far as I know they haven’t even been contacted.

Most of Norten’s problems result from his brother’s willingness to help Velma control the money which has always meant so much to her, and completely overlook the any wishes my uncle may have had. Neither his wife nor his brother have an education past the fifth grade. Velma began selling Norten’s personal items a couple of years ago while he would be out on fishing trips with me. She sold his Browning Beretta shotgun which he owned for fifty years, valued at 1500 dollars for 300 dollars. A few years ago Norten learned she had removed his name from all of their CD’s in the local bank, putting them in her and her brother’s name. He was furious at the time, and had to go have it corrected or he would have been penniless. During the past summer, Vaughn sold Norten’s boat and motor, and kept much of his fishing gear. He took Norten’s treasured Grumman canoe, which he had used since the 1950’s and gave it to one of his friends in Arkansas.

The two of them have made life miserable for my uncle for the past few months, and I have been told that there is nothing anyone can do. When they deceived him into signing those papers giving Vaughn the “Power of Attorney” status, it was basically all over for my uncle. Norten had no idea what it all meant.

A couple of years ago, Norten and I were fishing on an Ozark river when he told me what he wanted when his life is over. “Velma owns burial plots up near St. Louis,” he said, “but I don’t want to go there. Promise me that when I die, you will see to it I am buried in that little cemetery where my mom and pop are buried, close the Big Piney River where I was born.” I told him I would see to it, but I know now I can’t do anything about it. Thankfully, Norten gave me the things that meant most to him back then, knowing, I think, what Velma and Vaughn had planned. His old treasures from his past have no great value, but knowing what they meant to him, they mean a great deal to me.

If anyone knows how to find a legal way to do something about what has happened to him at the hands of his wife and brother, I would like to know about it. I would like to see some of his money used to help make life better for him now, and to go to his grandchildren, as Velma has no descendants. And I would like to find a way to take him out of that nursing home on occasion to let him have a little happiness in the last of his life. He is a World War ll veteran who deserves better than what he is getting.

In the Woods With Daniel

2012-01-02T09:19:00.004-08:00

"The young deer looked hard at me, cautiously lifting her small hooves to ease a little closer, nearly trembling with apprehension as she did so, her big ears extended with curiosity."

"Too far, 85 yards at least, maybe more.A muzzle-loader will kill at 90 to 100 yards, but that is too far for me."

In his day, Daniel Boone had more bucks to hunt, and they weren't as wild, I am sure.

The afternoon was chilly… cloudy and dark, one of those bleak December days when it looked like it might snow a little. The woodland floor was wet from a rain the day before, and I could move slowly into a slight breeze without much of a sound at all. My muzzle-loading .50- caliber Hawken rifle lay heavy across the crook of my arm, ready to be brought to my shoulder at the blink of an eyelash. Well, actually, with me it never happens that quickly, my imagination makes me faster than I really am. Alone and deep in the woods, I feel a little like Daniel Boone must have felt, hunting the Kentucky backwoods.

It brought memories of the time years ago when I walked through these very same woods and came upon a nice buck lying in a brushpile, watching me intently, thinking he was hidden completely. He would have been had I not seen his antlers. Then another time there was the buck which came running right at me and nearly ran over me; fleeing something… who knows what.

It was this same Hawken rifle, on its very first hunt about 20 years ago, that I fired at a doe leading a group of deer. She dropped in her tracks, and so did another doe behind her. The slug went through the hearts of both animals, and I found it on a hillside just past the two of them. I still have it on my office shelf, the .50 caliber maxi ball that killed two deer. There are those who never believed the story, but it really happened. My daughter was with me that day, and saw it all.

I love to hunt deer during the special December season with my muzzle-loader. There was a time when only the best of the outdoorsmen did so, when it truly was a primitive weapons season. Today it is much less so because of the modern in-line weapons which make a mockery of it all, permitted because so many hunters want an easier way to do things. Always, the easy way appeals to a modern group of hunters. But still, by and large, the woods during the middle of the week is empty of the red-clad crowd who descends upon us from the suburbs during the regular deer season, for most their only venture into the woods during the course of the year.

It was still and damp and bleak that day last week, when I came across a log that made a perfect seat. It was a little too comfortable I suppose. I should have moved thirty yards farther. From my left and behind me, I heard the slightest rustling, and caught a movement. There were four young does, all born last spring, coming out of heavy cover and moving across the woodland swale, crossing the creek before me. Too far, 85 yards at least, maybe more. And they were moving at a good gait. A muzzle-loader will kill at 90 to 100 yards, but it is too far for me. I take shots under 75 yards, because I have too little faith in my marksmanship at greater distances. Daniel was a better shot than me I am sure.

Slower afoot, five more does followed in only a few minutes, and two of them were mature deer, maybe two or three years old. A little half grown young-of-the-year doe came to within 60 yards, her nose up, somehow catching a glimpse or a scent which made her curious, careful. The others ignored her, and she could have been venison on the table that night, but she was so small I don’t believe she would have made more than a couple of pots of chili. If only the older deer would follow. They calmly fed before me eating a few remaining red oak acorns, moving down toward the small creek, a good 90 yards away and never closer.

The yearling looked hard at me, cautiously lifting her small hooves to ease a little closer, trembling with apprehension as she did so, her big ears extended with curiosity. In a while, she gave in to the fear of the unknown, and trotted away to join the others, with her tail lifted about halfway to a full flag. It took twenty minutes or so for them to all move away, but they did.

I moved on, to a little wooded knoll where trails crossed, and sat against a big oak tree. It was about four p.m. and I had only been there a few minutes when a wild turkey gobbled about 150 yards before me, down in the low ground where the creek trickled away. It was a poor gobble, but it was a gobble, loud and clear, likely a young jake. I called to him by mouth, imitating a hen in the fall assembling a brood before roost time, and he gobbled again. I waited a while, called again and he gobbled a third time… followed by the yelps and purring and cackling of several other turkeys with him. I waited, expecting them to perhaps come my way. About 4:15 I heard a loud clear gobble much closer, followed by two others in quick succession. Quite a group of them, obviously.

I called again a few times and all was quiet, so I stood and walked the opposite direction, wanting to check another deer crossing before dark. From there, about a quarter ‘til five, I heard a strong hard gobble from the little knoll where I had been calling before, and the turkeys began to fly up to roost. Oh well, it was too dark for good photos anyway.

As I headed for home, a couple of miles away, I caught a glimpse of a white flag bouncing through the woods in the very last faint light of day. A big buck, I’d bet. Or maybe a little one. I thought to myself how much easier it must have been for old Daniel Boone. His rifle surely was more accurate than mine. Lots more big bucks back then, much less skittish. Down right tame I’ll bet, in old Kentucky 200 years ago. Off in the distance I could see the glimmer of a candle shining through the window of my old cabin, and heard geese passing overhead. “It has been a good day Daniel”, I said. Behind me, I could sense him nodding his head.

