Squirrels..Part 2

 

Squirrel in our bluebird house

         When I was a boy we had a fellow back home in the hills that had two big teeth that stuck out in front. His big front teeth didn’t bother him much as he did just fine with the local ladies on account of his outgoing personality and gentle ways offset the fact that he was a little on the homely side. The fellows at the pool hall said they thought he developed those front teeth from eating so many squirrels when he was a kid.  

         That scared me a little because I figured no one ate more squirrels than I did.  I’d tie my shotgun to the handlebars of my bicycle and head for the Tweed Bottoms on the Piney every chance I got, to hunt squirrels. And Dad and I would float the river and shoot a limit of squirrels about every time we hunted ducks.

         It had been that way for most of the country folks well back before I was born.  There were no deer or turkey in the thirties and forties, when my dad was a kid.  They survived on what was plentiful, rabbits and quail, fish and bullfrogs, and squirrels.

         You can read about squirrels from Byron Dalrymple’s book, “North American Game Animals”.   Dalrymple was an old-time outdoor writer who no doubt was a true outdoorsman like me.  In his book, he passes on this fascinating information about squirrels….

………. “In the mid 1700’s crop damage from squirrels in Pennsylvania was so severe that a three-pence bounty was instigated for each scalp that had two ears.  The human population was small there, but 600,000 squirrel scalps were turned in over a short time.  In the early 1800’s every white male in Ohio was required to pay an annual tax of three dollars—a substantial sum in those days—or turn in 100 squirrel scalps per year in place of the money.”

         I had a friend once who hunted squirrels for money.  Well, of course he ate them too, and claimed much of his outstanding health was due to eating so many squirrels over the years.  But he also sent all the tails to the Mepps lure company in Wisconsin which paid from 15 to 20 cents for each tail, using them in the making of some of their flies and fishing lures back then.  Those tails paid for his ammunition. 

    

Baby in a bucket

     Over the years, this writer has had too many pet squirrels to count.  Many young squirrels are born in February, when country people were still cutting firewood, so my cousins and I made pets out of fox and gray squirrels both which were easy to bottle feed and raise. The grays made outstanding pets; the fox squirrels get a little grouchy, particularly the males, as they mature. Here on Lightnin’ Ridge I have had several pet gray squirrels. One lived in a minnow bucket on my back porch for much of a year.

         In the pool hall when I was a kid, I heard Ol’ Bill Stalder say once that he could tell if a man grew up poor or not.  If he had, Bill told me, he knew how to skin a squirrel. Otherwise he likely had grown up rich and wasn’t worth much. There are two good ways to skin a squirrel of course, and if you are a country kid who grew up hunting with your dad or grandfather, you know how to do it both ways.  So there isn’t any use in me telling you how to do either one here, because I never knew anyone who didn’t know how to skin a squirrel who cared to learn.

         I often see fox squirrels especially, in the middle of a paved road, chewing on the road. I can’t figure out why they do that, because it gets so many of them harvested by car tires.  I am assuming they are attracted to the salt or something like it, in the pavement, but I am not sure.  One thing about them, since they are a rodent, their teeth grow all the time, and they must wear them down by gnawing on nuts, and on deer antlers and bone.  The teeth grow in a circle and I once saw a squirrel which had one tooth growing so crooked he couldn’t wear it down by normal gnawing, that is, gnawing normally like a nut-gnawer normally would.  It had grown in a circle and back into his skull just beneath his eye, and that killed him.  That’s kind of an awful thing to imagine.  If I had been him, before those teeth penetrated my skull I would have run out in front of a farm truck or went and thumbed my nose at a fox.  I think assisted suicide is okay in the animal world!         

          

          

Squirrels

 

         Today I love to watch both gray and fox squirrels from my porch, and there is one tree just a ways from my office where baby gray squirrels are born every year.  They emerge from the hole in the early spring and are so small they look a little like chipmunks.  They venture forth, and at the slightest movement of a bird or another squirrel nearby, they dash back into their nursery as fast as they can go scared to death of the big world they are just becoming aware of.  

         In late summer I often watch both species cut leaves and build sunning nests high in the forked limbs of oaks and hickories, where they may nap and rest in midday heat.  It takes me back to those days as a boy, hunting squirrels with a seriousness I just can’t muster now.  And squirrel hunting not only taught me so much about the outdoors, it provided memories in abundance, like the time I was walking slowly through the woods hunting and a fox squirrel fell out of a limb right above me, brushing my shoulder and hitting the ground with a thud.  

