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.

  

WATER

 

         A few years back I bought a good-sized place in rural St. Clair county with a big house and two cabins on it, intending to make a retreat for small churches that had a youth group but didn’t have the money to send them to a church camp. It was all free, no one who ever came there had to pay a cent for anything. In those years I estimate we had more than 500 kids visit us.  

         It was a historic place because on our property there was an historic old iron bridge that some said was made in 1892. Nearby was a huge spring full of watercress that flowed hundreds of gallons of water into the creek. Local folks therefore called it Green Springs.  Author Lowell Myers was a neighbor and an accomplished Ozark writer who passed away a few years back. Mr. Myers was born during the 1920’s and I talked to him often about the history of that area in the very southern part of St.Clair county.  You can find his name and books on the Internet and I highly recommend them.

         He told me that he was a boy during the great depression and the drought that came with it in the 1930’s.  He said that many wells went dry during that time and people would come to Green Springs in old trucks and horse-drawn wagons to fill up buckets and barrels with the spring water. But he said that even during the 1930’s drought there was more water flowing from the spring than there was when I talked with him ten years ago.

         That receding water is something that bothered my grandfather, an old-time riverman who spent his whole life on the Big Piney and Gasconade.  He could not understand why so many small springs that were flowing full in his boyhood had gone completely dry in the 1960’s. My dad, back in the 70’s and 80’s often commented that the Little Piney and Big Piney rivers were not carrying near as much water in the summer as he had seen when he was younger, before I was born.  He was perplexed that so many shoals were shallower than he ever saw them and we had to drag our johnboat over them.

         The Buffalo is drastically lower in the summer now than it was when I was working there as a park naturalist from 1971 to 1976. Only older folks could have commented on what they saw in our streams 70 or 80 years ago but I think all the young kayakers and canoeists of today will say, as they grow old, that they too remember a time when the rivers had so much more water.

         On the land I turned into a youth retreat several years back the previous owner had drilled a well for one of the cabins that ended up being a dry hole until they got down about 500 feet and then it turned into an artesian well, with dozens of gallons a minute flowing up out of the casing like a water fountain.  The owner from that time told me he had sent samples of the water to Jefferson City and was told that the water was pure enough to bottle and sell.  It gushed cold clear water and yes it had a definite pleasant taste. This summer that artesian well was dried up after flowing for fifteen years!

          I have never bought a bottle of water but I have tasted some that was given to me and I cannot understand how anyone would buy it.  It tastes awful!  But the people who drink it don’t know that because it is all they drink.  Here on Lightnin’ Ridge where I live there is a 500 foot well and if you could taste water from that well and compare it to what is purchased off a store shelf you would see what I mean.  A time will come, I think, that it will dry up.  In the Ozarks, many shallower wells already have.

         Running around on the Big Piney in the early fifties with my grandpa, we both drank from small streams and springs and even from the river itself.  Taking water on a float trip was not done, it seemed a silly idea.  But grandpa told me that there would be a time folks would be paying for a bottle of water just like we paid for a bottle of soda back then. He was very bipolar, something no one knew about then, and when he was down he told me many things that were coming that have indeed happened.  I have included my grandfather’s fears in my book that will come out in the spring--- The Life and Times of the Pool Hall Kid. It is unbelievable what he knew would come to pass long after he was gone.

         Grandpa’s prediction concerning what we refer to as “Nine-Eleven” was accurate, and what he said about the future of nuclear weapons and what he called the ‘Japanese atom bombs’ meant nothing to me then, but it scares the heck out of me now.  And one of his predictions was that water in the oceans was all we would have left someday, and men would have to learn how to fix it so they can drink it.  I don’t know about that but I am sure of this… I will never buy a bottle of water!

Letter to the Director of MDC

 

From Larry Dablemont

 

To Mr. Jason Sumner,  

Director-Missouri Department of Conservation

 

         Last October a 17-year-old boy by the name of Ray DeAngelo was bow hunting when he shot a buck with huge 17-point antlers.  He started trailing the deer with his father Joe and didn’t find it until late that night. He couldn’t use his phone because he had no signal there deep in the woods.   So it was about 10:30 when he called it in and if it had been a small buck I believe he would have never been bothered.          But it wasn’t, it had many points on big antlers that were valuable, and that attracted the local game warden, Clare Burch.  She showed up about midnight at their home and walked into their workshop with no search warrant, and without permission, where they had been cleaning the deer and had put the meat in a small freezer. 

         Again, without a search warrant she opened the freezer, and took all the meat and then took the head and antlers.  She justified the confiscation because she said the law requires a deer hunter to call in a kill by 10 p.m. and he was a half hour late. There is much more to this story, regarding the extreme behavior of the agent, who should be fired because she violated search and seizure laws and policies of your own department.  But in talking to people in your department who know her I have been told that she sold Ray DeAngelo’s deer head and antlers for her own profit.  

         I believe that within a period of time I can prove this happened.  If I am wrong, just tell me where the head and antlers are now and I will apologize in my newspaper column and magazine for misjudging your agent and calling her a thief.   I have talked to your chief of enforcement several times about this. He has said he will not longer discuss because we can all find out what happened to that deer meat and antlers by getting on the Internet.  That is not true… nothing on the Internet tells where that deer went after Agent Burch took it.

         I know you are likely not familiar with what your agents do, few people are.  MDC money keeps everything your department does out of the television, radio and newspapers of this state.  I have proof of that also from several people in the news media. You have told me you are not concerned with the past accounts I have told you about, but I have seen first hand what they do to many innocent people in the Ozarks and have written about it.      

