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.

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 14^th.  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 14^th 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

 

Chest Waders and Quackers

 

       I would rather hunt ducks than do anything else pertaining to the outdoors.  I remember when I was laughed at for doing so.  It was in the early 70’s in December when I lived on a mountaintop out west of Harrison Arkansas.  I had been hunting on Bull Shoals Lake for much of the day and stopped into a little country store and filling station just outside of town.  I still had my chest waders on and my duck calls around my neck.  An old-timer sitting by the stove couldn’t help but laugh at the sight of me. 

       He said, “Dablemont, is that yore quacker tied around yore neck or are you fixin’ to strangle yoreself?” I told them I had sure enough been duck hunting.

        I let my Labrador get out to pee and when I did, 3 or 4 of the men came out to look at him. When I explained what his job was, one of them said that if his dog ever got his jaws around a whole duck he’d not be inclined to come back for a day or so…  Then they saw the four mallards and a gadwall lying across my boat seat and they could hardly believe they came from Bull Shoals.

       There was no one back in that day hunting ducks on Bull Shoals.  It was a great year because the lake was up fifteen feet or so and the ducks were finding lots of food in the back end of coves and creeks that few fishermen ever went into in the winter. I had it all to myself and it was a duck hunter’s haven.   The water had backed up into the vegetation and there was a lot of food floating in the water.  My dog Rambunctious and I motored into the end of a long cove and ducks went everywhere in flight, maybe a couple hundred of them.  I covered the boat with camouflage beneath a flooded tree and threw out a dozen decoys.   Of course they would come back… all that food amongst the floating debris.  

       As they returned over the next hour in small flocks I picked out the drakes and downed a limit in short order. Some of those hunts, where I had the whole lake to myself, were the best days I have ever spent out with my dog and quacker, chest waders and shotgun, and I have done the same thing on other Ozark lakes. The water conditions have to be right, but when the water rises into the vegetation you can bet the ducks will come, especially in December and January.

       I will never forget something that happened that winter on Bull Shoals.  My Lab brought me a mallard drake that had earthworms crawling out of its beak. I got to looking and all I killed had earthworms in their beaks, throats and crops. Back in one of those coves I guess worms had been floating to the surface too, and the mallards had been eating them. Never seen anything like that before or since.   That would make those particular ducks omnivorous!  To see photos from that day 50-some years ago, including one with old Rambunctious, the chocolate Labrador, find www.larrydablemontoutdoors.com on the Internet. 

       Even though there's such low water conditions on lakes like Bull Shoals and Stockton and Truman, all of which can provide great waterfowling in good years, when ducks come through ahead of a front, fleeing a blizzard up north or an intense ice-up in the prairie wetlands, the hunting can be good for awhile.  It just doesn't stay that way, because to hold ducks, you need water in the vegetation.  Without it, they just won't stay long.

       A few inches of rain could do the trick this winter, because late in the summer, smartweed, nut-sedge and sesbania and other green growth which attract ducks were growing along tributaries and flats on area lakes.  You hope to see the lakes rise into that green growth before the waterfowl migration is in full swing. If our lakes get enough rain to come up just four or five feet, we are going to have some great habitat for ducks.

       

       

       I wrote a book about duck hunting entitled “Memories from a Misty Morning Marsh” which might make a good Christmas gift for a duck hunter.  You can see it on www.larrydablemont.com or come visit me at my nature center on December 14.

 

       This sort of goes along with the way the world is becoming.  A few years ago I went to the county library in Houston Missouri just before Christmas and gave away a book of short stories I wrote for young people entitled, Dogs, Ducks and Bucks. Quite a few parents brought kids to get a book inscribed and autographed. Some just came to get a book for Christmas gifts for kids and didn’t bring the kids with them.   I gave away about 30 or so that day and it made me happier than anyone else. I wanted to do that again but the new librarian there said they were too busy for such an event.  

       So I will do it again, this time at my Big Piney nature center-project a mile south of Houston on Saturday, December 14 from noon to 3 p.m.  If you know a child who likes to read and isn’t getting a lot of presents, come by and get a book for him or her. My other books will be available too and if you already have one bring it by and I will sign and inscribe if for you.  The address of the place is 1640 South Hwy 63.