Many of Uncle Norten’s old friends have asked about him recently, and I am sorry to report he is not doing very well, though when I talk to him, he longs to be outdoors as he has always been. The old World War II veteran and fishing guide turned 88 last year, and has been victimized by his very family members, and a social services system which failed to protect him and now seems incapable of helping him, and completely unwilling to help him.

You can read more about him on my website, www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.net. Maybe someone out there can offer advice on how to help him.

I have also been asked about places I will be speaking this month, and there are two wild game dinners where I will be in late January. One is at Steelville, Mo on January 27, and the other is January 28 at Garden City. I will also put details of those events on my website.

E-mail me at lightninridge@windstream.net or write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, MO. 65613

A Growing Voice of Common People

2011-12-26T10:55:00.003-08:00

Sources within the Jefferson City office of the MDC have reported to me that in recent years nine million dollars has been spent and budgeted for bringing back a token population of prairie
chicken in a tiny percentage of west Missouri land deemed suitable for their survival. One million dollars has been budgeted to determine the number of black bears within the state. Where do these millions end up... In whose pockets? With no independent auditing possible, the answer can never be known.
A million dollars has been budgeted to determine black bear numbers. Can a million dollars tell us how many bears we have? Who gets the money?

A new year is upon us, and if you have heard of small but growing groups of outdoorsmen in different areas of the Ozarks forming what is known as Common Sense Conservationists, you might want to know more and become involved. If so contact me and I will tell you all about it. There are many outdoorsmen in the Ozarks who sincerely try to follow game laws who are charged with silly technical things involving hunting and fishing, who have no recourse but to pay several hundred dollars in fines because they cannot pay the higher cost of going to court to prove their innocence.

Next month I will tell the story of several of these people in this column. The Missouri Department of Conservation is the only state agency which cannot be audited, and there are no controls over what they do. I too once believed strongly in our state conservation agency, but things have changed in recent years, because of the tremendous amounts of money the agency now receives and the tremendous power they have, unprecedented in our state. Some of their agents… and I said SOME… have become little more than thugs. There is one working for them today who was proven to have broken the law in the exercise of his official duties, violating the rights of an innocent man he was trying to convict.

I don’t ask anyone to believe what I tell them about what is going on without looking at the situation and deciding for themselves. But few people ever see what is happening, because it is kept hidden from the public. The MDC has a great deal of control over much of the news media, which refuses to write or broadcast what is being done.

The “management” of our public lands often involves widescale timber cutting for enormous profit, which has nothing to do with conservation; clearing, burning, and converting wildlife cover to leveled land which they rent to farmers in return for a percentage of the cash crop. None of us have any say in that “management”. It is there for anyone to look at if they choose to do so.

There is little way anyone can defend millions upon millions of dollars in spending which involves downright corruption, and that too is there for anyone to look at if they just will. The stories about conservation agents breaking the law, about politically involved people getting their property taxes paid for them, about attempts to take folks land from them… all of that is there for those who will just look at what is happening.

The only way Missourians can have a voice in what the conservation department is doing, the only way we can have a voice saving our streams, our forests, and our wildlife is to form groups whose numbers have to be listened to. If you are tired of seeing innocent people run over, and your tax and license monies wasted, if you want to form such a group in your area, contact me and I will help you do so.

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

Change is inevitable, but I don’t know if it is always good. Sometimes, change just doesn’t make sense. Thirty-five years ago I was a young writer living in north Arkansas close to Bull Shoals Lake, which I still consider the greatest lake ever, with Truman Lake a close second. The Kings River, the War Eagle and Crooked Creek were all close, and they were magnificent streams back then. Today they are only a shell of what they were; progress and change have nearly destroyed what they were then.

In the 1980’s I took my kids to a McDonald's restaurant in Harrison, Arkansas not long after it opened, and a young girl named Robin was the manager there. A few days ago I drove through and stopped, and she is still the manager there. McDonald's probably doesn’t know what a treasure they have in her. They should send young employees to watch her in action.

It use to be, way back then, that old timers came in and drank coffee and talked about hunting and fishing, and sports, which was mostly the Razorbacks. Every day there were copies there, of the state’s two largest newspapers, the Arkansas Democrat and the Arkansas Gazette. Because of the competition, they were exceptional newspapers. I wrote a weekly outdoor column back then for the Gazette, but no one recognized me from the mugshot. I would go in most mornings and have a cup of coffee and read the sports pages, always interested in what was going on with the St. Louis Cardinals… baseball and football teams.

Those two newspapers combined about 15 years ago, and when I was there last week, there were two or three copies of what is now the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, and some old timers were sitting there reading them.

When I moved to Bolivar, Missouri 20 years ago, I found a daily Springfield newspaper there to read when I drank coffee in the morning, and I even wrote an outdoor column for them for 10 years or so, when they were locally owned and before a giant company from the east bought them out. In time, even if there was little else, you could read the sports page and find the standings of different teams, who was pitching that day and in the winter, what basketball or football teams were playing and where. Of course back then, McDonald's only had to pay about a quarter for that paper. The local restaurant had a big round table where a group of 7 or 8 local old timers could sit and read the sports page and talk about whatever was going on at the time. Later in the morning that big table was taken over by a group of elderly ladies who basically did the same thing, except for different topics of conversation.

Last month they tore the old McDonald's down and built a new one, not so much bigger but really fancy. They got rid of the big table, and there isn’t much of a place now for the old-timers to gather and talk. They don’t have a newspaper to read any more, and when I called and talked to the owner, he said they were trying to cut costs by eliminating it. The newspaper isn’t as good as it once was and it costs 50 cents or so more now. But what the new McDonald's has with their little bitty cramped together tables and chairs is several big-screen TV’s which no one ever seems to watch. I guess the young crowd they wish to cater to doesn’t read anymore, and doesn’t need a place to talk and gather. Younger folks are in too big a hurry for that.

Actually, I suppose that older folks aren’t of much importance to McDonald's any more, but they forget they got where they are today because so many of us older folks brought our kids there when we were much younger. We gave them a lot of money for lots of years.

Around the Ozarks, you will find McDonald's restaurants like the one in Harrison, Arkansas where there are still newspaper racks near the front counter, where you can read the sports page and see who’s in first place and who is pitching today and that kind of thing, if nothing more. But not here at this new one… They are trying to cut costs, so the newspapers had to go, and those big tables took up too much room. Actually, for the money we spend, I imagine us folks over fifty probably take up too much room too, and stay too long for what we are worth.