         He must have been watching me from a limb above and lost his balance.  No squirrel ever retreated any faster, but he was a goner if I had squeezed the trigger on my little single-shot 16-gauge Iver Johnson.  I didn’t, because Dad had told me that when you shoot a squirrel running away from you, you fill the back legs with shot and ruin the meat. Besides that, he was going to fast for my ability with a shotgun, and I didn’t want to waste an eight-cent shell.  I have seen many squirrels fall, from limbs or electric lines, but I never seen one killed by a fall.

         Of all the mammals I am aware of in the Ozarks, and birds too for that matter, the squirrel is the only one I know of that both hibernates and migrates.  Think about that!  In the fall, or even late summer or early winter, when food supplies dwindle as they do in years of poor mast (nuts and acorns) you can actually see a migration of squirrels for perhaps as much as twenty or thirty miles.  In the early 1980’s I saw thousands of squirrels swimming across Bull Shoals Lake over a period of two or three days, from the northern shores to the south, and from the western shores to the east.  Hundreds of them drowned.  

  
 

      Several rodent diseases affect them, but their biggest enemy is likely birds of prey.  Fox squirrels get into a den or nest fairly early in the evening but gray squirrels will be seen roaming around and active when it is getting so dark you can barely see the sights on your gun.  So grays are a favorite prey of great horned owls, maybe only second in an owl’s preference to skunks, which owls love to eat.   

         I will end with the story of a young girl who grew up in the city and married a young man who was so much a hillbilly that he ate squirrels like chickens eat June-Bugs… with enthusiasm.  They had only been married a couple of weeks when he presented her with two nice young fox squirrels, cleaned and ready to cook. He told her how much he’d like to have some squirrel and dumplin’s like his mother made.  Having a mother who had been a country girl herself, this new bride called home to find out what a dumplin’ was and how to make it.

         Her mother went through the whole rigamarole of how to mix the ingredients and make it into a big dough ball, but somehow the conversation got distracted and the young wife never got the idea that the big ball of dough was to have little hunks of dumplings pinched off and flattened the way that old time cooks did it.

         That night the young outdoorsman, who looked a lot like me, noticed that while the squirrels were delicious, there was just one dumpling, a little bigger than a softball.  The young girl, who really looked a lot like my wife Gloria Jean, got all upset and cried because she would never be a good cook.  And she was right; she never was a really good cook, like my mother and grandmother.  But then again, I never was the squirrel hunter my grandpa was.

 

More about squirrels in next week’s column…

Crawdads for Fishin’ and Eatin’

 

 

     The crawdad, or crayfish, is an unusual creature, always looking back where he has been, and going where his isn’t looking.  Quite often where he has been appears quite safe and there looms a bass or walleye or catfish where he is going and he winds up not going as far as he thought he would. That’s why the crawdad, or crayfish is you prefer, spends most of his time under rocks. You may be standing in the knee-deep water of a small stream or good-sized creek and not see a crawdad anywhere while there are dozens of them around you. Turn over the rocks and they start scooting off backwards.

       I point this out because this is the time of year that bass fishing can be very good if you have a bucket of crawdads and a gentle wind. Drift a crawdad over a lake point in 15 or 20 feet of water…sometimes a little shallower and sometimes a little deeper, depending on the lake…and you may find out that summer bass are easy. Smallmouth and Kentucky bass are especially fond of crawdads, and they’ll take them any time of day. If you can stand the heat, you can catch bass on crawdads.

       There are things you have to know first. Maybe this is a type of fishing better suited to spinning gear than the traditional bait-casting outfits us big time bass-mastering, lunker-busting, hog-hustlers would ordinarily use, compete with 12 or 14 pound line. Crawdad fishing is finesse fishing, and I like 6 or 8 pound line with medium action spinning gear with a fairly solid rod. You’ve got to set a hook and put some pressure on a good bass from time to time. I don’t use a really large hook, a number one or even a number two hook will work, with a light split shot about two or three feet above the crawdad. You want to get the bait down there on the bottom, and move it. A still crawdad is usually a crawdad which gets under a rock and stays there, so if you aren’t drifting over the points, keep the crawdad moving a little.

