Fishing is Like A Box of Chocolates

                                     

                        My daughter Lori Jean, who is a doctor at Missouri State University, is very alarmed about increasing numbers of tick diseases amongst her patients. She asks me to use a tick repellent on my boots and pants when I am outdoors.  That is something I have not often done, but the urgency in her voice concerning the Alpha-Gal syndrome spread by the Lone Star ticks makes me inclined to follow her advice. It makes one allergic to red meat and has caused deaths in the Ozarks.

            I have produced a 110-page summer magazine, which carries a two-page article about tick diseases written by Lori.  You need to read that article. I have about 100 of that magazine left to distribute.  To get one postpaid send seven dollars to Lightnin’ Ridge Magazine, Box 22, Bolivar, Mo 65613.  Or you can get one by calling my office, 417 777 5227.   The magazine has lots of great outdoor stories in it that I think you will enjoy.  But that article by my doctor-daughter will give you information you need to know about tick-borne diseases.

 

            Fishing is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you are going to get … and often you’d just as soon it was different than what you ended up with. That’s what happened to me this past week.  On a day that I figgered I would catch the farr out of ‘em--- I didn’t.  But I started out with great anticipation.  Casting nothing more than a twirly-tailed, yellow plastic jig with a lead head, I laid into a hard-fighting fish that arced my rod like he was a slab-sided, black-bellied, frog-eater.  He stayed deep and pulled like a roped goat!  I guess that’s what told me I didn’t have a bass.  A bass would come up and woller around on the surface a little, and maybe even jump clean out of the water.              

          This fish that had grabbed my little eighth-ounce jig just stayed down and pulled with determination…which led me to hope he just might be a walleye.  That was it, I told myself as I let him pull line against the drag of my spinning reel... I had a big walleye, likely 6 or 7 pounds.  In the depths beneath my boat I saw it finally, a white and pink- sided lunker, far different in color than what a gold-sided walleye would be.  I fought that fish for a good five or six minutes.  He was almost two feet long and too big to lift over the side of the boat with six-pound line, so I netted him and let it flop around for a moment as I cast aspersions upon her!  She was a doggone egg-filled drum!!!  But for an angler who   is only interested in fighting a big fish, a six or seven pound drum is not too great a problem.

            I can only add to this story that I was mostly trying to catch some white bass and never saw a one for the next two hours.  But the story is not over.  Two hours later I hooked another big drum, a good four pounds in weight, and had another tussle worth the trip up the river. This time I was more prepared when my walleye turned into a 20- inch drum.  But when you have fished for two hours for nothing but two drum you   aren’t exactly whistling and grinning about your good luck.  

            Then something happened that made the whole trip worth it.  I was just sitting in my boat taking my drum-tempting yellow jig off to put on a little crank bait when suddenly there was a big splash out in the middle of the river. Bass do that. Drum don’t.  So what I did was, I threw that crank bait out about where the rings were spreading out in the water and that bass nailed it.  It was a grand struggle, him taking off with my crank bait and several feet of line and me enjoying the bend of the rod and the whine of the reel. It was a bass all right, and I got to see him come up and jump out of the water trying to throw the hooks. I got my net beneath him, an 18-inch beauty that was half smallmouth and half spotted (Kentucky) bass.  You can see a color picture of the rascal on my website, larrydablemontoutdoors.   
             I don’t like that hybridation but it is seen often in some waters where the southern spotted bass has been introduced.  Most fishermen who catch one don’t realize what it is, but there is a smooth tongue on a true smallmouth and on the hybrid you will see spots on the belly, a raspy patch on the tongue and the red eye of the smallmouth.

            Well anyway that was the last fish.  A three-fish day over three or four hours of fishing isn’t something to brag about when you are an outdoor writer, but the afternoon was a boatload of treasure for me because I love being out there on the river by    myself, fish or no fish.  I shared the time with a pair of eagles and a mink and I thanked God for time I got to spend there. I always do.

 

            

 

Memories of a Fishing Guide

 

     Recently I wrote about floating the Roubidoux River as boy, working as a fishing guide for newspaper editor Lane Davis. Lane liked to fish that river because he felt it received less fishing pressure and might have more fish, if not bigger  ones.  I always wondered, what the Roubidoux River was named after.  The French name ‘robidou’ means “son of Robert”.