Squirrels for Thanksgiving? -- MDC

 

I shot this buck several times and left him there

       You can have the traditional thanksgiving dinner.  I guess you likely will.  I never did like store-bought turkey; it is tasteless and dry and if you have a slice of one when you are young you can bet it never is going to get better as many years of Thanksgiving pass.  Maybe it should be prepared as I do wild gobblers.  I slice the breast thin as possible and then fry the razor-thin meat slabs with a good coating of various types of seasoning and flour to give it taste.  I did that back when I use to shoot turkeys with a shotgun.  I roam the woods now with a camera, and as scarce as wild turkey are becoming I would be ashamed of myself if I killed another one.

       In Missouri, the conservation department has figured out a way to make more money out of dwindling numbers of turkeys.  It use to be that if you bought an archery tag you could hunt both deer and turkey with a bow.  Not now.  They got together and figured that they could double the income from bow-hunters by requiring different tags for each, therefore twice as much money.  I don’t know if that will work so good, because if a game warden got real ambitious and left his pickup to walk back into the woods and catch some smart fellow in a tree stand with a bow, the hunter could just claim he was hunting coyotes, or bobcats, or weasels and produce a predator call to prove it.  Or he could say he was hunting squirrels maybe, and then bark like a squirrel.  

       To make more money the MDC will have to make a new law saying that during the bow season for deer or turkey, a hunter may not hunt anything else with a bow.  Of course they could charge fifteen more dollars for permission to bow-hunt anything from squirrels, ducks and groundhogs to coyotes and bobcats.  That would work! And more money!

       The MDC has a lot of additional regulations.  For instance, you cannot shoot a deer or turkey with a firearm within 450 feet of a residence, barn, shed, etc -- in some areas of the state, nor hunt with a bow within 200 feet of those buildings-- in some areas of the state.  It is not clear whether or not you can hunt turkey with a bow in November with a gun turkey tag for October.  In October you can hunt turkey with gun or bow or atlatl or slingshot without a new tag after October. But in November thru January if you use a bow, atlatl or slingshot to hunt turkeys you need a new tag. Understand?   

       Some agents do not know for sure about all this neither. If you want to hunt deer and/or turkey with a bow you have to buy a turkey and deer tag separately.  Figure that what you have to do to hunt anything in the fall with gun or bow now costs more money.  If you buy deer tags for archery, turkey tags for archery, gun tags for turkey, and gun tags for deer, and then new spring tags for turkey you will spend well over 100 dollars.  You will have to spend a little more for getting a youth tag I think, but that enables a hunter who can drag a kid out in the woods to get one more turkey than it is legal for him to kill with his own tag.

       I hope I have not confused anyone here.  It is best that when you go bow hunting you call a game warden to straighten it all out and tape record the conversation so he can’t change anything if he comes after you.  Also, if you hunt coyotes, groundhogs, bobcats, or wolves with a bow, have a predator call with you.  And oh yes, there are some additional requirements for hunting bobcats, which I do not understand.  On the Internet it said there are also additional regulations involved for hunting squirrels, rabbit, rails, snipe, bobcats, coyotes, pheasants, coots, and several more species.  Thankfully that list on the computer does not involve ducks and geese.  That’s all I am concerned with.  If you hunt ducks with a bow, you do not need any special license, you need to have lots and lots of arrows and your head examined!

       I did shoot a nice buck this year with my trusty 35 millimeter Nikon single barrel. I just left him there! Last summer I shot several strutting gobblers! Called them to within a few yards. I never bought deer or turkey tags to do that and I recommend you follow my example! With all the regulations and efforts to make more money the MDC has agents that don’t understand all of it either.  

       I interviewed the Chief of Enforcement a month or so back and was surprised by an attitude I admire.  He said that if any hunter or fisherman receives a citation he feels is unwarranted, or if any agent treats someone disrespectfully or illegally according to that citizens rights, that he should be notified.   His name is Randy Doman and his phone number is 573-751-4115.  You will have to go through a lady at the desk, but just ask for him and then leave a message.  

His email is Randy.Doman@mdc.mo.gov if you need help getting through to him, call me at 417-777-5227 and I will put him in touch with you. He has assured me no one will be ignored. This opportunity has not been available before and I applaud him for making it happen.  Trouble is he gets told what he can do by some very uncaring higher-ups.   I like Doman and I intend to try to work with him.

