A Little Winter Walk

 

There is a remote little gravel bar along the river where I love to camp, quite a walk from the road. I parked my pickup and headed down there, determined to see it as a new year comes, in a bleak, drab winter picture of the river. 

I came across a nice buck and doe that bounded away.  He still had his antlers and she was getting a little bit round with a pair of fawns, if I am a good judge of such things.  I was surprised to see them together, but it tells me where I might find his antlers in a month or so.

The slough where the wood ducks were in October, and will be again in April, was frozen over.  I stopped and looked at very clear bobcat track in soft sandy soil. On such ground it is easy for anyone to tell a cat track because there are no claw marks. 

There will be young bobcats born very soon, long before the fawns are born.  In the Ozarks bobcats may bear young any time during the winter, from December on.  And some are even born in late spring.  But most are born in February and early March.   

I happened across a terrapin shell, this one very old because only the white undershell was there.  Terrapins have an outer and under shell, and Ozark boys in my grandpa’s generation often carved their initials and dates in the outer shell.  When I was just a boy, I found terrapins with initials and dates, and it caused me to realize how long they lived.  I suspect a terrapin might live forty or fifty years if he is lucky enough to stay upright.  They are unusual in that they are capable of living a long time and yet producing a lot of young.  Most all wild things are good at one or the other.  A species has high ‘biotic potential’ (the ability to survive well and live long), or high ‘reproductive potential’ (the ability to produce high number of offspring during a season).  Usually, they don’t have both. 

The predators have few babies, and live long and survive well.  A rabbit or a wood rat has a short life span because of predation and a weakness to disease and parasites.  But the small ground mammals are like rabbits; they raise lots of young to ensure survival of their species.  Any species which produces a small number of offspring in its lifetime is a species that has a great biotic potential, the ability to survive.  Only man throws a wrench in that natural equation.  In next week’s column I will say more about this year-end trip to the river.

            

      As much as I love to hunt and fish, I was born a naturalist first and foremost, and I am lucky to live out here in the sticks and still write about it all for newspapers scattered about in places far from where I might be this week or next.  If you read this column and like it, let the newspaper hear from you.  I wish I could answer all the letters and e-mails I get from you folks out there who read this column each week, but I just can’t.  I will reproduce many of the letters and emails I get in my magazine, the Lightnin’ Ridge Outdoor Journal, the next one due to come out in the spring of 2026.

 

      In the next few months I will write about some illegal things done by conservation agents and many newspapers cannot print those articles.  You can read them in January on a special Internet site… www.larrydablemontoutdoors.  Those articles give you an idea of what the Missouri Department of Conservation does that can affect you.  You can have property confiscated and never returned to you even if charges are dismissed. It has just happened to one 17-year-old deer hunter. 

       I don’t blame newspapers for not printing those articles but you have a right to know what this state agency does and they have extraordinary power to keep it hidden.  Please go to that website and read the articles.

 

Notify me by email…lightninridge47@gmail.com or   call my office at 417-777-5227

 

 

No Ducks, But No Worries

 

I haven’t seen many ducks but it is duck season and I can’t wait to go out with my Lab to try to find some. If you have never owned a Labrador, you have missed out on one of the greatest things in life, and if you have never watched ducks come into decoys on cupped wings, rocking back and forth with those red legs extended you have missed something. 

Recently I sat up against a tree scratching my dog’s ears while he slept beside me. I rested; watching empty skies and realizing that I couldn’t remember how much money I had left in the bank nor how old I was. Other things are more important when you’re out in the woods or on the river.

You may not believe this, but in a local pharmacy they have a blood pressure machine, and I can take my blood pressure. It remains pretty good until I get mad, which town traffic usually makes me.  If it is too high then I can set back and take it again while I close my eyes and envision a flock of wild ducks circling above me, and then dropping like fall leaves into my decoys. Then the second time I take it, my blood pressure will have dropped ten or fifteen points!

 

      It seems sad to me that we have arrived at a time when the men who truly understood and knew the ways of the wild are old men, or long passed away.  Most of what they knew, we are losing.  But this much is true; there are more self-proclaimed experts in the outdoors today than you can shake a stick at.... more pros and champions and authorities than fish in the sea.

