Tuesday, January 14, 2025

A Scientific Approach

 


Sick buck couldn't get up when I walked right up to him


       During the archery season in September, a hunter killed a young buck just west of Highway 63 between Houston and Licking Missouri.  It looked healthy but testing showed it to be infected with TSE, (Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy). That is the disease where disfigured proteins riddle the brain.  Thousands of humans have died from those proteins, known as prions, infecting the brain.  In England, years back many humans died from eating cattle infected with those prions.  That was TSE… but called Mad Cow Disease in England.

       In deer and elk TSE is given the common name of ‘Chronic Wasting Disease’.  It is said often that humans cannot get Chronic Wasting Disease or CWD.  Doctors I have talked to and researchers from other states say otherwise.  Relatives of people who have died of TSE from eating deer meat are never allowed to tell their stories in the media, though I have interviewed several whose accounts of their loss of a loved one sounds very credible and horrible.  Two men in a Montana hunting lodge died recently from TSE. They had cleaned and eaten the same deer meat one had killed.  I am certain that people have died from getting prions from deer meat, and I am also certain that there are some people that have eaten deer with the disease who didn’t get it. It may well be like the roll of the dice.

       Whatever you believe, you darn sure aren’t going to eat a diseased deer if you know it.  I hope that bow-hunter who killed the diseased buck didn’t eat any of that one.  The Missouri Department of Conservation will not give his name. Now the MDC wants to create a twenty-five square mile of ground around where that buck was killed and send their ‘shooting teams’ to kill and sample another 110 deer.

       Shooting teams are made up of Conservation Department personnel and some members of the US Dept of Agriculture, according to MDC’s deer biologist Jason Gabriel. He spoke to a gathering of about 75 people, most of them from that 25 square mile area, this past Tuesday night in Houston.  His presentation was very good, but much of the terminology is difficult for the average person to understand.  Gabriel did his best to explain it all.  But the gist of his talk was trying to explain that the MDC feels they have, by using this late winter harvesting tool, held CWD at bay in the Ozarks.   While other states, especially Wisconsin and northern Illinois have found 60 percent of the deer with the disease; in Missouri the percentage is only two percent of those sampled.

       Gabriel felt the ire of audience members who owned land in that square who did not want the sampling to take place because at this time of year, many doe deer carry two or three fawns almost ready to be born.  When looked at in such a manner, the 110 deer killed ends up taking perhaps 300 deer from the 25 square miles because of the unborn fawns.  And then there’s the method used; deer killed by spotlighting over bait.  Big antlered bucks aren’t spared, and hunters who want those antlers will never be able to take them next deer season.  Too many big trophy bucks will be in that total of 110. 

       So while Gabriel’s biological method of controlling CWD in the Ozarks makes scientific sense, that approach does not set well with hunters and landowners.  Of course individual landowners can say no, but deer do not confine themselves to fenced-in boundaries.  If the guy next to you welcomes those shooting teams to his land, the deer killed will likely be part of the deer herd that spends time on your place. Whether you like it or not, big bucks and pregnant does will be killed… a lot of them. The whole thing can be forced upon those landowners, and will be.  No one can stop it from happening short of a court order, and no judge will go against the MDC with their money and power!  

       A good alternative was discussed at that meeting… why not start checking the deer killed along the highway? No dice!  “It isn’t necessary,” was the response from Jason Gabriel, sewing a seed of discourse amongst country landowners and hunters all around Texas County and elsewhere.  That approach may be sound reasoning, but the MDC often rejects sound reasoning.  Gabriel has people above him who control what he does. Even if he thinks having a team to check road-killed deer is a good idea, he can’t say it should be done.   Such a decision would likely get him fired.

        But why not check road-killed deer? If 30 or 40 deer killed along the highway had glands removed and sent in, that would mean Gabriel’s shooting team could kill less live deer.  If you use volunteers like me, who know where the glands are and how to remove them, then think of the money that would be saved.  And after all, money is the greatest motivating factor in everything the MDC does.  Who knows how much money will be spent in having those shooters kill 110 live deer in that 25-mile square acreage.

       I will discuss this more in next week’s column and then promise to move on too more important things, like catching winter crappie or walleye.