       You hook the crawdad, or crayfish, through the middle of the tail, from the underside of course. And beware of those pincers, they work. Sometimes they can hurt a little, but not usually. If you are the kind of person who calls a crawdad a crawdad, you’ll never notice, but if you call them crayfish, let somebody else handle the crawdads!

       Everything eats crawdads, bullfrogs and coons and snakes and fish and wading birds and even humans. They are crustaceans, just like lobsters except different…the main difference being the size. But out in deep water in most of our Ozark rivers and lakes there are some big ones, and they can be caught in specially made crawdad traps baited with raw chicken necks or hot-dogs. And those crawdad tails are delicious. An old friend and fellow outdoor writer from Arkansas came up here a few years ago to fish all night with me on my pontoon boat, and be brought with him about 10 pounds of Louisiana crawdads. During the afternoon he set up a big pot out on my back deck underneath a big oak tree and boiled those crawdads with seasoning, whole potatoes, whole onions and whole roastin’-ears.

       When they were done, he drained all the water and put it all in a big plastic cooler, which in that case of course became a big plastic heater, and I ate so well that night I nearly forgot to fish. It has to be fairly simple to make crawdads delicious, because if you knew that guy you’d swear he couldn’t make a good baloney sandwich. Crawdads have to be boiled live, and if they aren’t curled when you peel the tail, don’t eat them. Straight-tailed crawdads aren’t good for you.

      I caught recently caught a nice bass late on the river one evening using an artificial crawdad and a Carolina rigging, fishing slowly out from a gravel bank which sloped off fairly rapidly. The big one, about 5 pounds, picked it up when I stopped it, and fought hard. He was in 10 or 12 feet of water I suppose, out 20 feet from the bank. If you don’t have live crawdads, they have some on the market now which look and feel so alive they will work nearly as good as real ones.

       In case you are wondering, a Carolina rig is swivel tied in, about 2 to 3 feet above your plastic lure, with a sliding bullet or barrel-type led weight of an eights to a quarter ounce in size above the swivel which won’t slide down past it, and never gets close to your lure. When a bass picks up the lure, he doesn’t feel the weight, because the line slides.

What I Learned From Rufous

 

                                                            Large Camouflaged copperhead

Rufous Still must have been in his late sixties or early seventies when I met him. I expect he was born around 1900 or just a few years later.   I was the head naturalist for the state park system in Arkansas, assigned the task of setting up interpretive nature programs in several of the state’s parks.  The best state park of them all was the one on the Buffalo River called Buffalo Point and Rufous worked there.  

He lived a few miles away and had spent his whole life in that beautiful Buffalo River country, and truthfully he was likely the most important person in that big state park because he could do about anything that required a little common sense and he was a treasure trove of information for me about the north Arkansas Ozarks and the creatures and the people who lived there.

Rufous and I had many long talks about the Ozarks and the Buffalo. One of the things he talked about was venomous snakes, and the problems they caused for mountain people who had no doctors within reach, no anti-venin. Rufous said that he remembered that death from snakebite was not unusual in his youth, that he remembered many people dying or becoming maimed by a lost hand or foot, or a limb that never functioned properly for the rest of a person’s life. 

Rufous said the worst time to be in the woods in Arkansas, if you were worried about timber rattlers, was September and October.  In years to come I found out he was right. I know how the book-trained naturalists tell you that if you will just not bother a venomous snake, you have nothing to worry about.  Rufous told me that most everyone he knew when he was young who were bitten by poisonous snakes were not making any effort to disturb them…  most just didn’t know they were there.  He recalled people going into their cellar being bitten by copperheads, small children playing barefoot around the old cabins where they lived, wood-cutters trying to get a store of firewood cut in late summer and country folks on their way to their privy on a late summer night.  He said he remembered a lady who lived alone being bitten in her old cabin by a copperhead that found a way to get under her bed.  