 

       I have written lots of books and put together more than 100 outdoor and Ozark magazines.  Some might make good Christmas gifts.  See them on your computer at   www.larrydablemont.com.  

There One Went…A Road-Runner

 

       Once a fellow called me to report seeing a hen pheasant down on the Arkansas-Missouri border. I knew exactly what he had seen. I had just seen something similar… a road-runner.

       About twenty years ago I saw a road-runner up here on Lightnin’ Ridge about forty yards from my back door.  The bird, which is  about the  size of a hen pheasant, was running as if the cartoon coyotee was after him, but I  never heard him beep.  Last week I saw him or one like him again.  For this part of the northern Ozarks, he is a rare bird. They are not suppose to be here, and my wooded ridge top is possibly the farthest north they have ever been seen. 

        But he is not a bird of woodlands.  He is a desert bird found in Mexico, Texas, Arizona and western Oklahoma. I guess mine has moved up here from northern Oklahoma  or maybe Arkansas.  If you want to see one, there is a gravel road west of the Big Creek resort on the north side of Bull Shoals where road-runners are thick in the summer.  On one day I have seen three or four crossing that road.  

       There isn’t a lot known about road-runners. They seldom fly and don’t get but a few feet off the ground, seldom going more than 20 yards at a time in flight.  But that is  how they avoid predators that are faster runners.  They can’t outrun a coyote but they can elude him.  The bird usually runs about 15 miles per hour but if necessary they can run 25 miles per hour.  You never see one pecking around in one spot like a dove or quail.

       They almost never get off the ground, except when they nest. They nest a few feet off the ground in bushes or small trees.  Some nests have as few as two or three eggs, and some have up to eight. Some ornithologists say they mate for life, but I think  that is unlikely. I have never seen two together.  

       They  have a cousin, in that same cuckoo family, that we in the Ozarks call a rain-crow, or  ‘yellow-billed cuckoo’.  The two birds seem to have little in common, but their four toes have two pointing forward and two pointing backwards.  Their track makes an X. The rain crow is common here, and is elusive in high branches of tall oaks. They stay off the ground while their cousin, the road-runner seldom leaves it.

       In the desert states, road-runners have been seen killing large rattlesnakes by pecking at the head and avoiding strikes until the snake is dead.  Usually that is seen involving two of the birds.  

       What will he eat up here on Lightnin’ Ridge in the  winter?  Anything he wants.  There are lizards  out on warm days, small mammals like field mice, and they also eat a small percentage of plant and seed matter.  As a photographer, I would give a good portion of my left little toe to get a picture of a road-runner up here on this ridge-top. Wouldn’t it be something to get him running through my woods in a skiff of snow? He  can live through an Ozarks winter because he never has to drink water, and doesn’t, ever.  He gets all the moisture needed from his food, like many other desert small animals.  He  doesn’t have to eat a great deal and his body temperature drops to surprisingly low levels much like a reptile, when it gets real cold. 

       He can thrive if it stays above 40 degrees, but I suspect that he would be in a sort of suspended animation for periods of time under cover somewhere  when freezing temperatures approach. I know darn well he and his kind do not migrate.  I tried walking to Arkansas once and gave up after the first ten miles.

       I  wish I  could help that  road-runner with a feeding station of some kind, or just see him more often.  A more fascinating bird I have never seen anywhere. 

 

       One last thing… deer hunters beware.  If you kill a big-antlered buck, DO NOT take a game warden,  who shows up later, anywhere you hunt. He will suddenly appear at your home, wanting you to take him and  show him where you killed your deer and cleaned it.  He’ll mysteriously find corn there or in the deer’s stomach (which  comes from his pocket) and therefore charge you and confiscate your antlers, which likely are worth a good deal of money.

       Not all conservation officers are crooked enough to do  that, but some are.  Don’t be their victim!  Any time and agent shows up WITHOUT A WARRANT, tell them to leave and close the door. They have no right to your cooperation without a legal warrant, and if they get your antlers you will never see them again.. EVEN IF YOU GET A LAWYER AND ARE FOUND INNOCENT OF THE CHARGE!.

       One agent in Stone County has a shed full of antlers he calls his ‘Retirement Account.’ Almost none were legally obtained! Don’t let them get yours.