A ‘Squirrel in a Bucket’ Story

 

In my dad's pool hall, the old timers occasionally referred to a tall tale as a 'possum in a bucket’ story. When my curiosity overflowed, I asked Ol' Bill where such a term came from. He told me that years ago one the old coon hunters had claimed he found a grown possum in a five-gallon gas can, with only the two or three inch nozzle at the top of the can open. The old coon hunter said he figured the possum had fallen through that small hole at the top of the can when it was a little baby and its mother had just been feeding it as it grew older. 

This column, therefore, could be 'squirrel in a bucket story'. It started when I was sitting on my back porch a few years ago and watched a mother gray squirrel carrying a very small baby squirrel from one tree to another when she dropped him. I would have thought the little fellow would have been killed by that fall, but he wasn't. I watched, thinking she would come back to get it, but she didn't. Finally I couldn't stand listening to the little fellow cry for his mama, and I knew he would soon attract a hawk or some other predator. So I went out and picked him up and told him everything would be okay. Looking around for a box to put him in, I could only find a minnow bucket sitting in my boat. I lined it with leaves and he liked it. We took him in and fed him from a bottle until he developed a liking for peanut butter and he grew into a fine young adolescent squirrel. We would lock him in the minnow bucket at night on the screened porch, so nothing could get him. 

Eventually we just set the bucket on the rail of our back deck next to the big white oak tree and he started hauling white oak leaves into it on his own to make himself a nice soft bed. 

I kept him safe by leaving the bucket out there where he could be free and well fed, and every night I closed the lid and every morning I opened it. He would come in the house at times and sit on my shoulder while I wrote, and become one of the gentlest, nicest little pet squirrels I ever had, and I have had a bunch of them over the years. 

I could bring the readers of this column to tears by saying that I went on a fishing trip to Canada and forgot to open the lid and when I got back he had shrunk up to the size of a weasel and didn't have the strength to crawl out of the bucket. I could go on about how I nursed him back to health with the aid of an old retired veterinarian who had become a hermit, and how he had one day met a girl squirrel and raised a family in that same bucket. 

But none of that happened. He must have been around here for a couple of years before he took off with a pack of migrating gray squirrels. I think he ended up in north Arkansas. 

Gray Squirrels are great pets. Fox squirrels are too, but they get cantankerous as they age and bite just a little, then run off to seek their fortune. I had a bunch of squirrels I raised from babies because Uncle Roy McNew would so often cut firewood in February and there'd be a litter of them in a hollow place high above the ground, which he hadn't seen. I don't want anyone thinking Uncle Roy would have intentionally cut down a den tree, it was always an accident 

My mom did let me have several wild pets, maybe three or four different crows. One of them, old Joe was the main attraction in a pet parade in Houston, MO. Mom and grandma made him a little vest and a hat and I tethered him to a roosting bar I could hold and Joe and I marched down main street with him cawing all the way. We won second place, and it was a crime. Some little girl and her ugly cat took first place, only because she was the mayor's niece!  You can never escape politics.

 

The promise I made to tell deer hunters about what the Missouri Department of Conservation is doing to charge and fine hunters with a technicality in order to illegally take and keep trophy deer antlers and capes was suppose to have been printed in my blogspot last week didn’t make it. I apologize for that but it is in there now. I hope you will read it, because what those agents are doing is a crime and I mean that literally! The site is ‘larrydablemontoutdoors’ on the Internet.

 

 

Column from 2008: In a Tree

 

I am writing this column from the deep woods, about 25 feet above the ground in a self-climbing tree stand attached to a big white oak. (It is early November 2008.) I am using a really nice manufactured surrounding-seat stand I bought many years ago on sale in the sporting goods section of a discount store with birthday money.  You can work it way up a branchless tree in a matter of minutes. 

I have had some enjoyable days in tree stands like this one, and have seen some really unusual things, and a killed lot of deer this way. Someday I might be able to write a pretty good book on what I have observed and experienced in a tree stand. Once about 20 years ago, I ran one of these self-climbing tree stands up a big oak and the sound of the metal scraping against the tree caused a buck to come running toward me thinking he was hearing another buck scraping his antlers against a tree, and he came to within 40 yards, his ears all perked up and his tail twitching, snorting just a little.  He was a nice eight-pointer, and obviously not the smartest buck in the woods. But I never worry about whether I get a deer or not. I usually do, but not a trophy. I don’t hunt for trophies.   I feel a little sorry for those who do. Some of them are my friends and we argue a lot about how nuts they are for doing    that.