Write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613 or e-mail me at lightninridge@windstream.net. My website is www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com

Gifts That Last

2011-12-19T08:34:00.004-08:00

As joyous as the Christmas season is, there is a great deal of sadness to it when you look beyond your own family and see the difficulties others have. In the Ozarks, I think folks do a very good job of helping others during this time we set aside to celebrate the birth of Christ. There aren’t many who do not remember what Christmas is all about and make an attempt to help others less fortunate. In the town nearby, there were many businesses and banks and restaurants where the first names of children hung from Christmas trees, with a short list of simple things they would like for Christmas. Trouble is, there are so many of them, and most of us have too little set aside to help. That’s what bothers you… there are so many in need, and our resources to help are so limited. If only more of us could be rich. But then you think about that meal told about in the Bible, when a limited amount of bread and fish fed a multitude.

Really, the greatest amount of help comes from ordinary people who are not rich, but just working from week to week to pay the bills and get by. If everyone gives a little, if a small bit of help comes from all of us ordinary people, there are so many of us it does a tremendous amount of good. Last year in March, we held a ‘grizzled old outdoorsman’s swap meet’ with the help of a big church at Brighton, Mo which allowed us to use their gymnasium. We had a grand time, and hundreds of people showed up. We put out a jar for donations and the vendors and visitors together filled it with money, a total of $526. When you added in a percentage of books and magazines that we sold that day, the total neared a thousand dollars.

Part of that was used to buy some little gifts for needy kids at Christmas, and some of it remains to be used for helping needy children in some local schools. By March it will all be gone, and we will start over with another swap meet and raise some more money for such causes. If you were there last March, be aware that you helped. I know it isn’t much money when you consider the need, but it does a great deal more than the dollar amount looks to be when it is written down on paper.

It is the result of believing in the things the baby born in Bethlehem 2000 years ago taught us, as he became a man, in three years of teaching mankind that life is better when it is lived for others. I have often told God that he made a mistake in not making me a millionaire, so that I could do so much more than I can do. But if I had indeed become a millionaire, I might have succumbed to the greed you see in those who can never quite accumulate enough wealth. In reality, I do not believe the happiest men are the richest. It may be just the opposite. Great things are done more often by the masses who are not at all wealthy, but work together with what little they have to create an ocean with just a few glasses of water from each. Trouble is, we too often forget that the Christ whose birthdate is called Christmas, intended for us to never stop celebrating that season of sacrifice and giving.

We need to keep on finding the places where our small gifts can make big differences in the lives of the few we can help. Our bank accounts should mean less to us than those around us who need help. As easy as it is for me to say that, it is hard for me to do. For some strange reason, as a younger man, I was always too worried about making ends meet to help others much. As I grow older it dawns on me that the more I can do for others, the less I have to worry about what I need to take care of myself. If you don’t understand what I am saying, don’t worry; you may not be old enough yet. You will understand it eventually.

And I am not saying that it is always money that is most important. All year long we can celebrate Christmas in little ways, as my uncle used to do by giving away much of his garden produce to neighbors in need. Hundreds of other Ozark gardeners do the same thing each summer. In the spring when you are catching fish, celebrate Christmas by finding those who seldom get to eat fresh fish, and giving away half of what you catch. When April’s blossoms are fresh and October’s foliage is bright, find those who like to eat wild turkey and deer, and see to it that much of what you put in your freezer finds its way onto the table of those who are less fortunate.

I will celebrate Christmas when morel mushrooms are popping up, by eating fewer of them I find and giving away more. I will celebrate Christmas by cleaning a big catfish in August and giving it to some elderly folks who do not get to have it at all, but remember how good it tasted when they shared their catch years and years ago. I’ll celebrate Christmas by sharing not what I do not want, but what I treasure. You get the picture. If you aren’t rich, like I am not, help me celebrate Christmas in other ways right through the year, ‘til it comes again as the new year ahead comes to it’s end. There’s a million ways to give, and that makes all of us ordinary people potentially, “millionaires”.

As a postscript to this, I am hunting deer this week with my muzzle-loader, with a message in mind that I received from a lady a few weeks ago that read …
“I figured you might know someone that would like to donate some deer meat. I would greatly appreciate you considering me, if this opportunity arises. I am disabled (but can get around) and the mother of 3 boys, still at home. My twins are disabled, and their brother has a different disorder. We all love deer meat. I don't get food stamps or housing stuff though we do get social security and Medicaid. I try to get us through as best I can because I think others could use that assistance more. We are still warm, covered, and fed. But we haven't had much meat to eat, except chicken, this year. Deer meat would be a grateful and much-needed addition. So, I just thought I would write you, just in case you run into someone that has extra. If someone has deer from last year that they'd be throwing out to make room for this year's meat, we can use the older meat. We don't mind. I can make even freezer burned meat taste great. Haha I can,truly. I know this is a strange request but I just thought I'd ask that you might at least consider us, if you hear of something.”

I will be glad to pass along the lady’s address to anyone who might like to donate some deer meat to her along with me.

Merry Christmas… and don’t be surprised if I wish you Merry Christmas in the spring and summer and fall, just to remind you… there are lots of gifts to give when you are an outdoorsman, hunter and fisherman, even if you aren’t rich. But really I never knew someone blessed with a life close to the outdoors and God’s greatest creations, who didn’t feel as if they were.

My website is www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com, and the e-mail address is lightninridge@windstream.net. My mailing address is Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613.

Older, and Tireder

2011-12-13T07:34:00.003-08:00

No matter how cold it is, a winter setting on the marsh at sunrise is a special time for a duck hunter.

Nothin like duck huntin...In the old days, ducks seemed to be easier to fool, and they flew slower.

When it is cold, deer have to move more, because to keep up their metabolism, they must eat more... Good news for December deer hunters.
A few days ago, I was out on the marsh at daylight hunting ducks, all alone at sunrise. At five in the morning, I get to thinking I never ever want to hunt ducks again, because I get out of bed a little stiffer than ever before, a little tireder (tireder is a word for hunters only) and a little less mad at ducks than I used to be. Motoring across a lake in the moonlight, creating a wind-chill on your face that is enough to cause frostbite, you begin to see why the old timers you remember from boyhood got to a point where they would rather fish than hunt.

But in that half-hour stretch before sunrise, when it is still and cold and the ducks are flying, you feel quite a bit better about life than you do at five a.m. And it was there in the marsh at sunrise that I saw something I have seen a few times before, but had forgotten. To my west, a big full white moon was settling toward the horizon in a sky becoming bluer by the moment. To the east, the sun was rising, looking like a giant orange through the morning fog over the water.