       It was a great river then, but not so much now.  Deeper eddies there have been filled with gravel and sand… so much of the fish habitat is gone.  And the water flow is much less now than it was in the 60’s, because dozens of small springs that fed the river have dried up. Modern Ozarkians do not realize what a water crisis our country will experience in another fifty years or less.  Our Ozark rivers will become creeks. 

       Back in 1960 there were no aluminum river boats or canoes, but dad had built a couple of 14-foot wooden johnboats that you could use to float small streams. They were heavy but better to fish from than anything made of metal.  The wood bottoms were slick enough to slide over the rocks and gravel and so easy to handle even a kid could paddle one.

       Boy, those were the days… not so much because there were lots bigger bass and goggle-eye and green sunfish, but because there were so many more of them.

       The biggest smallmouth I have ever seen caught from the rivers of the Ozarks was a 23-inch bass I know would have weighed six pounds.  It was the summer of 1959 on the Big Piney, guiding a Houston man and his wife, Joe and Katy Richardson.  I was 12 and it was my first paid trip as a float-fishing guide in one of those old wooden johnboats.  I was paid 50 cents an hour and Joe gave me a five-dollar tip at the end of the day. I told my dad that I had found my life’s profession!

       Back then I had no landing net, so I got out in the water up to my knees and landed Katy’s huge bass by hand. She was a fine lady and fisherman and no one deserved a fish more.  I still have the black ‘Heddon River Runt’ she caught it on and her photo with the fish and the lure are on display in my Big Piney nature center.  I remember it like it was yesterday and I have never seen a smallmouth like it from a river. It was a dark chocolate brown with almost no markings.  I am going to use a picture of the fish to have a replica made for the nature center.

As to the nature center… on May 10 we are going to have a big yard sale there too help pay for some additional work that needs too be done and some displays.  Hope many of you can attend.  We have lots of stuff for sale, some guns and fishing gear, and hundreds of lures, a boat trailer and a kayak or two.

 

And I also wrote about brown trout in a recent column. Here is more about that species of fish…

       Brown trout were introduced to American waters in 1883, from the British Isles and Eastern Europe.  The western U.S. had several species of trout, but there were no brown trout. Missouri stocked a quarter million of them in the Ozarks in the late twenties and early thirties.  Arkansas followed at a later time.

       The brown trout has been stocked and today thrive successfully in Missouri’ Meramec River, the Niangua River Taneycomo Lake, the Current River and the North Fork River. In Arkansas, they are stocked in the White River below Beaver Lake Dam, Bull Shoals Dam, Norfork Lake Dam and in the Little Red River below Greer’s Ferry.  There is evidence that they have actually had a few successful winter spawns in the Arkansas White River.

       Brown trout eat almost anything when they are smaller, from insects and crayfish to minnows, sculpins and shad. The larger they get the more likely they are to eat larger prey…from small rainbow trout to small ducklings to mice.

       Outdoor writer Jim Spencer tells of catching a brown trout near Calico Rock on the lower White that he believes was larger than 30 pounds. He nearly landed the fish but he couldn’t get it in a net he had. There are many browns in the White that are 20 to 30 pounds and most guides there know where to find them when the water is low.  Some have been caught and released.

       I hope readers will check out my websites, larrydablemont.com and larrydablemontoutdoors.   You can email me at lightninridge47@gmail.com.

 

March Smallmouth

 

            I like fishing big reservoirs in March.  Fifty-five years ago, I fished Beaver Lake with an uncle on a cold windy day using a lure called a spider, just a big spinner bait of that time. For three hours I didn’t catch a single bass, but about ten in the morning, only a hundred yards from my truck, I was rewarded by a hard strike. The biggest bass I have ever seen nailed the spider and fought hard for nearly ten minutes. I gazed in awe at the huge fish in the water beside me, and finally got my thumb in his mouth. His fight ended with a few flops on the boat floor.

            In Rogers, Arkansas at a sport shop, they weighed the bass at nine pounds and 14 ounces, for which I got a ‘lunker pin’. I had the fish mounted because I knew it was my last and only chance at a ten pounder. My uncle said it surely had weighed ten pounds when I caught it, but I should have put a rock in its gullet anyway. Only a few years back, however, I landed a nine pounder from Truman Lake and I have caught several eight-pound bass from various waters lakes, ponds and rivers. I must admit to losing more bass of that size than have landed. 

            But it is rivers that I love to fish and last week when the temperature rose into the 70’s, I took a trip to a river, going about five miles upstream from an Ozark reservoir.  It’s a reservoir where I have never caught a smallmouth bass. But there must be some there, because every March there is a movement of smallmouth up that river. It is something you are not suppose to see in smallmouth, a bona-fide migration of hundreds of   smallmouth. By sometime in May they are gone.  