I can’t fall out of this type of tree stand and that simplifies life somewhat.  When I was younger I fell out of one that I built once.  I have built a bunch of them. Without that worry, here there is a freedom which can be felt, but not easily expressed, especially with a cold pen and a half-sized notebook.  Everyone wants this freedom of the soul that I so often find alone in the woods or on the river. But it doesn’t go well with making a living unless you like venison as much as beef and chicken. Out here in the woods I quite often thank God for so many blessings I never had a regular job and I feel a little bit like an Osprey that sits in a dead tree watching the lake for a fish. Like him I don’t know what is happening elsewhere in the world nor what is in my bank account, nor do I care. Honest!

I lost my train of thought there for a moment.  A button buck just walked by about thirty yards away.  He would have been awfully tender and tasty, but there wouldn’t have been much of him to eat.  I don’t know if you have thought about this, but even though the loin of a mature buck makes about three times more steak than that of a button buck, it is about half as good to eat.  Even up here in this tree, there are some pretty weighty decisions to be made at times.  It isn’t for everybody… you have to be fairly quick witted.

What I really would like is a good two-year-old buck, with antlers enough so that I could lie about them just a little bit in the story-telling afterward, without having to feel really guilty and having to confess to anything later. I recall sitting in a self climbing tree-stand once during the peak of the rut with my bow when two very heavy-antlered bucks met not thirty yards from me, one going north and one going south. There was too much brush for a shot.  I thought to myself, “boy I am fixin’ to see one heck of a fight now!”  To my surprise they came together at a fence, touched noses and stuck them way up in the air.  Then one jumped the fence and they walked off away from me, heading east.  It was as if two old cousins came together and one said to the other, “let’s go eat some acorns and drink some stumpwater and chase women!” 

Most of this afternoon it has been overcast and just a few minutes ago the sun broke just below the clouds and just above the horizon.  It bathed the woods in an eerie sort of orange-glow with deep shadows, and now it is about to disappear. I hear some turkeys making putting and perking noises as they get up the nerve to try to make it up to that first big limb, a good place to spend the night.  It is soon going to be too dark to write and it is getting cooler. I don’t envy those turkeys, I don’t think I’d want to be up here all night, although I have been in tree stands pretty late at times, like that one time I couldn’t get the safety harness buckle to unlatch, and then that time Ol’ man Parker’s bull got loose.

Right now I think I will just run this thing down the tree and go to the house and build a fire. And see if I can write something while at my desk, while warmer.

 

The Trophy

 

I was lucky enough to get a photo of this 10-point buck while I was hunting with a camera instead of a gun.

            He was easily the biggest buck I have ever seen in    the Ozarks if you are talking about antler size.  And there he was filling up the scope of my rifle at 45 yards, broadside and stone-still.  I watched him for more than a minute, until he turned and walked back into the woodlands.  I didn’t fire because less than thirty seconds before he walked out into the open, I had dropped a smaller buck at the edge of a small   pond. I was looking over from my tree stand at a waterhole deep in the woods. It was getting a lot of attention from deer during that dry year, probably 25 years ago.

       I remember him well, a gray-muzzled old guy with thick-beamed, high spreading antlers, perhaps with several more tines than ten.  I don’t know what the Boone and Crockett measurement numbers would have been; I have never gone in for that kind of thing.  He was actually no larger in body than the buck I had just killed. That deer was a young one, and fat.  What I wanted wasn’t more antlers but some good loin steaks, a smoked ham, ground venison to combine with pork to make summer sausage and chili, and maybe some good jerky for the rest of the winter.  I had that in the seven-pointer that had dropped in his tracks.  

       Who knows what happened to that big-antlered rascal. I only wish I had been able to get his photograph, because I would rather get pictures of live big bucks than dead ones.  Especially now, and it has been that way for four or five years.  I will hunt keep hunting deer… but likely never again with a rifle or bow, as I have done for five decades.  I shoot lots of wildlife now, with my camera.