About 7:30 a.m. I stood facing north, and stretched both arms straight out beside me, watching the moon at the end of my fingertips of my left hand, and the sun at the fingertips of my right hand, exactly at opposite ends of the earth, nearly the same size, and exactly the same distance above the horizon. I thought at that time, how small and insignificant I am. But I didn’t think about it long, because three mallards came swinging around on cupped wings, so beautiful they appeared like something an artist might paint. They settled at the edge of my decoys and there I was with both arms spread out like an eagle in flight, with my shotgun leaning against an old dead snag.

Sometimes you feel small and insignificant, and sometimes you just feel like a really dumb duck-hunter.

Twenty-five years ago, when I would have jumped out of bed at 5 a.m. raring to go, I would have also dumped a couple of those mallards when they took to flight.

This past week, with the moon watching from one side and the sun from the other, I shot twice and missed. I blame a lot of it on a bulky hunting coat, and my feet being stuck in the mud and ducks that are faster today than they once were. But I know the truth… there have been too many sunrises and too many marshes. I am just getting too old to be a good duck hunter. But I can call ducks better than ever, and I can afford to buy shells now, more than I ever could before, and I never ever appreciated the beauty of God’s handiwork as I do now. And I never loved the outdoors more for what it is, without worrying about limits or shooting percentages. However many days on the marsh I have left, however many mallards I bring home from future hunts, I have no complaints. Standing there between the sun and the moon, I felt blessed.

A pair of Canada geese swung too close that morning, and I will have a Christmas goose to eat. I got another one a few days before. But duck hunting has been difficult. Mallards did not work well this past week, even though there are more of them this year than I have seen in a while, and water conditions, while poor compared to twenty-five years ago, are better than they have been in recent years. I have confidence that there will be better days before the season ends.

The trouble is, the real deer season begins this weekend, (the season for grizzled old outdoorsmen like me)… the muzzle-loader season. From the 17th to the 27th, a handful of us who like to use old historic firearms get to hunt deer with muzzle-loading rifles, and because it is harder to do, and your chances for success much lower because of the muzzle-loaders limitations, there won’t be many hunters out there. The ones who are there in the woods with a smoke-pole, as muzzle-loaders are often called, are a different breed of hunter. You are required to wear blaze orange by the rule-makers in Jefferson City, but most of us just remove and stow the unsightly garb when we get into the deep woods. Blaze orange doesn’t go with the ambience of muzzle-loader hunting.

I like to hunt deer by walking against the wind, slowly and quietly, and it’s something I can do with a muzzle-loader. Where I will hunt, in the middle of the week there will be no other hunters at all, and it is the only time of the year you can actually stalk and hunt whitetails all alone. That is a nice feeling.

You get only one shot with the muzzle-loader, as reloading takes a couple of minutes for most of us. Most of us use Hawken rifles of 50 or 54 caliber, and the black powder charge which propels that heavy slug is poured down the barrel before the slug, then fired with a percussion cap, much like the early pioneers used. The new in-line muzzle-loaders came along for those would-be-er’s and greenhorns who wanted an easy way to do it, but they should never have been allowed in this season, set aside for Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett types born 200 years too late.

Muzzle-loader hunting requires that you wash your rifle and oil it after each day that you fire it, because the old-time black powder is so corrosive it will rust your barrel and clog up the primer seat. Truthfully, it is more trouble than it is worth, so if you aren’t already one of us, I suggest you just keep hunting the modern way. Another thing, it is much too cold for most folks during this December season and I don’t figure you would like it much if you aren’t a grizzled old outdoorsman.

Us grizzled old outdoorsmen know that deer which are so active before the regular deer season in November become harder to find now, seeking heavy cover and moving more at night. But if there is some tracking snow and cold weather, a muzzle-loader hunter might find a nice fat buck or two left, and the cold weather makes deer move more to find more food which cold weather makes necessary. I’ll let you know if I have any unusual adventures during this last deer season of the year, when I start feeling like ol’ Davy is out there with me, looking over my shoulder.

Doggone if I don’t wish I had a coonskin cap and a leather coat. I also wish I wasn’t gonna have to drag that deer as far as I am going to have to drag him, once I drop him with that one shot! Davy and Daniel had a horse, and I don’t.

Write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613 or e-mail me at lightninridge@windstream.net My website is www.larrydablemontoutdoors@windstream.net

A Bicycle for Christmas

2011-12-07T09:26:00.001-08:00

When I was very young, maybe 11 or 12 years old, my dad got a little angry with me, just before Christmas. It was over a report card that said I was just average, almost all C’s. Dad didn’t want me to be average. He was always afraid that’s what he was… ordinary and average! He would have given anything to go to high school. No Dablemont had yet finished high school, and he was afraid I wouldn’t, because I was so carried away with hunting and fishing, and those old timers in the pool hall, that I didn’t do my homework. I was supposed to go to work after school at the pool hall he and my grandfather owned, and spend some of the time there doing homework on a big chest-type soda machine that really did make a good desk. I used it to read the outdoor magazines and write stories.

Dad was beside himself that time just before Christmas when those report cards were issued. He shifted his pipe and told me the way it was… “Stop writing those darned stories,” he said, “do you think writing stories is ever going to get you anywhere in this world? You are going to wind up working at a factory like I have had to do, because all you want to do is read these danged magazines and write stories.”

He didn’t know then what I would do with that urge to write, and the wonderful gift he gave me by putting me in a pool hall with old men who became my closest friends, and helped me to see the difference between intelligence and wisdom. I had tunnel vision at the time. All I could see was the river and the woods; and the experiences those old men related, there on the front bench, was akin to the moose hunting stories I read in those outdoor magazines. And I hated school, because if anyone was indeed less than average, it was me. It seemed as if every teacher knew it. I was the pool hall kid, and in all those years of high school, I never once attended a football game or a social event. I spent all my spare time on the river, and all my working time in that pool hall from the age of 11 to my final year in high school. You couldn’t get anymore ordinary than me, and I guess Dad saw himself in me.

Dad had to work at a shoe factory during the day. Grandpa and I ran the pool hall until he came home and had supper, then came in to take over. He didn’t make much money. How did a dad who would tell a boy who was to make his living as a writer not to write, influence that youngster in a positive way? Well, you just had to know my dad. As fathers go, he wasn’t special. He was indeed a common man, ordinary, with all kinds of faults, like other men. But to me, he was the greatest man in the world.

He knew, that Christmas, how much I wanted a nice bicycle, but we didn’t have that kind of money. I rode around on a little second-hand bike someone had given me, a tiny little thing with wheels not much bigger than fifteen inches across. If I sat on the seat, my knees kept me from seeing the road! There was a big red and silver bike with 26-inch wheels at the local hardware store, but I never dreamed I could have it. It was for looking at and dreaming. If I had that bike, I could tie my shotgun or fishing rod to the handle bars and ride it down to the river and hunt squirrels and rabbits, or go all the way to Mrs. Kelly’s place, borrow her old johnboat and fish ‘til dark.