       Speaking of walleye, I will be speaking to a walleye fisherman’s club at Clinton Arkansas, at the Fairfield Bay Resort on Greer’s Ferry Lake the evening of January 20.  If you have an interest in attending, there is further information about this event on my BlogSpot, larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com. Or you can contact me at lightninridge47@gmail.com or by calling my office at 417-777-5227.   

                                                                                        



Saturday, January 11, 2025

The Greatest Man I Ever Knew

 


 

 

 

My dad, Farrel Dablemont

      

      

      My Dad’s birthday was this week.  He died at the age of 84 in 2011. I miss him most when I am on the river, where we spent so much time together.  Dad was several inches taller than me at 6’ 3”.  He was strong and quiet, hard working and dedicated to his church and community.  He was too young to fight in World War II, but when he was just barely 17 he joined the merchant marines and wound up on the high seas in liberty ships, which took a tremendous beating during the war. High numbers of them were sunk by German U-boats, and thousands of merchant marine sailors were lost at sea.

      Actually, it was my dad who taught me to fish and run the river when I was just a little tyke. I was floating the river with Dad when I was only 6 or 7, learning how to cast an old open-faced Shakespeare casting reel. 

      One of my best selling books is an account of my dad’s experiences he was just a kid on the Piney I the 1930’s.  It is entitled “Little Home on the Piney”. If you would like a copy, contact me. 

      The following is just part of a magazine article he wrote years ago and it is his memories of long ago days on the river….

 

 

      ----What fishing there was in those days!  The Big Piney River was full of bass and goggle-eye and black perch. It was nothing to catch 30 or 40 perch and goggle-eye in a single day, and a dozen or so nice smallmouth bass.

       I missed a lot of school in the spring and fall so I could guide fishermen, but it couldn’t be helped, the family needed the money. I made good grades because I studied hard and read a lot.  The schools understood in those days when boys were needed at home.

       My customers were mostly nice people and I enjoyed working for them.  I had one man who insisted on standing on the front seat to fish.  I warned him if we hit a submerged rock or stump he would fall out.  He told me he was a gymnast and an expert on balance.  So being a dumb kid like I was, I decided to see how good he was.  Going down a deep riffle, I saw a small stump just underwater and I built up a little steam and hit it head on.  I can’t describe how he looked flailing in mid-air with both arms and legs while he fought to keep his feet on that boat seat.  But he wasn’t the expert on balance he declared himself to be.  He went in with a big splash.  For some reason he never used my guiding services again, even though he caught a good mess of fish that day after he dried out.

       Then there was a man from St. Louis who wanted to photograph the Big Piney River.  He was to come early on a Saturday morning but on Friday we had a heavy rain.  He showed up the next morning with his wife and sister-in-law after the river had risen 15 feet.  I told him I was sorry but it was just too high to float.

       “I thought you were a riverman?” he said.  “I just want to take pictures. Couldn’t we make it?”

       So the four of us set out in a 16-foot wooden johnboat.  I knew the river and all the dangerous bluffs and crooked places.  So when the river was straight I stayed in the middle and in the main current, and where it was crooked I took to the edges and paddled through the fields where the water wasn’t as fast.  Boy, what a ride we had!  There were some tense moments when my passengers were hanging on for dear life, but we made it in four hours…a distance of 20 miles.  We even stopped twice to climb hills and take pictures.

       The gentleman paid me well but now that I’m older and wiser, I would never do it again, and shouldn’t have done it then.  We were all risking our lives.

       As a fishing guide I have seen strange things on river floats.  I took two lawyers from Springfield on a few trips.  I remember one trip in particular when they had done well in the morning but by noon they had downed most of a whole bottle of Jim Beam.  One threw a wild lure and caught the other one in the lobe of his ear.  I’m not much of a surgeon but I offered to cut the hooks and take it out.  The fisherman declined.  He wore that lure in his ear for the rest of the trip, taking a drink of his antiseptic every so often.  After that, I asked that fishermen take no alcohol on float trips.  It was one of the smartest moves I ever made.

       I have seen grown men cry when they lost a big fish.  One got so mad he broke his rod over his knee and threw it in the river. 