        He said that if you were bitten by a copperhead you certainly seemed to have a better chance than if you were bitten by a timber rattler or cottonmouth.  The best possible treatment back then was just what they tell you not to do today.  You took a very sharp knife just as soon as possible, cut into both fang marks and sucked out all the blood you could, knowing you had a chance to remove much of the venom if you did it in a hurry.   Rufous said there wasn’t a doubt in the world that worked on many occasions, but it had to be done quickly, not an hour later. He said people who had chickens would kill and cut open a chicken and try to wrap the opened carcass around the bite location, wrapping it with rags, tightly on the arm or leg.  It was also commonly though that you could draw out venom with rags soaked in coal oil and placed on the bite.
        When you hear self-proclaimed naturalists who have spent more time in a never fatal, they have no sense of history, and they just haven’t been ‘out there’ enough.  Our conservation department here in Missouri had a website and a printed pamphlet saying that no one in this state has ever died from a snakebite. A camper at Sam a. Baker State Park died from a copperhead bite three summers ago, and it may have been because he read that pamphlet and was just slow to get medical attention.   Common sense asks anyone, why should a copperhead in my lawn be protected by law, while no laws protect red wasps, brown recluse spiders, black widow spiders or scorpions?   On the first day of August, I killed a 28-inch copperhead in my garden, about 30 yards from my front porch.  Every year I kill a couple, up here on this wooded ridgetop where I live.  

I am a naturalist who grew up in the outdoors and then worked for a salary as an interpretive naturalist for more than a dozen years in two states.  Many, many times I came across venomous snakes out in the wilderness of Arkansas while working, studying wild areas for the State Heritage Commission. In those wilderness places, where they were no threat to humans I didn’t kill any of them. Those places were their natural habitat, and I wasn’t there to change anything, but instead to study and report what was there.  But when I and other naturalists were working on new trails for the State Park Department and we came across copperheads, cottonmouths, or rattlesnakes we dispatched of them because we didn’t have time to catch them and transfer them to some far away place, and they represented a very real threat to hikers who would use those trails.

Rufous and the old-time Ozarkians in his Buffalo River community had what the world lacks today… common sense.  And every time I hear someone remind people that it is illegal to kill any snake, and that they are not ever aggressive or dangerous, I wish I could tell them about the times I have seen just the opposite. I would like to have them on an Ozark river in August and show them the temperament of a cottonmouth. 

Remember that from mid-August into early October, all snakes, which are cold- blooded creatures, seek out warm places as cool nights come on.  In the dusk or dark, be careful on concrete or paved driveways, on gravel bars or rock ledges, where the warmth of a hot day is stored into the coolness of the night.  If you live in the country, as I do, don’t leave a basement door open.  Seeing a copperhead or cottonmouth first is your best defense, so be aware.  

Too Soon Old

 

Grandpa McNew and me - 1953

    My maternal grandparents, Bert and Hilda McNew, had a little farm out southeast of Houston, Mo a few miles. I was born in their old farmhouse. They were wonderful people whom I dearly loved.

    Scratching out a living with a few milk cows and chickens and a hog or two was a difficult thing in those days, so Grandma sold some eggs and milk and butter, tended a big garden and canned and sewed a lot. Grandpa did a little work on the side when he could find it. One of the things he did for a while was pick up trash from businesses along Main Street to haul to the city dump in his old faded 1940’s era red Chevy pickup. 

    When I was only five or six years old I would go with him on Saturday mornings, and it was a wonderful thing to go through that trash as he raked it from the bed of his old truck into the city trash dump three miles south of town. Grandma always wanted him to look for jars she could use for canning, and I would look for comic books and magazines. There were a bunch of them, and they always had the top few inches cut off of the cover. I guess the stores had to do that to prove they hadn’t sold them, and that’s the way I came across my first outdoor magazines, which fascinated me. 

    But one day I found a little oblong wooden plaque, obviously cut out of a small pine tree, with the phrase printed on it, “Ve get too soon old, and too late smart.”

    I clung to it like a valuable prize, and wrapped it up and gave it too my dad on Father’s Day. It was the first gift I ever gave anyone and I was tremendously proud of it. For a while Dad hung it in the kitchen, and it seemed everyone was amused by it. Dad said it was advice he could use.

    In time of course I forgot all about it, and recently, going through Mom and Dad’s photos and things after they had passed away, I came across so many old things I had forgotten. And there was that little plaque in the bottom of a box! 

    As I held it in my hands, it brought me back to that time long ago when I rode in town with Grandpa, looking so forward to driving down the alley with him, behind the Main Street businesses, to load up and haul off someone else’s refuse. And it was a time when I realized that someone’s trash could be someone else’s treasure.

    But the words of that old plaque had such an impact on me now… “Ve get too soon old and too late smart”. My gosh, there is so much truth in that. 