       Oh yes, I have seen some monstrous record-book wild bucks, but they were in Manitoba, Canada, where deer live in the bush country to the north of the great flat croplands there where I once went to hunt ducks and geese. I saw deer there that were 60 to 80 pounds larger than any I have ever seen in the Ozarks, or even Iowa or Nebraska.  I found a shed antler there once while hunting snipe, that I could scarcely believe. It had 6-points with a beam like a hickory fence post.

 

       I have many good friends and even relatives that are trophy hunters and they would give anything to hunt deer like that, but to go there and do it you would have to have permission to hunt private land and the trip and tags will cost you a fortune. I could have done it but I was so into waterfowl and goose hunting that it was all I wanted to do when I was up there.

 

       I have seen monstrous antlers on deer in the south too. There are oodles of them in deer farms where people raise them from little tame and bottle-fed fawns to be slaughtered via rifle, much as you would do a hog or steer.  Some of those bucks bring tens of thousands of dollars.  The biggest of them are raised in Texas on hundreds of deer farms, by people who have made a fortune because of it. It comes down, I guess, to what you want to do with your life. And it is the deer farms that created Chronic Wasting Disease by feeding deer animal by-products, although some I have interviewed say they don’t do that. 

        I talked once to a man by the name of Larry Bade who worked on a deer farm in the Ozarks who told me it bothered him to bottle feed a little fawn and watch it be turned loose in a killing zone four years later to be shot by some millionaire’s kid from a tree stand overlooking a corn zone emptied only a day before they arrived. 

       “Those who kill the deer seldom eat them anyway,” he told me,  “some are just thrown away in hot weather or the MDC takes the meat and it is put into a program they call ‘share the harvest’.  The people who eat that meat have no idea how many chemicals I have injected into those nearly tame bucks, with bottles that clearly say, ‘not for human consumption’.”  Bade quit the job because of that.

       All around the Ozarks this deer season there will be hunters going after bucks with big antlers! Me too I hope… with my camera. If you are a deer hunter you need to read some articles I am putting on a website this week.  They concern the Mo. Dept. of Conservation and cannot be printed in the news media. Go to my blogspot larrydablemontoutdoors, and read about those things that can save you from fines you do not deserve, and keep you from losing deer antlers and even firearms to MDC agents.

October Mountains, --16 Years Ago

 

       My camera couldn’t capture it and my words can’t describe it.  The Rocky Mountains of Colorado in mid-October...I saw it close up and will never forget it.  All the while, during the three days we were camping and working back up into the high country where the elk are found, I thought about the mountain men from 175 years ago who first saw it, and why they couldn't ever go back to a regular life.  I never thought I'd return to a regular life either.  Heck, I never thought I'd survive the trip! 

    Somehow on the opening morning of the elk season, I found myself sitting alongside the concealing branches of a huge Douglas fir, peering uphill into a thinner-than-normal group of good-sized yellow-leafed aspen trees.   I was watching elk come and go, only 30 or 40 yards away.  First there was a cow and two calves, then there were two big cows and a young spike bull.  Then there were seven or eight cows crossing the opening behind me, then four or five more.  I was in cow heaven.  

    But you can bet that during the prime of mating season, there's a bull or two around that many cows. And there were several, but one in particular I heard him bugling a half dozen times in the first hour, sending a high-pitched bellowing note out across the aspen grove from a ridge-top well hidden high above me in thick scrub oak. 

        Seven more cows came down the hill before me, and in the midst of them there was a set of tall antlers.  But I couldn't get a good look at them, and you have to have four points on one antler before a bull elk is legal.  I wouldn't take a chance, but oh was he a magnificent creature.  A young bull, he was a deep chocolate brown.  And then, high above them, coming out of the scrub oak, was the big bull, last in line behind them all, with heavy antlers and a deep tan coat and dark mane.  I watched him come down the ridge toward me 200 yards away, and into the swag below the high mountain beyond.  