            I found them last week and one afternoon I had a ball catching forty or fifty 14 to 18-inch brown bass out of one deep eddy. I was all by myself and the calm peaceful river was a reward in itself for the few hours I spent there. I was lucky to have found the bass. They were deep in a ten-foot hole about 40 feet wide. For about three hours they hit any deep-running lure I tied on, six different lures. But what they seemed to like best was a six-inch stick-bait that I could crank down about four or five feet. And with that I had something rare happen. There was a savage strike and after it, instead of a struggle, there was just a hard pull. Moments later I saw why… there was a 13-inch smallmouth on the rear treble hook and a 16-incher on the front hooks. Together there were about three pounds of bass. I netted them and there was chaos on the floor of my boat. It is hard to disengage the hooks on a pair of bass doing most of the fighting after they have been boated.

            But   the worst was yet to come.  I was casting a sinking, wobbling lure once known as a ‘Cordell Hot-spot’ when it was engulfed by a slab-sided frog-eater   of a smallmouth.  I could see his broad bronze side when he came deep alongside the boat, fighting against my drag with a fury I had yet to see on that day.  I    got him in   close enough to just see a big tail wave good bye. He made a powerful lunge that broke the line.  I hated losing that lure; hated losing the smallmouth. I would have released him anyway but had   he visited the inside of my boat I would have been able to tell you how long he was.  I am sure, in doing the algebraic equation of x equal a five inch tail and a five inch tail equaling better than four pounds in fish weight, that he weighed better than four pounds.   Being an outdoor writer bound to uphold the   ‘truth in journalism’ rule, I wouldn’t stretch things about any fish I lost, though I have exaggerated a couple that I caught.  For instance, before the day was over I hooked a real whopper-dock of a brownie and landed him.  I would love to tell you he was and 18-incher but he wasn’t.  He was short of it by about 3/8ths of an inch, doggone it.  It   could    have been a half an inch or maybe less.  The   fish just wouldn’t lie still to be measured accurately.  If I   had of scrunched up his   tail I expect I could call him an   eighteen incher…  but I am a real stickler for accuracy.  I may    go back and measure him again this week!

 

My website, which shows all my books and magazines, is www.larrydablemont.com and my email address is lightninridge47@gmail.com

MDC Slaughter!!

 

 

       The deer slaughter is over! It goes from mid-January to mid-March.  Last years extermination project killed more than thirty-seven thousand deer. That number may reach 50 thousand this year.  I don’t know how a “Conservation” department could be a part of such meaningless killing of a wild creature of any kind. Conservation is not what they are involved in now. The name should be changed.  The greater goal is more money. 

       The killing is being done in the name of chronic wasting research.   They say that ‘til now only one out of a hundred deer in the state have the deadly transmissible spongiform encephalopathy disease, which they refer to as chronic wasting disease, the brain destroying prion disease, which they falsely deny that humans can get.

       And there is also the belief inside the MDC that Missouri has too many deer anyway. The U.S. Department of Agriculture is a partner in the slaughter.  The MDC gets hundreds of thousands of dollars from USDA to carry out the extermination.  Maybe the new president’s DOGE will get wind of what’s going on and put a stop to it. If those thousands could be spent more wisely we could actually see some legitimate conservation projects in the state, like the preservation of rivers and the reconstruction of Schell Osage waterfowl area.

        In case you are unaware of where the money goes… think of ‘reimbursement’ for the expense of rifles, ammunition and the salary and expenses for perhaps hundreds of different shooters necessary to kill 40 to 50 thousand deer in two months.

        Piles of corn are set out where blinds are built to conceal the shooters, even though farmers feeding deer corn can be arrested for that.  Part of the killing is done at night using spotlights.  A certain amount of lying is necessary.  The public is told the deer meat is utilized in the “share the harvest” program.  That’s baloney.  A source inside the department I have talked with says, “You think those shooters will gut and butcher that many deer? No way! Bulldozers can dig big holes where hundreds can be buried or burned! Not all are even tested when a late night accounts for a whole pile of carcasses and crippled deer.”

       The shame of it all is that this past month hundreds of doe deer were killed with one or two fawns in them not long from being born. Thousands of big bucks are also among the count, bucks that will not be taken by hunters who spend their money on deer tags this coming fall.  The record low kill seen last fall will be even less next season. And once again, the MDC experts will come up with all kinds of reasons for it, warm weather, too many acorns etc. 