    I wish I could go back and do things differently. I wish I had gotten smart long before I got old. Well I’m still not all that smart! But one thing I remember well was the words from old Bill Stalder, who listened to me late one summer evening about July of 1950, going on about how I couldn’t wait until duck season came and I could hunt ducks on the Piney with Dad.

    “Don’t wish your life away, boy,” Ol’ Bill said with a sad and solemn look, remembering I am sure, his own youth. “It ain’t tomorrow that overtakes a man, it is the years beyond it.”

    He told me to enjoy each day, and use it to accomplish something. For a man with almost no education, it was wisdom way beyond my years. I learned, there in that pool hall my Dad and Grandpa McNew had acquired when I was only 10 years old, that there is a big difference in possessing intelligence and gaining wisdom. If only I could go back to my boyhood I would indeed grow too soon old, as I have done. But I would not grow too late smart.

 

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In closing, I can vaguely remember a time when I was a little boy on my grandparent’s farm, and my grandmother told me she once had a small container of prunes, which had become moldy! She said she threw them out the back door by an old revolving-blade lawn mower, the kind you had to power as you pushed it. A blue- jay landed on that mower handle and eyed those prunes and finally flew down to pick one up. He flew up on the lawn mower handle and struggled to eat it, but he finally got it down. Over an hour or so, he must have flown down to retrieve five or six of those moldy prunes, and ate every one. 

When they were finally gone, he sat there awhile and then finally tried to fly off to the adjacent apple orchard. He only made it a few yards, and then he fluttered to the ground and died. Grandma told me I should learn a lesson from that. “Don’t go flying off the handle,” she said, “when you are full of prunes!” 

I did a lot of that flying off the handle when I got older. Wish I’d have listened closer to my grandmother.  But, I got too late smart!

 

LIFE AND POETRY

 

         It dawned on me recently that the way to know if your life has been a success is by being able to hire someone to mow your lawn when you have become too old to do it yourself.  You cannot be a failure if you have a lawn to look at and a porch to sit on while you watch some neighborhood kid mow it for only ten dollars.  But you are a big-time success in life if you can talk him into mowing it for five.  

My dad never had much money because my mom had things to do with it before he got it, and he had to pay my sisters a quarter apiece each week just to be good.  It was hard even then, to make them be good for a quarter.  He never paid me anything, and bragged often to his friends that I was good for nothing.

 

It is awful when a poem-making compulsion plays over into your daily life. I myself have been into poetry since I learned to write and as I go through my daily life I make up short poems for the situation. I stopped in a café the other morning to have breakfast, and the poor lady waitress, who had the demeanor of a lady who had too many old timers telling her jokes that week, asked me what I wanted. I told her I wanted bacon and 3 eggs.  She asked how I wanted them cooked.  I told her I would like them even better that way!  She didn’t even smile so I added a poem in good humor,  “If my bacon is all floppy, it won’t make me very hoppy, and if my eggs are soft and runny, you won’t get any money.”  She just looked at me as if bored, and walked away with my order.  Later when I got ready to leave her a quarter for a tip, I asked her what she thought of my poetry. With a bored look on her face she answered in prose… “Men look really weird, when they have egg yolk in their beard!”         

 

Since I am from the Ozarks, and growing older a great deal quicker than I once did, I do not like to be told what to do by some machine.  I put my debit card in a gas pump the other day and it told me to remove it quickly.  Well I didn’t and I’ll be darned if I will do anything a machine tells me to.  I removed my card at my own pace until I couldn’t get the gas pump to give me any gas, so then I sped it up a little.  But every time I go there, I take my card out of my billfold really slow, and put it back my billfold real slow, hoping that machine is watching.

Actually I have lived all of my life without credit cards, but I have one now because the bank told me they would give me two and one-half percent interest on the money I have in a checking account, if I would take something they call a ‘debit card’ and use it only ten times in a month.  I got to figuring… if I maintain somewhere between 100 and 200 dollars a month in my checking account, which is what I have had on occasion when times are good, that interest comes to almost a dollar every couple of months.  It is hard to turn down a free dollar when you have grown up in the Ozarks.  