      For an outdoor partner, give me someone who doesn’t proclaim himself a pro at anything. Someone who will slowly walk the ridge tops and the valleys from dawn to dusk and be sorry the day has ended.  Give me someone who loves it so much he can't tire of the songs of birds, nor experience enough the sound and smell of rain coming across a still valley…someone who notices the scent post of a fox as he passes, who finds the pellets beneath an owl roost and    knows what they are.  

      Put me in a boat with someone who can paddle down the river so slowly and quietly even the beaver and the mink and the wood ducks are unaware of his presence. Give me a man who leaves nothing but his tracks, and takes only what he uses and wastes nothing.  Give me an outdoorsman who has learned more from experiences beneath a hardwood canopy or along a flowing stream than from books.  Such a man needs no trophies or acclaim.  He seeks the treasures which God bestows on those who walk in wild places men have not yet ruined. 

      When we come to the end of 2025, may there still be such places, and such men.  May the values and convictions of our ancestors still be strong with us.

      I     write too much I   guess, about those days when those old men I knew were young.  Those days when being poor still had its blessings.  Why…when I was a kid, I really did go to the local army salvage store to buy hunting clothes and a variety of items used in my hunting and fishing forays as a youngster.  At the time, I was so poor I had to get used haircuts.  I was so poor that I had a burlap bag for a lunch pail, with a hammer and a handful of walnuts in it.

 

This column comes out weekly... If your newspaper misses a column or two you can read them and dozens more on a BlogSpot called larrydablemontoutdoors.   My website with my books and magazines on it is larrydablemont.com. I    have written 12 books and more than 100 magazines which you can order on that last website. If you want to get in touch with me just email me at lightninridge47@gmail.com

Eagles, and Treasures…

 

Adult parent eagle keep a watch on us and her young

Adult parent eagle teaching it's young how to find food

     Right now in the Ozarks, there are eagles everywhere, and each spring more and more of them nest here. If you spend a lot of time outdoors, you know where eagles nest, and it is very easy to see them. I found a new eagles nest this week, and counted about a dozen different birds, about half of them immature.

Last year we floated a river in early January and found five eagles feeding on the carcass of one deer on a gravel bar. As years go by, they become more and more docile, and now you can easily get within a few yards of eagles along the river in winter, so if there is anyone who wants to photo one, it becomes rather easily.

One fall in Canada, we were feeding smaller yellow perch to an eagle out in the middle of nowhere, and would get to within 15 or 20 feet of her almost everyday we went out. She had two eaglets, both a little bigger than her in that stage of their development, and they were tagging around, waiting for her to give them their share. 

I heard more sounds from those three eagles than I have ever heard from any. The young ones sat in a tree one evening just before dark and whistled almost exactly like quail regrouping before dark after being scattered. I could hardly believe what I was hearing. If I hadn’t seen it and heard it, I would have bet all I had the sound was from bobwhite quail.

I do not worry about the eagle population. They are becoming very numerous, and in ten years there will be even more of them. In time biologists are going to be wondering if some numbers in some areas shouldn’t be controlled. They’ll start becoming a problem for newborn sheep and newborn cattle.

 

 

Another treasure I obtained recently is a little wooden shelf, which obviously was made by a true craftsman. A lady brought it to a book signing and I traded her one of my books for it. I didn’t know who made it. On the back it says, “Early American Craftsmanship by that Crafty Early American, J. F. Keefe”. 

Jim Keefe was one of my heroes when I went to University of Missouri. He was the editor of the Missouri Conservationist, an old time country outdoorsman who loved to hunt with muzzle-loaders. Keefe, with a limited budget, put out a great little black and white magazine that talked and taught real conservation, a far cry from the million-dollar piece of propaganda the MDC puts out today.

 

Mr. Keefe published a couple of my first magazine articles, and I would go to the brand new offices in Jefferson City to talk to him as often as possible, about writing, about hunting, and about conservation. 

 

I won’t be somewhere on New Years Eve blowing a horn and drinking that stuff that comes from France, acting like I can’t wait to see a New Year come. I hate losing the old one. Every time the calendar gets a new number, there are fewer days to enjoy the woods and the waters and fewer opportunities to learn more about the perfection of God’s creation. 

But I might take a little walk out in the woods behind my house on the last night of 2025 and see if I can hear a coyote or a great horned owl. I’ll be asleep at midnight and greet the New Year the next morning with hopes of finding some good duck-hunting soon.