        I didn’t move a hair.  Holy mackerel, it was exciting.  Before me was an entire herd.  I kept waiting, and the big bull ambled toward me, down the ridge, stopping to bugle again.  Then he turned to follow the cows, across the grove of aspens above me, about 75 yards away.  Finally, I knew it was the right time. I put my scope on him but I couldn't find a sure shot because of the aspens between us... and when I did, some of the cows caught sight of me, and began to trot down the hill through those black and white trees at a pretty good clip.  He came after them, moving way to fast.  But there he was, one of the most magnificent animals I have ever seen, a wild bull elk with a dark coat and spreading antlers.  He stopped up that slope a ways, and stuck his nose high in the air and bugled again, his sides heaving with the effort. My pulse went to 150!

I had only one opportunity, and that was a place between two widely spaced aspens.  When the cow in front of the bull moved through it, I set my scope on the opening, picked him up as he entered it, and squeezed the trigger.  A good-sized Douglas fir concealed the elk when he went down, but I was pretty sure of the shot.  I found him dead behind a big log, his antlers rising high above it.  He would have weighed nearly 700 pounds, a 3-and-1/2-year old stag with 5 by 5 antlers...what we'd call a ten-pointer here in the Ozarks.

      We knew there was a big storm moving in that night, so by two p.m. we had the horses loaded with meat and camping gear and we headed in about as serious as you can get about it.  Over much of the terrain, we had to lead the horses, and it was tough going. Even in descending from that 11,000-foot mountainside, there was a lot of climbing involved; it wasn't just a downhill trip. For the last hour I had watched the lightning bolts in the mountains to the north of us, and figured I'd get wetted down and lit up long before we got back.

       The snow began in the mountains that night and there would  be 6 or 8 inches on the ground by morning.  

        It would have been nice to stay another day or so in the glorious weather we had enjoyed the first three days. Half the time we were on elk trails way up in the places where you never see anyone else.  It would have been difficult to stay up there high in the mountains with that storm and the coming snow.

 

      I was thankful that I got to see the country where there are no other footprints or hoof prints.  But what a grand place it would be if there were just some Indians still there to live with, peaceful Indians with some really good looking squaws and warm teepees and a gas grill for the elk steaks.   To  be  continued.

              

Seventy-Nine Years Ago Today

 

BOLT ON POINT, WATCHING A COVEY OF QUAIL THAT WANDERED INTO OUR YARD

       This Sunday morning I am sitting on my back porch watching the birds and squirrels around the feeders.  It is so dry that the watering bowl has attracted six or seven species of birds and a couple of doves.  The big oaks around me aren’t changing colors yet.  Fifty years ago they would have been gold and red by now and a few leaves would be drifting down on the breeze.  The winter in the Ozarks will be fairly mild, I think, because the seasons are changing a little.  Climate change is no big deal; the earth has been doing that for eons.

   

    Just a few days ago we had some quail below the oaks and two days later fifteen young turkeys. There was a fawn born behind the pond this past spring that my daughter happened across. Now it comes through the back yard on occasion. From the tracks around the pond, deer, bobcats, raccoons, foxes, you name it, all water there. That’s why I built it… to provide water for those that need it on this high ridge top, filled with big oaks and hickories and walnuts and a dozen other species of trees.  When I leave this earth I wouldn’t mind a bit if heaven were much like this home and this ridge top overlooking the river valley.  I don’t mind if heaven is like where I live now, far from the towns, well sheltered from the crowds and a throwback scenario to a better life, when technology wasn’t bent on destroying all of us. and a time when folks were a little bit simpler and slower like me.

         I was born about sunrise this morning seventy-nine years ago today in a little farmhouse with board floors and no electricity or running water. This morning I sat there alone thanking God for these seventy nine years, and I never felt so good.  God let me have a great life as an outdoor writer-photographer and naturalist.  I wasn’t smart enough to be anything else. As the years pass, I just get more backwarder!  

       Mentally I still feel like I just turned thirty.  Only my aging back and legs keeps me from taking my camera and rod and reel and going out on the river for a while this evening.  I am patient though, my boat and paddle are waiting and that time is not far ahead as it gets cooler.  Thankfully, though walking very far is harder to do, sitting on my boat seat and paddling is as easy as ever.  About the first of November, at midweek, I will get to be alone on the river, just me and the Great Creator.