       What you won’t hear is “There are fewer bucks because of our winter slaughter, but that’s’ alright, we had too many deer anyway. The decline in hunter success is tough luck”.

       One landowner called me and told me he refused to let the MDC and USDA kill deer on his land but a neighbor let them in.  He has found dead deer and wounded deer on his place the last few weeks, ones that were shot on that neighboring land. Another call was from a lady who said they had bought 60 acres next to MDC’s 280-acre Cover Wildlife Area in southeast Missouri and for two months they had to live with the constant sound of rifle fire from late afternoon until way past sunset as shooting teams exterminated dozens and dozens of deer.  She fears that there will be few deer left on their own land. 

       The U.S. Dept of Agriculture contributes personnel to help kill the deer, and tons of money to the MDC for the slaughter. Like so many things, it all comes down to Government money, which likely means millions to the MDC over time.

       If you buy a deer tag this year, you might oughta be okay with less of a chance of seeing a buck.  But that’s okay. Remember the MDC slogan… ‘For Nature and you!’

 

 

Here is a news bulletin….Next fall and winter landowners will be offered 10 deer tags. In designated Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) Core Areas, landowners of 5 contiguous acres or greater are eligible to receive up to 10 no-cost CWD Management Permits for use on their qualifying properties.

CWD Management Permits give eligible landowners the opportunity to take an active role in managing CWD in areas where the disease has been detected by removing POTENTIAL positive deer from the landscape. The permits also increase surveillance in CWD core areas by offering landowners, and/or hunters they designate, the opportunity to harvest additional deer on their property and get reimbursed for processing if they have their deer tested for CWD.

 

Browns on the White…

 

                           Frank Saksa with a large brown trout

       There may be no better fishing to be found in the Ozarks in March than the brown trout fishing on the White River, for many miles below Bull Shoals Dam. Brown trout actually spawn in the White in December into February, and there are some fish there in those waters well over 20 pounds. In fact several 30-pound plus browns have been caught in the past 20 years from the White River.

       They feed ravenously after the spawning period, as do the rainbows. Trouble is, it is difficult to catch big rainbow trout from the White, because they are caught quickly on natural bait and therefore not given much chance to grow after they are stocked. They rarely bring off a successful spawn in the White, but it is not unheard of. A 14- or 15-inch rainbow isn’t hard to catch from the White, and on light spinning gear, they are strong fighters.

       It is not unusual for inexperienced fishermen to hook and land brown trout from 5- to 10-pounds. The river has a large number of brown trout much larger than that, a real prize for the White’s early spring anglers. Browns are known to be warier than rainbow trout, but they are particularly susceptible to 5- or 6-inch Suspending Rogue lures.

       A Suspending Rogue is a lure which is easy to cast because it is fairly heavy, and long and slender. And it takes no great talent to make it look like something a brown trout takes a shine to. Usually browns and rainbows both will hit the lure when it has stopped, so be ready to set the hook. Use six- to eight-pound line if you aren’t experienced in this type of fishing. If you are an old hand at it, four-pound line will work even better because it has lower visibility. Just keep that drag set well.

       White Rive Guide Frank Saksa say’s that the best brown’s he sees each year fall to those Rogues, which are jerked several feet and then allowed to drift in the current, then jerked hard again.

       “You’ll see, after you have fished awhile, how many times they hit those Rogues when they are dead in the water.”

 Saksa says, “Jerk ‘em a few feet, but resist the urge to just keep working them. Let the lure stop a few seconds, and hang on.”

       Saksa’s clients land several brown trout between 10 and 15 pounds in March. Most are photographed and released to grow larger. And while there are thought to be a number of 20- to 30-pound browns in the White, the Norfork and the Little Red, few are ever kept. All are released to grown larger. These fish grow very fast; reaching lengths of 18 to 20 inches in only three years, and the females will exceed five pounds in weight in that time. They may live more than 20 years and grow a maximum weight of 40 pounds in the Ozarks.

       Saksa says a dead brown was found on the White in the winter a few years back, which was partially decomposed, but thought to be larger than 25 pounds. Fishermen who fish for brown trout year round tell of seeing or hooking fish they think will exceed 30 pounds, but they seldom have the tackle to land one that size. Saksa says many big browns are also caught in the spring and on crayfish, white jigs or spoons.