I won’t wish you a prosperous new year; I wish you peace, and contentment and good health. Those things can indeed be found without the wealth men are intent on today. It is part of the little treasures God grants to those who are happy with what they are, and the blessings they are given.

I came across a valuable piece of history this past week when I bought a little book entitled, “Hillbilly Humor” by Jim Owens, the man who got float-fishing started on the White River and became famous because of it. I was pleasantly surprised to find it autographed by Jim Owens. Again, it might be worth more than I sell any of my own books for. To me it is a treasure.

Remember that on Saturday December 20 I will be giving away a book entitled, “Dogs, Ducks and Hayrack Bucks” to kids at my Big Piney nature center a mile south of Houston Mo. on highway 63.  The address is1640 S. Hwy 63.  We’ll have a big sale that day with lots of outdoor gear and art for sale.  For more information call my office… 417 777 5227.

 

 

 

 

Larry Dablemont  column  12-8-25

 

The Wind and the Oaks

 

The opening of the doe season was only a few hours away and the wind was blowing through the oaks up here on Lightnin’ Ridge. “Shucks” I thought to myself, “There won’t be a leaf left on my oak trees!”  

I am sensitive about such things.  I had watched those oak leaves bud out on the big white oak beside my back porch, only a few months ago. First there were the tassels hanging down, shedding a yellow-green pollen all over my porch, a thick dusting of it that caused me to sneeze.  

How wonderful spring was, if I can remember right. But finally those squirrel-ear-sized leaves began to pop out and it was easy to see summer was on its way.  In no time, they were fully formed and bright green and it was great to sleep at night with the windows open and hear the rain dripping through that thick canopy. 

In September, I abruptly awakened to the sound of acorns bouncing off my roof.  I smiled to myself knowing that those first acorns meant the bass would be smashing buzz-baits and topwater lures on the river. In no time, you could hardly sleep at night for the sound of bouncing acorns off the roof. It was one of those Octobers where you had to sweep the porch every couple of hours.   

October flew past, the sun began to set earlier and earlier, and those beautiful green leaves began to turn, and yellow, and gold and red and finally, brown.  In the last days of that wonderful month, I began to sweep some leaves off the porch as well as acorns. 

Ten or fifteen years ago I would have likely shot a doe during this season because I like to eat venison. For some reason, it is harder to want to now that rocks beneath the oaks are harder to sit on. And my camera is lighter than my rifle.  I can now gaze through the woodlands before me, at squirrels busily gathering the acorns they so willingly ignored when hickory nuts were plentiful, and I can see, in my minds eye, the first skiff of snow, and hear some distant church bells ringing out a Christmas carol, as deer season is forgotten.

I can feel the cold mornings of January, and see falling snow that gets deep enough to make for good photos and good rabbit hunting.  Even beyond that, I gaze into the future and imagine the coming of longer, warmer days and those first oak stamens which will make me sneeze in April, just when some long-bearded, gobbling tom is easing through the woods, scratching at old dead leaves which were bright green a few months ago.  What a picture I will get then, as  I  lean up against a big oak tree.

It feels good to be in the woods, no matter the season and no matter the reason, waiting and listening and thinking. There will be many more oak trees to sit against, I hope. I think I’ll keep bringing that old camouflaged boat cushion with me to soften the rocks.  Make no mistake about it, it will not soften me any!  And make no mistake about it, I’ll get that hat-rack buck yet, with my camera, sometime before all of today’s oak leaves are blown away and decay. I’ll get him and some of his sons with my camera.  Maybe.  If there’s a soft spot against a big oak, and a layer of leaves to cushion the rocks…

 

      I made a big mistake in the article I wrote about our Christmas event coming up soon.  I said it was Saturday the 22^ndof December when it is actually Saturday the 20^th from 9 to 3.  On that date we will have a big sale of lots of   art and other items and I am going to be giving away one of my outdoor books to children who like to read.  A neighbor of mine has given me some beautiful big wooden bowls to sell as Christmas gifts and they are sold for high prices in gift shops at various places in the Ozarks. At our event they will go for fifty percent of original costs.  There will be lots of tackle boxes, fishing rods and reels and likely 200 or more fishing lures, plus a portable depth finder that is brand new.  If you have an office or den you would like to add some color to, there are several large framed pictures of wildlife for sale, done by world renowned artists, and  a beautiful mounted deer head as well.   The address  is 1640 South Highway 63 at Houston Mo. Hope to see you there! Come by and get a free Christmas magazine.  See my websites… larrydablemont.com and larrydablemontoutdoors.com

The address is  P.O. Box 22, Bolivar, mo 65613 and the  email address is lightninridge47@gmail.com

 

 

 

A Christmas Event

          

The fire had burned down in the fireplace, and it was a trifle warm, so I stepped out on the back porch to feel the coolness of the oncoming winter, looking down on the dark river valley. The moon was faint, shining through the clouds and it was so still you could have heard a coon cough. Down in the timber below I could hear an old hound on the trail of something. Its deep baying was mournful, and beautiful in the still night. 