       I am so than thankful l that I lived the life I had as a kid, in a time when the rivers were clean and clear and God gave me the privilege of watching so many people catch fish while floating through those beautiful unmarred hills and valleys, which were then still much as He created them.  And I’m thankful he let me be a part of a vanishing breed…an Ozark riverman.  Only those of us who remember it the way it was then, know how bad it is now…and what God-given treasures we have lost forever.

 

       

 

 

Sunday, December 29, 2024

The River in Winter

 



      It began to rain, lightly at first. But from the dark clouds building to the northwest I knew what was coming.  I pulled my johnboat up on a shallow gravel bar due to that promise of coming bad weather, just minutes away. The temperature was in the low thirties, cold and wet. I picked up the pack on the boat seat before me, grabbed my shotgun beside me and hurried up the incline before me to a rock ledge about 20 feet high. Facing the east, it jutted out about four feet, a shelter from the wind and rain. 

      As the rain increased, I gathered some dry sticks around me. Even a small fire would help. I pulled a small vial of kerosene from the pack, and poured it on the layer of dry sticks. I dug out a lighter from my pocket and lit it, watching the flame burst forth and grow. I pulled the thermos from my pack as the rain began to pelt down. The coffee I had made hours before was still hot as I settled back on the layer of dry leaves against the rock wall and pulled my old goose-down coat up around me, tying down the hood.

      The rain was steady now but with little wind, thank goodness. I was content to watch it from the dry shelter. I was in no hurry. My pickup was only three eddies and two shoals downriver and there was three hours of winter light left, even with the heavy cloud layer. I could make it in about an hour if I paddled straight through.

      But I would wait, so that I could stay dry. I had rain gear in a dry box in the seat, but when it rains hard you don’t stay real dry with any rain gear. Especially when you are paddling a boat. And it was too cold to get damp.

      I leaned back and watched the rain slack off a bit and out above the river I heard the sound of wings. Under that overhanging ledge, I just glimpsed the flock of mallards heading down river.  They circled above the trees across the river and out over the field just beyond, then headed back to the big eddy downstream. I watched them circle and funnel down into its protective slough, maybe a dozen or more.  

      That made me happier than the fire and coffee.    In a little while I could float down toward that slough and paddle right in beside them.  Maybe I could add a couple more greenheads to that one old drake I had picked up earlier. He took to flight behind my boat as I drifted past and he was the only duck I had seen all morning besides the ever-present hooded mergansers, which would skim along above the river surface before me.

       It rained for about a half an hour and then I began to hear the patter of ice particles around me, at first mixed with the rain, then in a few minutes, there was an onslaught of nothing but sleet.  I just sat there finishing my thermos of coffee and a half a sandwich.  It was something to enjoy, being so peaceful and dry there beneath that rock overhang watching it sleet.  Shortly the fire burned down and I let it subside into small coals and ashes. The sleet didn’t last long.  About that time I saw something big coming up the gravel bar and past my boat.  It was a lone otter, likely a big male.  He had skirted the shoal and was about to slip into the eddy above me. I was surprised that he didn’t get my duck inside the boat. Otters are efficient killers… the scourge of the river.  They are the biggest enemy of smallmouth bass, rock bass, catfish, you name it. If it swims, they will kill it to eat. What lives above water, they may kill that too. They have been known too kill fawns by pulling them into the water.  They kill ducks and geese, turkey poults, mink, muskrat, rabbits, etc. 

       Otters are one of many embarrassments of the Missouri Department of Conservation. Young, inept biologists stocked them years ago without any knowledge as to what they were and what they would do. They moved from our rivers to upland waters to become a devastating predator of stocked fish, and ruined many fishing ponds and small lakes, far from the rivers.

      The MDC traded wild turkeys to Wisconsin for the otters they stocked.  Today there’s an abundance    of otters in the Ozarks and wild turkeys become fewer each year.  Had I a rifle, I would have killed that one and taken him with me.  But in a moment he was gone, and with him went the sleet.  Suddenly it was snowing. 

      I headed for the johnboat, adjusted my bow-blind and pulled the boat out into the river.  The snow began to really come down and for a moment I just stood there watching it drift down between me and the high bluff downstream, so beautiful it was hard not to stand there in awe, and I thanked God he allowed me to see it. It was so quiet you could hear snowflakes hitting the leaves along the gravel bar. Eventually, I swung my hip boots over the side of the boat, adjusted my shotgun beside me and reached a gloved hand for my paddle.     