       This morning, my wife and daughters are in church, where my parents would be if they were here. They’d be put out with me for staying home. I doubt if I have any other family members who aren’t in church. But I feel as if am in church too, alone on my porch, just thankful and happy.  God is here with me if he is anywhere! 

       I have been to church!  I have heard too many preachers in the last seventy some years… hundreds of them. Many confuse me. When I was a kid, a couple of them came into the pool hall on occasion and tried to answer my questions about God and Jesus.  One of them finally told me, “Son, Sunday school is tomorrer…this mornin’ I came in to play snooker while my ol’ lady shops!”  One of the funniest exchanges took place when I tried to get one of them to tell me why you had to say Amen after you  prayed.  That story is in the book I am about to publish.  It is my bibliography… “The Life and Times of the Pool Hall Kid”.

       We had a good talk this morning… ‘me and God’.  I  let him know that I need no gold mansion or streets of gold, should St. Peter see fit to let me in.  He told me that He understood!  I said I would be real happy with woodland trails and clear cool rivers with high bluffs and sycamores and lots of fish.  I am a lot more like Peter the Fisherman than any of them other folks in the Bible.  

       I let him know that I would love to have all my family and friends there with me; with a garden and lots of wildflowers. I would really like a Labrador and an English setter and hundreds of birds, and wild creatures. How could heaven be without them. And though I love duck stroganoff, I said I would be content with wild mallards over decoys just to look at, not to shoot. 

       I’d like to be able to take folks out on nature trips and down the rivers like I use to do. I’d like to have fish fries on occasion and family reunions. I want to help folks better there than I could help folks here ‘cause I think I could do a better job of it.  I said I sure hope that in heaven we can eat things.  How could we not have banana cream pie and chocolate cake and ice cream and peaches and watermelon in heaven? And donuts? I can’t imagine not watching a thunderstorm roll across the valley or not hearing a gentle rain patter against the leaves at night. I reckon a little snow every now and then would be okay too.  Not a blizzard, just something you could track rabbits in.

       Well there you have it for what me and the Good Lord are talking about this morning, on my back porch, watching the birds.  And of course I’ve been thanking him for these past seventy-nine years. Boy did they go by fast!

BACK PORCH ON LIGHTNIN' RIDGE

To the Commissioners of the Missouri Department of Conservation…

 

To the Commissioners of the Missouri Department of Conservation…

 

         I am sure most of you folks don’t know who I am, but my name is Larry Dablemont and I am and have been a full-time outdoor writer from the Ozarks of southern Missouri all my life.  My first outdoor newspaper articles began when I was 17 years old in 1965.  I have spent much of my life writing about conservation issues and have been awarded a Conservation Communicator Award in two states.  I have a wildlife management degree from the University of Missouri.  Once upon a time I wrote articles for the Conservationist magazine, and Outdoor Life, Field and Stream and Sports Afield magazines.  I have also written conservation articles for a dozen or so other national outdoor magazines as well.  At present I write a weekly outdoor column for about 40 newspapers in Missouri, Arkansas and Kansas.  You can see most of them on the Internet under larrydablemontoutdoors   I have published 12 books and published more than 100 of my own magazines which you can see on website on  my website…larrydablemont.com.  I have written more than 700 magazine articles and more than 6,000 newspaper columns for more than 200 newspapers and I am not done!  I am telling you this because I want you to know my writing is not a sideline it is my profession.

         I am writing you because for many, many years I have watched the MDC become one of the most corrupt agencies imaginable. Some of what I have investigated and can prove goes beyond belief!  Please read pages 86 through 89 in my enclosed magazine.  I have done the research to back up what I write and next year I will publish a book entitled, “The Truth About the Missouri Department of Conservation”.  In it I will tell what I have seen happening with the MDC and a large percentage of your employees, especially the conservation agents.  I suspect it will amount to photos and text including more than 300 pages and will be distributed free of charge all over this state.  

         If you would like I will meet with you at any scheduled meeting or individually and inform you as to what is happening in this agency that you have no idea of.  In that book I will print any responses your agency might have to the charges I am going to make, so it is not going to be a one-sided view of things.  But I will print the letters too, from dozens of people whose truthful complaints have gone unheeded.  If you folks have any interest in what is right and what is wrong in your agency, you need to know what is going on. And believe me, YOU DO NOT!  