I know that dad figured out a way to buy that bicycle by making some extra money at the pool hall, instigating a snooker league from October to Christmas, charging each entrant a fee to join, and buying three nice trophies which sat in the pool hall to make everyone’s mouth water. We had some great snooker players, Junior Blair, Garnett Sliger, Shorty Evans, Jerald Jeffries, and a dozen others. But my dad played snooker all the time, and he was better than anyone. He had the game reduced to a kind of science, and he could do things with a cue stick and a billiard ball that would amaze anyone. Still, the game didn’t always come down to who was the best. That league attracted better than 20 of the best shots in our county, and a dozen or so who weren’t so good, but loved to play. It came down to those men I named and my dad, and during the middle of December, he just really seemed to lose his touch. He was out of it by the time the last rounds were played, and I think Garnett Sliger came in first.

I could hardly stand it. My dad was the very best, and he didn’t win. I tried to console him one night when we closed the pool hall and I stood there looking at those trophies, with the town Christmas lights shining through the window. There would be next year, I said.

That’s when he stopped brushing the table and shifted his pipe and made sure I understood something.
“I own this place, and I play free all I want… how would it look if I put on a big tournament and won it?”

My mouth fell open as I asked, “You mean you didn’t try.”

Dad shook his head. “I didn’t say that, a man should always do his best. I just knew I wasn’t going to win, because I want these other guys to do well. They are my friends, I don’t mind seeing them win. When it came down to one shot making the difference in a game, I just let them make the shot instead of me.”

Then he made sure I was listening, as he went on. “I guess there are times you win by losing… you’ll see that as you grow older. If you know you are good enough, if you yourself know you are the best… that is all you need, you don’t need to prove it to anyone else. And even if you aren’t the very best at anything, and you do your very best… that is enough. I have known some great men, the men I admire the most, who just kept on trying, who never quit, and they never were first at anything. But they were satisfied with their efforts because they did their very best. Someday the kind of man you are will be far more important than what you accomplish. I don’t know a whole lot… but I know that.

Dad spent a lot of years taking me hunting and fishing, and he didn’t always teach me a great deal by what he said. He taught me more by what he did. I watched and learned. He was something special, to me.

I got that beautiful bicycle on Christmas morning, because of that snooker league in the preceding fall. I had it for years and years, and nearly wore it out riding it to the river. And I have thought about it most every Christmas since. Dad passed away on Father’s Day this past year, but he will be with our family this Christmas, you can count on it.

Only nine years after I got my bike, my dad was so proud to see my first outdoor article in Outdoor Life, with a story about him and me and an old johnboat we used. It won a national award as the best outdoor story in 1972 and was published in a New York book of award winning sports stories.

As for me, I have never been first in anything, still only average and ordinary and happy being that way. But back when I was a kid, I was ahead of everyone in one category. I had the best bicycle in the whole world… and the best dad!

The Cedar Tree and Me.

2011-11-30T08:23:00.004-08:00

Every Ozark home ought to have a real cedar tree for a Christmas tree, Christmas tradition requires the smell of cedar, cookies baking and a wet beagle!

Sometimes a big antlered buck chooses a smaller sapling to polish his antlers, and sometimes a small-antlered buck will rub a large tree. But as a rule of thumb, a big based tree chosen for a rub indicates a good sized set of antlers. And bucks love cedars and pines for such a purpose.

The cedar trees we put to such good use for Christmas trees in my youth are not really cedars, they are junipers …technically speaking of course. ‘Red cedar’ is a common name for those trees, and that sounds a lot better than juniper. This week as I rambled through the woods, exploring a place I had never seen before, I found a 15-foot cedar tree that had two big scrapes under it’s outer branches where a buck had been leaving his scent, and checking for doe scent. These scrapes are just places underneath overhanging branches where bucks prepare scent posts, and scrape away leaves and vegetation on each visit.

They bite at the overhanging branches, and break the tips of them, and rub glands just below the eye against those branches. I have watched them do it, and it is a fascinating thing. They make scrapes underneath large cedars, and hardwoods alike, and any novice hunter can find them in October, November and December, by looking along trails and field borders. It gives you an idea of a place bucks will be visiting. They create sort of a rambling circle of these ‘scrapes’, which they revisit again and again and it is a big part of the mating of whitetail deer.

But this big cedar tree I found was about ten inches in diameter, and a buck had been using the trunk of the cedar as a ‘rub’… a place to polish his antlers. Those rubs originally are places where bucks with velvet-covered antlers in September rub shreds of the velvet coating off hardening racks. Bucks love small cedars and pines for such rubbing posts, and it is true that in general, a big set of antlers is used on bigger trunks, up to five or six inches in diameter. And the bucks with smaller antlers usually pick out a smaller sapling only an inch or two thick. But that isn’t always the case, because I have seen bucks with big antlers attacking a small tree like they were fighting with it, and I have also seen a little forkhorn scraping velvet from his antlers on a pine tree as big around as my arm.

Nothing is ever absolutely one way or another in nature, despite the general rules. But I am betting the buck that is using that big cedar as a scraping area and an attack post is a big one. I think I will hunt there in the muzzle-loader season, even though I don’t need any more big antlers. Some of the ones I have in the shed are being chewed on by mice, and adding another set seems pointless.

You have to understand, I just have an affinity for magnificent cedar trees, and it makes me mad to see some big old swollen-necked buck come in and whack up the bark like that, maybe keeping it from growing any larger! I am sure disappointed knowing that if I get that obnoxious old rascal, his steaks will be tough and strong tasting and I will have to make hamburger out of most of him and eat venison chili all winter long. But I will probably shoot him anyway, should I get the opportunity.

It is hard for me to accept that a whole generation of people now go onto city lots and buy Christmas trees, a large number of them spruce or pine instead of cedar. And they pay for them! They will spend enough on some trucked-in, bound up tree to buy two or three boxes of shotgun shells, and then throw it away in less than a month. What the heck has this world come to?!! Dad and I always went out to neighboring farms in early December, hunting rabbits and quail and farm-pond ducks and at the end of the day, we’d find a perfect cedar Christmas tree which we brought home to set up in the corner in a bucket and decorate. In doing so, the whole house smelled like Christmas. That’s because cedar trees smell like Christmas more than anything else, and if it isn’t that way at your place, you are not keeping up with tradition. Cedar trees, baked cookies and a wet beagle… those are the smells of Christmas.