      There were ducks downstream a ways.  I thought I heard an old hen quacking.  “Be patient” I said beneath my breath, “I’m coming!”

      See my new book on www.larrydablemont.com and read all outdoor columns from the past and future on www.larrydablemontoutdoors

Into Forgiving Hands

 


      

      Grandpa McNew and my dad bought the pool hall on   Main Street in 1960.  I was twelve years old at the time, and immediately dad let me start working there, doing this and that and occasionally running the place while he went to take care of errands. There were a host of old men and middle-aged men who came in regularly to talk hunting and fishing, and the outdoors was all I thought about.  Why wouldn't it be the greatest place in the world for a boy like me?

          Ten or twelve of those old men became my best friends. Maybe none of them influenced my life more than Saldy Reardon. Dad had a day-job in a factory at the time, and Grandpa would open the pool hall at 7:00 a.m. and work until noon. Saldy would take over at mid-day and work until I got there at 4:00.  I would come straight from school to work until 7:30 or 8:00, and then dad would come in to take over and close down. 

      Dad said Saldy was as fine a man as he ever knew and he would trust him with every penny the pool hall made in a week, which usually wasn't enough for anyone to run off with anyway.  And he was my friend so it hurt sometimes to see him like he was late on a Saturday night when he had been drinking heavily.  He never drank during the day, only late at night, I guess when the loneliness was too much to bear.  

      Everyone talked about how great an athlete he had once been.  Dad said that when he himself was just a boy and all the Ozark towns had baseball teams, Saldy was the greatest pitcher anyone had ever seen.  There were times on a Sunday afternoon when Saldy would walk miles to a country ballpark and pitch a double-header. The other team just felt good if they got a few hits, no one expected to beat him.  No one did, that anyone ever recalled...he was that good.

         He was young then and had a wife everyone knew as Pinky.  Pinky was young and beautiful and so adored by Saldy that he couldn't go on after she died. In his mid-thirties at the time, Saldy fell apart, and turned to alcohol to forget.  He never found anyone else, he never pitched again, never held a steady job, he just drank and drank and drank.

         I didn't know anything about all that 'til I got older.  I'd just come in after school and Saldy would say, "Where the heck you been Squirt?" like he was mad because I was always a little late from stopping by the drug store for another outdoor magazine.  He never called me by my name, just called me ‘Squirt’, and said he didn't figure I'd ever grow enough to amount to much. But he always smiled, and messed up my hair and I knew it was all in jest.

         Saldy carried the only two-dollar bill I ever saw, and one evening when the place was nearly empty he showed it to me and said someone real important to him had given it to him a long time ago, so he couldn't sell it to me like I wanted him to, not even for two dollars and a quarter as I had offered. But on Christmas Eve that year, just before we closed up early, Saldy handed me an envelope and said, "Don't open this 'til Christmas, Squirt."  At home that night I read the card inside and found that faded old two-dollar bill. I could not have imagined a greater gift.

         As much as I admired Saldy, he taught me in reverse how not to live.  There were tears in his eyes when I went away to college and he told me he was wrong… I had grown a little.  And then he said to me, "Don't do like me, Squirt, don't take up with a bottle.  It's the devil's partner and you can get tied to it like I've been all these years.”

          I always remembered, and I've enjoyed living life to the fullest without ever needing the alcohol that took Saldy.  He died that year, in mid-November of 1965.  I doubt if he knew that he made an important positive impact on a young life.  Today when I see some young kids tipping a bottle or bragging about how drunk they got the night before, I wish they could have been fortunate enough to see into the future as I could, as a boy, when I watched Saldy fight the demon and lose.

      Somebody told me years later that a two-dollar bill was bad luck.  I guess Saldy would have maybe agreed.  It never brought him much luck.  But me, heck I was the luckiest kid in the world.  I had friends like Jess and Bill and Jim... and Saldy Reardon.