         If the 1/8 cent tax so many of us worked to get passed years ago were to come to a vote now, the rural people I know and hear from would vote 80 percent against it, and I would work to see it repealed. For many years I was a writer who wrote hundreds of articles supporting the old Missouri Conservation Commission and then the new MDC for many years after.  It is time things change, time things are done to reverse the corruption and law breaking and violation of rights that I have seen.  The department policies your agency is supposed to stand behind are becoming meaningless to a large number of your employees.  I hope you will hear me because thousands and thousands of Missourians soon will.  I would hope to work with you if you are genuinely concerned.

 

Larry Dablemont, 

Publisher -- The Lightnin’ Ridge Outdoor Journal

 

Advice on having deer mounted and Back Yard Turkeys

         If you are indeed a deer hunter you need to know this… I talked to a taxidermist recently who asked me to pass along something to deer hunters who kill big deer and want to have the head mounted.  He said to tell them to be sure when they call in their kill to get the required measurements accurate when they are asked for the size of the beam, points, etc.  He says that a woman agent has been coming into his shop the last year or so, looking at deer heads and comparing each set of antlers to what was actually called in, to see if it matches that. So I called some other taxidermists to see if it is happening in their shop and they said it does, several times each deer season.  

         They feel that if they are not paid in advance for all incoming deer heads they may lose the mounted head without being paid. The taxidermist who called me says the agent is looking for any discrepancies and can confiscate the deer head and write a citation if she feels there is any significant difference.   He says that sometimes a hunter loses his deer head on a technicality and there isn’t a thing he can do about.

          Even if you do not intend to have your deer head mounted, if you call in a very large set of antlers conservation agents may show up on your doorstep in an attempt to charge you with something and take the antlers.  You can read about a recent case like that where a 17-year-old boy lost a big set of antlers to an agent who actually entered his home illegally, without the necessary search warrant.  The story is on my website larrydablemontoutdoors   On that website you can also read two separate letters I have written to the director of the Department of Conservation and to each of the four commissioners.  I think you would be interested in those letters.

Our fall magazine was sent out in early September.  If you ordered one and didn’t get yours, send me an email at lightninridge47@gmail.com

 

 

 

This past week as the weather cooled and the acorns pelted my rooftop, a covey of 15 or 20 quail fed around in my back yard for much of an afternoon.  The big oaks are producing a lot of acorns and there is also a lot of grain dropped on the ground from our bird feeders.  I sat on my back porch and watched them for quite some time and it made me happy to see there were more in this October covey than in past fall seasons.  

         Then a day or so later there were 15 young turkeys, fully grown now, feeding across that back yard for most of an hour. They love those acorns and a few grasshoppers here and there.  In the past ten years the largest flocks of poults I have seen up here on this wooded ridgetop numbered no more than a half dozen and often times only three or four.   Where I once fed seven big gobblers at a corn feeder there have been none now for years. 

         Wild turkey numbers in much of the Ozarks are down forty to fifty percent of what they were fifteen or twenty years back and don’t believe the baloney about changing habitat being the reason. On lands where the habitat is the same or improving turkey numbers have gone down for years. I think some of that is an increase in predation but the most of it is in the liberal seasons, the youth season and many more hunters than there has ever been. One landowner I talked to this summer said he is seeing flocks increase because he stopped all turkey hunting, spring and fall, three years ago.  

         I never enjoyed a month more than October because I always spent so much of it outdoors hunting wild turkeys.  Back years ago there were so many gobblers and broods that I loved hunting them.  Sometimes I would spend a day on a river in the Ozarks and hunt turkeys on a float-fishing trip. October is one of the best months to fish for bass with a topwater lure and late in the evenings turkey flocks would show up on the bottomland side of the river to feed just before flying across to the bluff side to roost.  Late October evenings were wonderful times to hunt turkeys but I never will shoot another except with a camera. Knowing the diminishing numbers of gobblers, if you do decide to hunt them this fall, let the older gobblers go and pick out a young turkey, preferably a young hen, to eat.   But better yet, leave the wild turkeys alone and go fishing, or sit in a tree stand in the month of October with a bow, hunting deer.