It made me wish I was sitting on a gravel bar somewhere, before a roaring fire, with a few of those old-time coon or fox hunters who would rather listen to the baying of distant hounds than listen to the music of the finest choirs or orchestras.

Oh I know that if you have never heard it, you can’t imagine it, or appreciate it, but baying hounds in the night are a kind of music you can become addicted to. I have never owned a coonhound or foxhound, but my dad and uncles had some and I cannot forget what a sound it is when they are trailing something through the hills of the Ozarks. Every man knows the sound of his own hound, no matter how large the pack. 

Hearing that one made me feel something so nostalgic and fine that I didn’t want to leave. In time, he faded off into the darkness way off to the west, and I wished I could have followed. Ozark houndsmen are the last of a breed of real outdoorsmen. 

 

                  ********************************************************

         If you have a youngster between the ages of 9 and 15 who likes to read I    have a free book for them. The name of it is  ‘Dogs, Ducks and Hatrack Bucks’.  It is a book of short stories about the Ozarks outdoors which I wrote several years ago. I will be signing that book to boys and girls who might   like one for Christmas.  It sells for 15 dollars but on Saturday December 20 it is free and I will sign it to your youngster for a Christmas gift.  You can pick one up between 9 and 3 o’clock that day at my Big Piney nature center… 6410 South Highway 63, about one mile south of Houston, Mo. Despite some health setbacks I am going to work to put up displays about the river and I’m looking for volunteers who want to help with that.  I actually hope too open it to the   public three days a week next spring.  

         Back in September we had an open house with all kinds of stuff for sale hoping to raise some money. Lots of folks came, but a heavy rain hit about noon, which ended the whole day.  So now I have a roomful of good items for Christmas gifts, which   includes fishing lures, rods and reels and carved duck decoys.  There are also several valuable framed wildlife paintings and other art.  You just might find something special for a Christmas gift.  I will have all twelve of my books there, selling for a 4-dollar discount, and some antique magazines.  My new Christmas magazine will be there too, on sale for 5 dollars.

         If I can get them there I will sell a really nice NuCanoe kayak and a 19-foot square-stern Grumman canoe as well as a 20-foot boat trailer.  All proceeds will go toward finishing the nature center for next spring.  If you would like more information, call me at 417 777 5227 or email me at lightninridge47@gmailcom. You can read past and future columns on the Internet at larrydablemontoutdoors and see all my books and magazines at www.larrydablemont.com.

 

 

Don’t Be Fooled

 

         Deer hunters need to know that some conservation agents come to the homes of those who telecheck large antlered deer and ask to see the place where their deer was killed. If a hunter complies they will be cited for some technical offense or charged with baiting even if no baiting has been done.  Always, 100 percent of the time, if you take an agent to the place you killed a deer, you will be charged with some type of offense! Always, 100 percent of the time, it will involve a large antlered deer that will be   confiscated.  It happened to me a few years back.  Two agents stood on my porch for a half hour questioning me about a buck I killed. I eventually closed the door on them and they left.

         Often bait is found at such a site that comes from the uniform pocket of the agent!   They will only do this if the antlers are large enough to warrant being confiscated.  If you have an agent come to your door do not let them in, and DO NOT take them where you killed a buck or cleaned it unless they present you with a signed search warrant. 

         I now have forms which have been given to me by the Department’s Chief of Enforcement with which you can file a complaint against an agent or agents who violates your rights or tries to coerce you to reveal where you hunt or who asks you to allow inspection of your property without that search warrant.  If you want to fill out a complaint, which can be filed with the MDC and kept secret or made public, notify me. I will fill it for you, use it in my column and protect your identity.