         I know your department controls the thinking of city people by keeping the truth from them, but the people who live in rural areas do not have a high opinion of the MDC.  The answer they all give me is, “They only care about money, not people and not fish and wildlife!”

         I have had four different agents come to my home trying to discredit me and what I write. One, who was a supervisor, was insistent I had killed an illegal deer and he stood on my porch and used God’s name in vain, calling me a “G__damned liar.”   He was mad because one of my newspaper columns had revealed something I saw him do that he didn’t want done.

         Next year I hope to finish a book which describes what they have done to innocent people in our state over the past 20 years and the declines in fish and wildlife and resources in that time. It will include what retiring MDC have told me.  One of them resigned because he was told to lie in court to help nail a man his supervisor had a personal grudge against. 

          All of this happens because no agent has to worry about being accountable for what he or she has done. No one can get justice after being falsely accused and what is happening cannot even be told to the public except through what I write.  I am asking for some agent accountability, and it should start with the firing of agent Burch.  I will be glad to publish her answer or your answer to this.

         Everyone, including you, knows that the deer antlers that were a once-in-a lifetime trophy for a 17-year- old kid, put money in an MDC employee’s pocket and this is not the first time it has happened.  I have proof that other agents have done this, and we will start putting those incidents in future issues of this magazine.  The same thing has happened many times and will happen again soon as the huge bearskin taken two years ago by a 13-year-old boy, which I have been told is now in an MDC freezer, will be sold or given to Bass Pro Shops.  If I am wrong about the bear-skin or the deer head, I will print an apology in this magazine and in my newspaper columns.  I await your written response.  Where are those antlers now?  I want to be shown, not told.

 

Mrs. Kelly And Me

 

Mrs. Kelly had one of grandpa's wooden johnboats chained to a tree 

 

     Myrtle Kelly lived in a little farmhouse about six miles west of town on the best stretch of the Big Piney River. She and her husband Fred had been long-time friends of my grandmother and grandfather. They would fish together for catfish on the river, and play cards together. Grandpa made a johnboat for them every few years and sassafras paddles. They were needed for fishing the Ginseng Eddy and Sweet ‘Tater Eddy and the Peaked Rock hole, all close to Mrs. Kelly’s farmhouse. 

       She had her share of heartaches. She lost her son, a fighter pilot, in World War Two and her husband passed away in the mid 1950’s when he was only about 60 or so. You might understand why, when I knew her, Mrs. Kelly was lonely and cranky and sour at times.
       I showed up at her little farmhouse often to use the johnboat she had locked to a tree down at the river. I would ride my bicycle from home down that gravel road which ended at her place, with my Shakespeare fiberglass rod and Pflueger reel tied to the handlebars. Behind her barn I could dig night-crawlers with her pitchfork or acquire some minnows down in the river with one of those old glass minnow traps that are valuable antiques today. Well come to think of it, everything I had to fish with then is an antique of some value now. Today I have several of those sassafras paddles grandpa had made for her in the 1930’s. She wanted to be sure I had them.

       Mrs. Kelly told me one day that she was tired of working and decided she would go fishing with me. Cynical and cranky as always, she was the boss in the boat, telling me just where she wanted to fish. If there was one thing I was good at it was handling a johnboat, so she never had to pick up a paddle. She started to enjoy the fishing so much she went with me most every time I showed up. 

       We would go up and down the river and
tie up to a log or root wad here and there, hauling in stringers of black perch, goggle-eye and smallmouth. Every now and then one of us would hook a hefty largemouth, Mrs. Kelly’s favorite fish. She told me there was a big brownie that had been caught several times but never landed. She called him Old Fighter and mentioned him often when we sat in my johnboat, fishing the dark water shaded by the high west ridge. 

       When I was 13 or 14, my grandfather and I caught him on a trotline one dark night in the Peaked Rock Eddy and I released him at grandpa’s urging. I wrote a story about that and it was published in Outdoor Life magazine in 1974. 

       Mrs. Kelly admired my grandfather but she said that while he was one of the smartest and most talented men she had ever known, he was the most obstinate man there ever was on the Piney. Every now and then she would get a little perturbed by my actions and would shake her head and declare that I was going to be just like him. But every now and then I would say or do something to make her smile and she would turn her head to make sure I couldn’t see it. 

       Once when we were walking up the steep path from the river, I insisted on carrying the string of fish. I was starting to develop some pretty good shoulders and arms from paddling johnboats, and strong legs from peddling that bicycle. Inside the barn I started to show her some new way to clean fish and I saw the tears stream down her weathered cheeks. Then she told me that I made her think of her son when he was a young boy. 

       Just out of high school at the age of 17, I started to college at School of the Ozarks down near Branson.  It was a year-long school but I would come home often on weekends to work in the hayfields, and I would usually find time to visit Mrs. Kelly. I brought her some Taneycomo trout several times that summer and we found time to go fishing on occasion. I could see her growing older and sadder and even more cranky. 

       “That little boy who paddled me up and down the river has grown up,” she said one evening. “And I didn’t change you a bit. You are going to be Fred Dablemont’s grandson for good. Just like him I’m afraid!” 

        It wasn’t too long after that, she peacefully passed away. It was weeks before I knew it. I know that her son and husband was waiting. And I am sure she isn’t cranky any longer. I am anxious to see her, someday.  Maybe there’s a river like the Piney where she and I and my grandfather can go fishing again in a wooden johnboat. After Ol’ Fighter!