The most beautifully shaped cedar Christmas trees in the whole state are found along our highways, millions of them from 3 feet to 8 feet tall, so perfectly shaped that it looks like they were grown just for that purpose. Gosh I would like to have one of them! If the state highway department would just start cutting some of them and putting them in strategic locations where those city folks who pay big money for Christmas trees could get them, we could pay to fill in all the chuck-holes and solve the states financial deficits at the same time.

I have had my eye on several, but of course, I can’t park along a busy highway and take my grandsons up a steep bank to cut a beautiful cedar tree and violate whatever law it is we would be violating. As tempting as it is to try it, their mother would kill me if she found out. I may have to hike through someone’s woods in the middle of the night, cross his fence onto the state property, and cut a perfect Christmas tree with my belt axe. If I get caught, I suspect I will have to pay a fine nearly equal to that which Kansas City suburbanites pay for their Christmas trees legally.

Or, I can go out into my woods and cut some little straggly cedar that grows all thin and unsymmetrical because over the years some buck deer has been deforming it with his antlers. Whatever; my advice is… take an axe and go get a cedar tree with your kids or grandkids, somewhere where you have permission to be, and keep the tradition growing. And just remember, that old Ozark adage…“shoot a buck, save a tree!”

Some people call on occasion to see about getting a subscription to my Lightnin’ Ridge Outdoor Magazine for a Christmas gift for someone. Occasionally, someone wants one of my seven outdoor books for a Christmas gift and I inscribe and sign them. My executive secretary, Ms. Wiggins, who for much of the year isn’t worth much, does a good job directing people to stores or locations in their area where my books can be found. You can call her and ask about getting them from a store close to you or ordering them in the mail. This year Ms. Wiggins gets a bonus of a quarter per book every time she doesn’t goof anything up, and she is doing better than ever before.

So many readers have never seen the magazine it is surprising, so we send out free sample copies to those who will pay the postage. And we have about 50 or so of the special Christmas issues we put out last year, which has nothing, but 80 pages of Christmas oriented outdoor stories. If you’d like to get one of those they are four dollars each, and most of that goes into postage and envelopes to mail them. At any rate, should you like information about the books I have written, or ordering information, or a place near you where you can see them, just call Ms. Wiggins at 417-777-5227 and speak clearly and slowly. Repeat your request several times as she is a little bit slow at times. I intend to fire her someday, but not at Christmas. I am so soft-hearted I’ll probably give her a Christmas bonus of ten dollars or so. This time of year just does that kind of thing to me!

See my website, where you can make comments on this column or any outdoor subject, and see color outdoor photos. www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com or write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613. E-mail me at lightninridge@windstream.net

Just Another Deer

2011-11-22T08:05:00.003-08:00

I had just worked my tree stand up the big red oak about 10 feet or so, and pulled my rifle up on a rope. I was untying it when heard a rustling in the leaves up the hollow a ways, and I knew it was a deer. I hurried, and as the eight-point buck walked past me, I had it ready. But there was no shell in the barrel, so I pulled back the action to inject one into the magazine, and when I did, the bullet jammed tightly just below the barrel. I had to watch him walk by, but I really didn’t care. I wasn’t there to shoot a deer so much as I was to see Christy get one. The buck was a nice one, and he never knew I was there; he just ambled by with his head down, apparently intent upon finding a doe.

Just before daylight I had left my daughter in her tree stand, in a spot where she has killed several deer. My daughter has hunted with me since she was a small girl. Today as a teacher, and much involved in her church, she doesn’t get to hunt as much. Sometimes she only has the opening day of the deer season, but she usually kills a deer and we spend the day taking care of it. Last year it was almost noon before a little broken antlered fork-horn buck came by her stand.

I have mentioned before that she has killed five bucks over the last seven or eight years with one broken antler, and not all from that same stand. When I saw that buck I knew he was bigger than any she had killed, but it didn’t matter. Christy usually shot whatever came by, if she didn’t miss. Using a small light 30-30 lever action, she has become a better shot each year.

The buck was walking toward her, but she was several hundred yards away, and I knew the chances were against her seeing that buck in good shooting range in the heavy woodlands around her.

In twenty minutes, I had given up. I said to myself that if he was going to climb that ridge from the bottoms and pass her stand he would have done so by now. As I was thinking that, I heard the loud report of her rifle, then a pause and a second shot. I got down and walked that way, and sure enough, it was the same buck that passed me. I don’t know if I would have shot the buck, but the jammed shell kept me from it, and I am grateful that it did. I favor the muzzle-loader season as a deer hunter, and I will have that time to hunt the woods alone just because I didn’t shoot that deer, and my daughter was tickled pink to finally get a buck that had two complete antlers.

Deer are strange creatures. As I left Christy to field dress her deer, (something she is just learning to do as old dad wises up and doesn’t do it for her) another buck wandered up and stood looking at her for several minutes, only 15 yards away.
“Dad,” she said later, “If only you could have been here, you could have got that deer.” I thought to myself, what a great day it would be if I had to process two deer. One is enough!

I have an old Hobart meat saw made in the 1920’s and I use it to cut some select ham steaks, and of course I filet out the loin steaks and butterfly them as most hunters do. The rest of the meat I cut off the carcass little by little and grind it up, mixed with pork, to use for spaghetti and chili.

The older you get the less enthused you become about deer hunting. Cleaning and skinning and processing several deer each season gets into a lot of work, and too, I enjoy fishing more every year. As for deer, I have killed a lot of them, and it gets to a point where it becomes old hat, especially if you aren’t interested in trophies. I am so tired of hearing some guy spouting numbers when he talks about the antlers on the buck he has taken. Many of those young hunters haven’t seen the buck deer being raised on farms around the Midwest by the thousands just for the sale of their antlers. None of them have seen antlers on deer in Manitoba. Buck deer in Canadian provinces are fewer in number, but antlers up there, if you start touting inches and numbers, dwarf the best you can find in the Ozarks.

In future years however, the record book antlers will be from farm-raised bucks and will not include any wild deer. You won’t always know that, because there are “hunters” now paying up to 50,000 for a half-tame, deer-farm-raised buck which they will shoot inside an enclosure and tout as a wild deer.

I have had several fish mounted, back when I was younger, and mounted ducks and ruffed grouse and pheasants which I have mounted myself have adorned the walls of my office. I learned to do that when I was young, and enjoy it still. But I have no mounted heads here, because when I was younger, there wasn’t enough money to pay for one, trying to make a living as a freelance writer, and feeling that my three little girls deserved that money more than a taxidermist. I lived in Arkansas for quite a time, and I knew men who would do anything for a big buck mount. There were some who baited them, some who spotlighted them, some who devoted all their spare time to getting big antlered bucks. Some of them who were no better off than I was, had four or five deer heads on the wall, and couldn’t find ways to pay all their monthly bills.