 

         A local taxidermist says that a woman conservation agent spends lots of time in his shop trying to find a reason she can confiscate deer heads and antlers brought to him.  He says she ought to spend as much time in the field as she does in his shop.  I once wrote that hunters might consider checking an unusually large set of antlers as smaller than they really are so that they will not be the object of an agent’s attention.  Now she goes into taxidermy shops and tries to find antlers that are in any way different or smaller than reported. She can and does take hunters deer heads or antlers from a taxidermist’s shop with no ones approval but her own.  It isn’t right, but a hunter who loses his deer head that way has no choice but to pay a fine and lose a legally taken deer head if he cannot afford a lawyer.

         As an example… a taxidermist tells me that a deer head was brought to his shop by an agent who declared it to be illegally taken.   He said he wanted it mounted for educational use in an MDC office.  Instead, he hung the mounted head, paid for by the   Department of Conservation, in his own home.   If there are those who think I am making this up, I can tell you the name of the    agent and of the taxidermist.

          What they call “Sunshine Laws” don’t apply to the MDC.  Agents who violate laws or are proved to be in violation of MDC policy are never publically named, and some have even been promoted. The MDC paid out a million dollars years back because two agents violated the laws and illegally searched a home. They were never disciplined.

         I am told no one in the MDC can comment on “Personnel Related Matters”.  I can name illegal acts and violations by individual agents that they were never questioned about.  It is beyond belief.  Are they so powerful that they can never be questioned or investigated?  This 18-million dollar construction boondoggle, that has destroyed for good a fantastic wildlife area named Schell-Osage, likely involves the violation of state laws and certainly has allowed for tens of thousands of dollars in interest going into powerful individual’s pockets, both in and out of the MDC.  But it can never be investigated by anyone.  In time cost over-runs will amount to several million dollars more than the 18 million supposedly given to someone who will never finish the project, and it is likely that waterfowl will never come there in appreciable numbers again.

         Newspapers and television stations tell me that they can be closed down by reporting on the MDC because the powerful agency can shut off much of their advertising other funds that they depend on.  If you doubt that I can give you the name and station manager of the news media station, which told me, and I quote… “The department is awfully upset that we had you on the air last week…they give us an awful lot of money to control what is said about them!” When a state agency controls what newspapers and televisions can report, that is full-scale corruption.

 

I had an interview in Jefferson City a month ago with director of the MDC, Jason Sumner and the enforcement chief, Travis McClain.  In a future column I will write about what is going to come from that meeting that may be a big benefit for Ozark rivers and those who own land along Ozark rivers.

 

Drones For Deer Hunters

 

       

       I have a friend who grew up in Wisconsin who was a very good deer hunter.   He liked to bow hunt in early October where large unharvested cornfields stood...his name was Al Narveson.  Al had found a good number of big bucks by walking along cornrows into the wind, and coming upon bedding deer deep inside the cornfields.  He said that in midday they would hide in those cornrows and    you could walk right upon them. I got to thinking about that.  Al lives in Arkansas now and it has been many years since he has seen a cornfield. But what a difference today would make on that kind of hunting. Al wouldn’t have to walk through a cornfield, he could just buy a drone and fly it over a field and find the deer in a hurry, pinpointing where he needed to stalk one.

       Would drones work in the Ozarks for deer hunters?  Well right now with all the foliage left on the trees, probably not, but when the muzzle-loading season arrives you are dealing with bedded down deer during the day and the foliage is gone.  Deer would be fairly easy to find with a drone, especially with snow on the ground.  I am not sure how to find Al now, but I wonder if he already has figured this drone thing out.

       It is amazing how our seasons are changing.  Ducks that once lined the Ozark Rivers in early November now come to the Ozarks two to four weeks later than they    once did.  I keep an eye on Ozark ponds because that tells me when the mallards begin to arrive.  Last year they didn’t ‘arrive’ they just pretty well passed us by. This Thanksgiving I will have to watch the situation while I fry a turkey out on the back deck because leaves will be falling in the cooking oil.  In twenty years I predict we’ll see the fall foliage at it’s brightest around the first week in December, hurricanes in November, ducks arriving in the Ozarks with the new year, turkeys mating in June and the first tomatoes becoming ripe in July. For the past several years, wild turkey spring mating and egg laying has been two to three weeks later than it was in the 80’s.  