       When winter-kill shad are coming through the dam and drifting down the White, you can catch both rainbows and browns on a 1/16 to 1/8 ounce white jig. The smaller the jig and the lighter the line, the better luck you will have.

       But the Rogue is more fun. The brown trout, are a catch-and-release species. If you get a big one, take a picture and release it to let it grow. Keep the rainbows to eat. They do not produce in any appreciable numbers Brown trout do. The limits on the two species change from time to time.

       There are techniques involved on the White River and the Norfork River, which you do not learn overnight. Spend a day with a knowledgeable guide like Saksa and you will learn more in a day than you might learn in a month of fishing on your own. Talk to folks in resorts up and down the river if you do choose to fish without a guide. There are length limits to know about, some areas where you may not use barbed hooks and natural bait. Those catch-and-release areas like the one just below the White River Dam are places where bigger fish can be found, rainbows, even walleye from time to time. In that area below the dam, you may keep walleye or crappie sometimes found there, but not trout.

BE sure of the limits, and stamps and licenses you need. Ask the resorts and docks about the best lures at the time, the best colors, and even line color. Those are things they know, which you need to know.

Short-Eared Oddballs

 

                

      Several years ago in late February a gentleman called me to tell me he had seen around 200 owls the day before in one small area in the western Ozarks.  He said that on one corral fence there were more than thirty in a group!

      When you are a grizzled old outdoor veteran like me, you figure you have seen about everything in the outdoors, and I have never seen more than four or five owls of any species together in the woods ever.  So, you can figure if I haven’t ever seen something, I won’t believe it ‘til I see it.  And folks, ‘I went there and seen it and I ain’t never seen nothin’ like it’.  

       Near Greenfield, Missouri was a huge group of short-eared owls, a species a little bit like the barred owl in size and appearance, but with small ears sticking up. In habit, they are much different than most of the owls we are accustomed to hearing and seeing in the Ozarks.  They have a mean look to them, with ornery-looking bright yellow eyes rather than the brown eyes the barred owl has.  And the face is much different, with a pronounced circle of feathers, contrasting white and dark brown, and two little feather patches referred to as “ears”, which are much like the horns on a horned owl.  Except the ears on a short-eared owl can usually not be seen, they just barely stick up above the forehead most of the time.

      They are a species not so much fond of forests; they do not seem to need a tree.  They stick to a more open country like that prairie land along the Missouri Kansas border, with scrub timber and thickets.  And they nest on the ground!  Now that is something, when you think about how most all owls nest in hollow trees.  The barn owl often nests in old buildings of course, and there is an odd little burrowing owl which nests in holes in the ground.

      It is interesting to note that an owl can’t build a nest because his beak isn’t made for carrying and assembling nest materials.  A burrowing owl doesn’t dig his burrow, and barn owls don’t build a nest at all, they just lay eggs on a barn loft or ledge.  Great horned owls and barred owls find a natural hole in a tree and nest there, or sometime use an old hawk nest.  But short-eared owls actually nest in the grass on the ground, which they trample down and flatten down, and they actually try to arrange a few sticks in a situation which really doesn’t resemble a nest. Knowing that other owls do not carry sticks, that’s something I’d like to see.

      On this little flattened grass “nest” they will lay anywhere from 3 or 4 to 7 or 8 eggs, depending on the whim of the female owl I suppose. They lay their eggs in May or early June, and the eggs aren’t much more than an inch wide, about an inch and half long.  That is a very small egg for a bird that eventually will mature at a size of 14 to 16 inches tall and weigh about a pound. Most owls and predatory birds, known as raptors, are nesting now, sitting on or laying eggs in late February or early March.

 Ornithologists examined the stomach contents of 110 short-eared owls many years back, and found that three-quarters of their diet had been mice or voles of one kind or another, about 10 percent small birds and nearly as many moles and shrews.  About 7 percent of the diet appeared to be insects, with the stomach of one owl containing about 30 big grasshoppers. So that tells you they didn’t do that study in the winter!   Another odd thing about the short-eared owl is that he is a daytime type of owl, actively hunting during the day more than at night, when most other owls are active.

       But why do they bunch up in flocks? Why are so many owls concentrated in such a small area together?  Who can explain that?  Certainly not me, and up to then I though I knew everything!  Obviously these short-eared owls do some kind of a migration, perhaps not very far, but likely from a place where food supplies of small ground mammals had been decimated for some reason or another. It is likely a mass movement of a species looking for food. I don’t see, anywhere in books I have, any naturalists talking about a migration of owls.