         As sad as the story is, Saldy had a friend too, and I knew about Him.  On that Christmas Eve when he gave me that gift, we were about to celebrate the birth of someone who came to earth and made all lives count for something. And it is because of Christmas that there is hope for the least and the lowest of us.  Saldy didn't really lose the battle.  Liquor eventually lost its hold on him and he slipped from its grasp on that day in November of '65, into forgiving hands.  

 

 

 

Taken from the book “The Buck and the Widow Jones” by L. Dablemont

 


Baked Mallard for  Christmas -- L.. Dablemont  column 12-15-24

 

Taken  from the  book “The Buck and the Widow Jones”  by  L. Dablemont       

 

 

       It was a two days before Christmas in 1939.  There was a knock on the door and a boy stood outside, waiting for the old man to answer.  When the door opened he doffed his hat politely and said, “Mister, I reckon you don’t recall me, but I’m Joe Roggins’ youngest boy Jimmy… and I come to ask if I could shoot me a couple of mallards off’n yore pond.”  Before the old man could answer, the boy went on…  “My Pa’s been feelin’ poorly and he allowed as how he’d like a big ol’ mallard duck or two for dinner tomorrer. They’s a bunch of ‘em on yore pond an’ he’d love to eat one of ‘em.”

       Charley and his wife were in their early sixties.  Neither knew the young seventeen-year-old kid who stood there before them in ragged overalls and an old patched suit coat probably made ten years before the boy was born. His overalls were two or three inches too short. Charley couldn’t help but smile at the sight of him. 

       “Oh heck boy, them mallards ain’t mine,” he said, “they belong to the good Lord, an’ I ‘spect He made ‘em to feed folks, so if’n you shoot a couple, I don’t care. Bring me one too.  I never have favored turkey nor ham over a baked mallard.”

       “That was nice of you Charley,” his wife said as they watched the young man walk through down the gravel road with an old hammer double-barrel twelve gauge.

Sunday, December 15, 2024

The Cedar Tree and Me

 


How strong is the cedar tree? This one is growing from the fork of a giant  maple, 5 feet above the ground

The most perfect Christmas trees I have ever seen are found along the highway between Springfield Missouri and Branson. They are perfectly formed, many not much wider than a lampshade and five or six feet tall.  There they are there for the taking, small, medium and large; all perfectly formed due to their environment, which gives them no plant competition and full sunlight, plenty of rain and ideal soil.  

The Highway Department apparently has no idea what they are worth.  If they would put ordinary entrepreneurs in charge of harvesting and selling them, I think they could make a hundred thousand dollars from those cedars each December.  But, they aren’t so interested in ‘making’ money as they are in increasing taxes! 

Common sense often is rare outside the Ozarks.  City folks buy bottled water that tastes awful! However, if you see one of those perfect Christmas trees along the highway, mark it. Then at night you can have pickup trouble right where it is.  It don’t take no time to cut a cedar tree off a hillside where you had to stop for whatever legitimate reason. I might try that! If I get caught, I suspect I will have to pay a fine nearly equal to that which city suburbanites pay for their Christmas trees legally.

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. ‘Eastern 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 tree branches where bucks prepare scent posts, and scrape away leaves and vegetation on each visit before peeing in the spot.  

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 November and December, by looking along trails and field borders. 

But this big cedar tree I found was about eight inches in diameter, and a buck had been using the trunk of the cedar as a ‘rub’… a place of a mock fight, skinning up the bark. Bucks love cedars and pines for such fighting and rubbing posts, and it is true that in general, bigger sets of antlers are 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.  

        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.

       So my advice…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!” I made that one up. Come muzzle-loader season… that may be my aim, saving cedar trees from some old scraggly-horned buck.

 

       Don’t forget folks, I will be at my Big Piney Nature Center, 6410 Hwy 63 to the south of Houston Missouri from 1 to 4  this coming Friday afternoon and 1 to 4 on Saturday, the 14th.  The purpose will be giving away a special book I have written for youngsters who like to read and the selling of books and magazines for Christmas gifts and.  But on the 14th I will be in Houston at the Health Food Center doing the same thing from 10 a.m. to noon.  If you know a kid who needs a good book of short stories for Christmas, come by and see me.

 

       More info at www.larrydablemont.com or on www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com or E-mail me at lightninridge47@gmail.com