It is a fascination that is difficult for some of us to understand, but certainly, a big antlered buck is a beautiful creature. I have shot a bunch of them in my life… with a camera. I have killed a few with a rifle. But I am less impressed with dead deer now than I have ever been. If you want a huge set of antlers, you can find them by the hundreds and hundreds in a deer breeders catalog I have, sent out annually by the people who are raising and selling deer. Some of them are relatively cheap, at only 10 or 15 thousand dollars each. And maybe that’s why some hunters are always talking about scoring numbers, inches and points and beams… because if you find a big enough set of antlers in the wild, that deer too is worth a lot of money. There are some people who will do about anything for enough money.

That, more than anything else, is behind Missouri’s four-point restrictions in the northern counties, an attempt to create more trophies. Trophies bring in trophy hunters, and they spend a fortune on non-resident tags. But that money angle puts a lot of people in the woods who I don’t care to associate with, and that makes deer hunting ever less attractive to me. I will be in the woods or on the waters year-round, and I know that if I wait out the deer season, most of those “hunters” will be gone ‘til next year.

You can see my daughter and her buck, and the photos of that big ten-pointer I took last week, on my website.. www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com
Write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo.65613 or e-mail me at lightninridge@windstream.net

Ol’ Bill and the City Fellers

2011-11-15T06:34:00.000-08:00

The pool hall had a big picture window all the way across the front, and long before I can remember, a coat of green paint covered the lower half of it, about seven feet high. I think it was to keep wives and mothers from looking in. But inside, there was a small stage about three feet high that the coke machine and cigarette machine sat on. I could stand on that stage and look over the top of the green part of the window, out onto Main Street. With the big chest-type soda machine there before me, I could sit on a stool and use it as a sort of desk when I wanted to do my homework. More often, I sat there and wrote stories… hunting and fishing stories, stories about wild animals, about dogs, about boys who did great important things.

The deer season of 1962 brought a potful of hunters to our small town from the cities. Ol’ Bill and Ol’ Jim and many of the other front bench regulars didn’t much approve of those city hunters. There weren’t nearly as many deer back then, and every year the number of hunters in the Big Piney country was increasing. Sometimes it seemed downright crowded!

I don’t remember when we had our first deer season, but I think it was about the time I was born. I didn’t hunt deer until years later, but I learned a lot from those old hunters in the pool hall when I was just a kid.

“Big bucks like to stay in the brush, boy,” Ol’ Bill told me. “The does and young deer come out in the fields, but big old bucks like to stay in the heavy cover ‘til it gets dark. That’s why I like my old guvamint .45-70. You can shoot right through a hickory saplin’ if you need to, and knock a big buck flat.”

I didn’t know much about calibers, but I saw one of those bullets when he pulled one out of his overall pockets and it looked big enough to stop a bull elephant.

Bill and Jim never used deer scent or grunt calls or anything like that. Back then, those things hadn’t even been invented. But they were great woodsmen, and they knew all about deer; what they did, how they moved and where they would be when the rut came about. They explained the rut and mating season to me rather colorfully!

They knew how to find bucks and how to kill them. There were only 3 or 4 days in those early deer seasons and you were not allowed to kill a doe, only bucks. In later years, Ol’ Jim got to where he would kill his deer on the day before the season opened so he didn’t have to be out there with all the “greenhorns and would-be’ers” as he called them. I think the game warden knew what he was doing, but every opening day morning just after the check station would open, Jim would be there with his buck, stiff as a board. That was legal enough.

In 1962 on opening day, I was looking over the pool hall’s green window, when a big long car pulled up with a buck deer tied across the hood. They parked in front of the Big Piney Inn across the street; two hunters all decked out in red clothes, just like you’d see in the pages of the outdoor magazines I read religiously. Back then there was no blaze orange, and no law requiring you to wear red. Jim and Bill both wore red caps during the hunting season, but no one ever had on a red coat and red pants like one of those fellows had on. Several of the front bench regulars peered over the top of the green window, watching those two city fellows go into the West Side Café, just beside the hotel.

“Lands sake,” Virgil Halstead exclaimed, “That one feller looks like a giant walkin’ fire hydrant!”

“Looky there at that deer on the hood,” Ol’ Jess Wolf exclaimed, “It ain’t even been gutted!”

Ol’ Bill came up and looked out the door and shook his head. “Gosh almighty,” he said, “strapped on that hot hood with the entrails still in it… reckon that’s a new way of seasonin’ the meat.”

About that time the two men left the restaurant and headed for the pool hall. When they walked in, there were a few smiles and a snicker or two, but everyone tried to act like they hadn’t noticed the buck across the hood. It was done often in those days, when beginners got a deer and didn’t own a pickup. A couple of years before, a fellow from St. Louis had pulled into a local filling station in a big Oldsmobile with a billy-goat strapped across the hood. No one told him what it was, and he got directions to the check station and left, with several fellows near about rolling on the pavement with laughter when he was gone.

The two red-clad hunters came right in the pool hall, and to the surprise of everyone asked if Bill Stalder might be there. Bill had just left the West Side Café after having a piece of pecan pie and coffee, bragging to the waitresses about the 10-point buck he had bagged that morning. He was a little surprised to have someone come in looking for him. It may have been the first time anyone but someone’s wife came in the pool hall looking for anyone.

They were trying to find someone to clean and skin their deer, or at least help them with it. They said they were willing to pay twenty dollars. Bill would have done it for five, I imagine. He rubbed his whiskered chin and acted like he was trying to figure out if he had the time, then turned and asked me if I reckoned my grandpa was at his home, out on Brushy Creek east of town. I reckoned he was.

My grandfather and Ol’ Bill had been trapping partners for years on the Big Piney. Grandpa had no equal at skinning and cleaning fur or game… any kind of game. I had heard all the stories about how, when he was young, grandpa would travel to different farms around and butcher hogs for folks, just for the feet and head, and steers for little more than the head and hide. Ol’ Bill said the man never lived who could equal Fred Dablemont at preparing furs, or butchering.

So in little time, the two city hunters were following Ol’ Bills red International pickup to my grandpa’s place. They talked for years about that day and the easy money they made, and how bad that buck deer smelled.

But the big surprise came later that week when everyone was laughing about those two fellows, and Ol’ Bill only smiled. “You know, they was different all right, and greener than poke sprouts in the spring,” he said. “But they was pretty good guys, once you got to know ‘em. They wasn’t so much like I figgered they’d be… not such bad fellers for city folks.”

None of the front bench regulars ever got to know anyone from Kansas City as far as I know. But Ol’ Bill did. And the next summer, he and my grandpa took the two of ‘em catfishin’ on the Big Piney, and they all had a big time. I think they paid 20 dollars for the guide service and the johnboats and planned to come back in the fall to go gigging.