      Obviously, as I have said so often, no one can know all there is to know about nature.  Those of us who spend a great deal of time outdoors see unexplainable things.  A modern day outdoorsman or naturalist who tries to learn by the book can know little of the secrets of nature.  You have to be there sometimes to see things which perhaps no one has seen before. 

If you like to read about the outdoors, see my websites, www.larrydablemont.com 

An Excerpt from the Book, “Life and Times of the Pool Hall Kid.”

                                                       Lane Davis

An Excerpt from the Book, “Life and Times of the Pool Hall Kid.”

       In the 60’s, Houston Missouri had a weekly newspaper called the Houston Herald. The owner and editor was a man I got to know well. His name was Lane Davis.  I started guiding float fishermen at a young age, in an old wooden johnboat, and Lane was one of my clients.  He liked floating the Roubidoux  River  over by  Plato.  It was a small river with much more water back then than it has now, some deep eddies and lots of smallmouth, goggle-eye and black perch (green sunfish).  Lane was a good fishermen and he always caught lots of fish.

        I was 13 in the summer of ‘61, a troubled youngster who hated school, rich people, teachers and most all of the kids I went to school with. I was at a dangerous crossroads in my life.  I took my .22 pistol to school that fall to shoot a 15-year-old bully. I came close to using it, and I still sweat a little at the memory of that.  I wasn’t a mean or cruel kid, but I had been convinced I was worthless and without any ability. My grades were low, and I had no size or athleticism. I only wanted to be in my dad’s pool hall or alone in the woods or on the river.  Everywhere else there was conflict. 

       Lane Davis was one of three men that helped salvage a young life and get me through that awful time.

       Floating the river in the spring of ‘64, Lane convinced me I could write!  Then he said if I would write stuff about the outdoors he would publish it in the Herald.  The first few columns I wrote for the newspaper was entitled, “Summer on the Piney.”  That was the first one or two of nearly 6,000 newspaper columns to come over the next 63 years, outdoor columns published in more than 200 newspapers in five states.

       The week I graduated, at 21 years of age, I was hired as the outdoor editor for the Arkansas Democrat, the states largest newspaper out of Little Rock.  Lane Davis was my lone reference, and the only one I needed. The pay then, in 1970 was 509 dollars per month plus travel expenses.  I thought I was the luckiest man alive. 

       At M.U. when I was only 19, I wrote a manuscript about one of those old johnboats dad had built we called Ol’ Paint.  I had been reading Outdoor Life and Field and Stream magazines in our pool hall since I was 12 years old and I told my friends I was writing that article for Outdoor Life Magazine.   No one believed that that huge magazine would even consider it, including me. I was a kid wanting to be a writer, reaching for the stars.

              There is still an old Underwood typewriter in a storage closet in my office that belonged to my new wife, in 1970 who had been the secretary to the vice president of McDonnell Douglas Aircraft in St.Louis.  At only 18 years old she could type 110 words a minute on that old manual typewriter.  She typed that manuscript and I sent it to the editor of the largest outdoor magazine in the world.  A letter came back in the next couple of weeks from editor William Rae, saying that Outdoor Life was pleased to receive it and with my permission they would publish it and pay me 1500 dollars. I nearly fainted! 

       The ‘Old Paint’ article was published in Outdoor Life in1972 and that year it was chosen to be the only outdoor story published in a NewYork book entitled “The Best Sport Stories of 1972” It was also published years later in a 500 page anthology entitled, “The Best of Outdoor Life.” It had about 75 articles chosen from magazines covering 1890 thru 2000. I could scarcely comprehend mine being one of them.

       What I remember about that latter book was articles in with mine were written by Zane Grey, Archibald Rutledge, Jack O’Connor, Edwin Way Teale, James Oliver Curwood and dozens of other legendary outdoor writers. That first year out of college, as the new outdoor editor of the Arkansas Democrat, I began to sell articles to Outdoor Life, Field and Stream, Sports Afield and several west coast outdoor magazines put out by Petersen’s Publishing company. In the next ten years I sold articles to more than 60 outdoor magazines. One of those magazine articles,  some written in only an hour or so, would pay me 2  to 3 times my monthly salary for the Democrat.

       Today the  Houston Herald still uses my column each week, a self-syndicated outdoor column which is used in about 40 or so newspapers in 3 states.  I hope that somewhere in heaven Lane Davis knows that and how important those fishing trips were on the Roubidoux. On those trips he helped a hapless, confused kid become a successful naturalist and outdoor writer.