 

I am having that big “sell everything I have got” sale up here on Lightnin’ Ridge this fall. It was scheduled for September 26 but the heat worries me so I am rescheduling it for Saturday, October 24. If it rains I will have it a week later on October 31.  So mark that on your calendar.  If you want a list of everything that will be sold that day, let me know via email lightninridge47@gmail.com, or send me a mailing address. My address is P.O. Box 22, Bolivar, Mo 65613.  In a month or so I will post all that on my website, larrydablemontoutdoors.  Mostly it is boats and trailers and fishing and hunting gear and wildlife art and hundreds of antique outdoor magazines.  There is a lot of stuff I have used and accumulated over the years of my life that I have no one to leave it too. The real prize is some of my grandfather’s sassafras paddles he carved before I was born and a couple of his old guns. My age and health have convinced me I won’t be using much of it in the future, and I can’t take it with me when I leave to go float heaven’s rivers with my dad and uncle Norten.  I can imagine someone in the future saying, “This fishing lure is one used once by that outdoor writer, Larry Dablemont.”  And someone else saying, “Who the heck was he?”

 

Bullfrogs in the Snow

 

         Bullfrog season is open!  I might go down to my pond soon and grab a couple to eat. Usually, when you read a natural history account, it discusses the basic things you find in a nature book of some type, like when the bird or animal migrates or hibernates, how many young it has, and what it eats.  People who write such things often live in a town or city and get their information from a book someone else wrote long ago.  When  I was a kid I read where bullfrogs lay about five or six thousand eggs and I set out to see if that was correct.  I found a big bunch of frog eggs in a little backwater slough and began to count them, and I was up around four or five hundred when something distracted me, so I never did get a completed count.  I have decided to go with what the book says.  

         I can say for sure that tadpoles hatch from the eggs and begin, in time to sprout legs and slowly, throughout the course of the summer, become a small bullfrog.  The book says that in about two years, that little frog will be a full grown, eating-size bullfrog about 5 inches long.  It says that bullfrogs only get to be about 6- or 7-inches long, and I don't buy that at all.  I know I have caught some that were 8 or 9 inches long and 18 inches long with their legs stretched out.  

         Ol' Bill Stalder, down at the pool hall when I was a kid, said he had seen 'em 24- inches long when he was younger, and I can tell you that Ol' Bill knew more about river critters than whoever wrote those books.  You remember seeing that picture of the heron trying to swallow a bullfrog, and the bullfrog hanging out the big birds beak with it's front feet wrapped around the heron's neck trying to choke it to death...?  Well Ol' Bill actually seen something like that happen once.

Bullfrog eating a fish
       I know from studying bullfrogs on my own that they will eat about anything they can, and they eat both at night and during the daytime.  I never recall ever seeing one asleep; never saw one that wouldn't eat whenever the opportunity presented itself.   They really can unroll that tongue out there and nail an insect before them, and they can also swim up to a crawdad under water and eat it too.  I imagine they prefer crawdads to about anything when they can get them, but then, a pond bullfrog which has no crawdads in his pond has to settle for insects or small fish or small snakes.  A bullfrog is a little like some of my relatives on my mother's side, he will eat whatever he can get, whatever
comes along that looks capable of being swallowed.

         Bullfrogs usually fatten up and hibernate in the muck or mud somewhere, and that is to me one of the most amazing things when you think of it.  They just sense when it is time to burrow in somewhere and when spring comes along they wake up and get back to a normal life.  Think about that this Christmas when there's about a foot of snow on the ground.... down at the river, there are dozens of bullfrogs snoozing away in a foot or so of frozen mud, not breathing or eating, with about one heartbeat every three days.

         From my own experiences with bullfrogs, without consulting the books, they are very prolific, lead a fairly boring life, miss the whole winter sleeping but stay awake all summer, can jump the full length of a johnboat, eat almost everything that is smaller than they are and feed almost everything larger than they are including me. Their deep bellowing call adds a great deal to an Ozark river on a summer night.  It wouldn't be the same without them.

         I was watching one of those nature shows from the British Broadcasting channel and actually saw this or I wouldn’t believe it either. They showed big bullfrogs in the French Alps, which is where my ancestors came from, poking their heads up out of a snow bank in the spring, coming out of hibernation.  There were a dozen or so of them and they emerged to slide down a hillside of snow and into a small pool of freezing water.  They seemed to enjoy that slide over the snow.  Watching slick, wet bullfrogs sliding several hundred yards down a snow covered hillside was a jaw-dropping experience for a naturalist like me that thought he knew everything about bull-frogs.  Even Ol’ Bill Stalder wouldn’t have believed that.

 

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