Ol’ Bill said that as strange as city folks were, there was gettin’ to be so many of ‘em that someday they’d sure enough outnumber the rest of us, and we all needed to get along. I expect that twenty dollars had a lot to do with his progressive way of thinking. But who knows?

Nature at its Best...

2011-11-11T07:06:00.002-08:00

Taken at midday, this buck was so intent on the scent of a doe that he paid little or no attention to the photographer. Photos by Larry Dablemont & Sondra Gray

Canada Through the Lens...

2011-08-30T09:02:00.014-07:00

Flying back into civilization after 7 days of wilderness!

Two tiny white butterflies and a bee take advantage of a blooming flower back of our cabin at Loonhaunt. There are many beautiful flowers as well as insects in Canada.

LROJ Editor Sondra Gray with one of many smallmouth catches.

A Bald Eagle sits amidst a sea of green and sky of blue.

Left, David Gray, husband of LROJ Editor Sondra Gray, shows off a pair of hefty smallmouth.

A beautiful rainbow after a warm Canada rain.

Getting the Jump on the Hunting Season

2011-08-30T08:49:00.002-07:00

Most youngsters who grew up in the rural Ozarks learned to hunt by searching the branches of an oak-hickory woodlot or creek bottom for squirrels. In October and early November, when the leaves are hinting of the upcoming fall season, squirrels have little trouble finding a place to hide. Squirrel hunting in the fall is a challenge but it is made easier when squirrels begin to work the hickories. That happens as early as late August, and will continue at times through October. On a crisp, still morning in the Ozarks, you can hear the grating of teeth on hickory nuts and the sound of small bits of hickory hulls falling to the forest floor. In the times when squirrels are not plentiful, the cuttings, or bits of hickory hulls give away areas where they are concentrated. As the weather cools a bit more squirrels stay out later in the morning and come out earlier in the afternoon. When it's hot, their activity is lessened. But find a supply of hickory nuts or a walnut tree and you'll usually find squirrels. When the hickories and walnuts have dropped, they really turn their full attention to the acorns, and at such times they also seem to crave dogwood berries where you can find a lot of them.

Old timers talked about seeing fall migrations of squirrels in the Ozarks back in the thirties and again in the fifties, when thousands of squirrels were moving in one direction in long waves, moving from an area where the mast crop had been exhausted, and eating every walnut and acorn in their path, devastating small corn fields and other crops.

Most of us who have spent time in the rural Ozarks for many years have seen small migrations. Back in the 1980’s I remember seeing an October migration of squirrels in north Arkansas that was something short of what the old-timers spoke of, but nevertheless, a fascinating movement. On Bull Shoals, there were often 8 or 10 squirrels swimming across the lake, north to south, within view of any fisherman, and hundreds of them drowned in the attempt.

This year, squirrels are plentiful over most of the Ozarks. There are plenty, the hunting is good, and the numbers need to be thinned. Combine that with the opportunity to teach an anxious youngster and the fact that they are excellent eating, and you have reason to do some hunting well before the deer season is upon us.

There are four methods of squirrel hunting that work all across the Ozarks. One involves hunting with a squirrel dog, and another in floating small streams. But the old tried and true method of course is 'still-hunting'. When I was a youngster I'd take my old Iver Johnson shotgun down to the Tweed bottoms just off the river and walk an old logging trail where gray squirrels were abundant. Occasionally I'd spot one by moving slowly along, but when I'd reach a certain spot on a rocky hillside, I'd find a comfortable boulder and sit still enough to be taken for a part of the rock. Within 10 minutes, gray squirrels would have forgotten there was an intruder, and begin moving about. When one presented a good shot within 30 yards or so, the old shotgun would roar and then the forest would be still again. I learned if you stayed put, marking your downed quarry, that in 10 or 15 minutes things would return to normal again and squirrels would begin to scurry about. A still hunter could sometimes take several squirrels in less than an hour from one spot. And there was always much more to see, as other wildlife passed through and birds flitted through the nearby branches. When things were slow, I’d lay back on the big flat rock and go to sleep, dreaming of hunting moose and bear in Canada someday. Still-hunting had many rewards.

Later I learned that two hunters could effectively find squirrels if one hunter became the eyes and the other became the feet. Hunter number one moves slowly along, watching the branches as best he can but traveling at a quiet snails pace. Usually he won't see squirrels which have already heard him. When he's well down the trail, he stops and waits and hunter number two advances in the same manner moving on past his partner to take a new position. Squirrels react to a moving hunter by moving themselves, well concealed by a tree trunk or branch. And while they are concentrating on the moving hunter they expose themselves to the hunter who is still, and watching. When two hunters hunt together, that walk and wait method is the best way to find squirrels in the early fall, a perfect method for a father teaching a youngster to hunt.

So having said all this, we come now to the responsibility of taking care of the game, making sure it is cleaned properly and therefore at it’s best for the table. My dad used that to make sure I developed a reverence for life. He made me to understand that no hunter should make a target of any living creature, that all the game we hunted was to be utilized, and valued. I learned as soon as I learned to shoot, how to clean and care for whatever I shot.

Today I carry in my game vest a handful of freezer bags, and soon after a squirrel is dropped, I skin it with the old method of cutting just below the tail and then pulling the skin forward over the front legs and head by using the tail, then stripping the remaining skin back over the hind legs. Then I cut off all four feet and the head, remove the entrails and place the cleaned squirrel in the bag. I seldom kill a limit of six unless there will be several people at my table to eat them, but I can eat a couple of squirrels easily, and it is nice to put some in the freezer for late winter meals.

So there you have it. A year with plenty of squirrels, an opportunity to test your marksmanship with a small bore rifle, and a chance to take a youngster to the woods….and a chance to let him learn, from a bushy-tailed teacher.

My website… www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com
E-mail me at lightninridge@windstream.net or write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, MO. 65613

Anthology available...

2011-03-16T12:59:00.003-07:00

There are still five of the bound volumes containing the first 15 issues of the Lightnin' Ridge Outdoor Journal available for purchase. Only 28 of these bound volumes were printed.

Each is numbered & signed by the editor & publisher of the magazine and inscribed to you or someone else upon request.

The magazines inside are in mint condition.

Cost of this collector's edition is $250.

For more information call 417-777-5227.

Jack Paluh Website

2011-01-04T11:23:00.002-08:00

For those interested in viewing or purchasing any artwork by Jack Paluh, we have now linked to his website at bottom left of this page. His artwork is featured in the Lightnin' Ridge Outdoor Journal and is a beautiful asset to our magazine. Jack Paluh is honored to bring the beauty of the outdoors into your home!