       I have acquired seventeen bound volumes of the “Ozark Mountaineer” magazine, which I will put to good use.  They begin in the early 1980’s. In my own magazine, “The Lightnin’ Ridge Journal”, I have used some old recipes from a hundred years or so ago that came out of the Mountaineer. In future issues I will reprint material from those old historic issues that tell so much about the Ozarks. My Christmas issue of the “Lightnin’ Ridge Journal” has just been printed and you  can get  your  own  80-page issue by calling my office… 417 777 5227. 

 

An Arkansas reader by the name of Phillip Rice sent me this note….        

 

Be sure and mark November 8th on your calendars for opening day of river-otter season. You are allowed two per day, daytime hunting only. The Game and Fish Commission wants you to tell them your hunting strategy, how many days per year you focus solely on hunting otters, and how many you annually harvest. What a joke. Why does AGFC not recognize that managing otters should be right up there at the top of the list in getting our rivers back.  A river the size of the White should support 2 to 3 otters per river mile. There are sections that easily have 10 times those numbers. They eat 15 to 20 percent of their body weight every day. I’d say the average weight of otters is in the twenty- to twenty-five-pound range. Take 10 twenty-pound otters per mile for the 44 miles between Bull Shoals Dam and the confluence with the Norfork River, and the number of fish they are killing is staggering. 

Since we have had one knee jerk reaction, why not have a 2nd and let us put the hammer down on these predators. And throw blue herons in there as well...

       

       Pond owners in the Ozarks are learning to shoot any otters seen around   their ponds if they want to keep their fish. Stocking otters years back was one of the crowning   achievements of the Missouri Department of Conservation’s way-too-young-to-know-what-they-were-doing biologists.   Seemed like such a good idea!  They didn’t know that the otters would end up in north Arkansas rivers destroying fish numbers as well as they did in the Ozarks of Missouri.

Send me comments or messages via email at lightninridge47@gmail.com, or send me a letter to P.O.  Box 22, Bolivar, MO 65613.

Canadian Adventure

  

Canadian  Adventure 

 

            What an adventure I had recently in Canada!  I took my daughter Christy Lynn to Tinker Helseth’s place for a week of fishing in Lake of the Woods in mid-October. We drove all day, pulling my boat full of fishing gear, and got there about eleven p.m.  I awakened the following day to a beautiful sunny morning, looking forward to a day of fishing. As I looked from our cabin out across a wind-chopped bay it came to me that something was going to be   different from the way I had planned things. A hard pain hit me to the left of the center of my chest and I knew in a second what it was…a heart attack. 

       With the pain hammering me with each heartbeat, Christy took over, and drove me back to the border, to International Falls, Minnesota. There was no doubt what was happening… the pain was tremendous.

       They waved us through the border gate and in minutes we were at the small International Falls hospital—small but tremendously efficient.  A very obese doctor walking with a cane came in and two nurses gave me tests and some medicine, which instantly took away the pain. In minutes I felt back to normal, and even thought maybe there would be a chance to go back and go fishing.  No such luck.  Wired up for what they called an EKG, the test showed something was wrong and a blood test had enzymes that proved I was indeed having a heart attack.  

       The doctor was great… he kept treating me and told me that he would have a helicopter there soon to fly me to Duluth where a brand new hospital had several heart doctors to take over my treatment.  I think I went to sleep for a while or they had me so relaxed I didn’t know how the time flew past. It was about four in the afternoon when I saw that helicopter land just outside.  I told Christy to find out where the hospital was in Duluth and drive my pickup there, a three-hour drive to the shores of Lake Superior. Surely we could get back to fishing in a day or so.

       The helicopter trip, which I always dreaded the thought of, was something I will never forget.  They bundled me up and slid me in through a large back window and propped me up so I could see out. A very pretty nurse sat next to me all the way and talked to me via earphones that even let me hear the pilot. When that helicopter got started it felt as if it was vibrating to pieces but in short order I watched the hospital fade away and my daughter Christy climbing into my pickup far below.  I was worried about her, Duluth was 3 hours away and Christy does not drive in large cities.   Fortunately for her the city overlooking that huge great lake is not very large. Fortunately for me it has a great hospital only three years old with several top-notch cardiologists.

       But first let me tell       you about the helicopter ride.      My uneasiness due to fear of heights, known as heightrophobia, quickly went away.  For the first 30 minutes, I looked out from 2000 feet in the air at a landscape bathed in the light of the setting sun, then in the coming darkness, which showed hundreds of lights everywhere.

       I hadn’t been told that the new hospital was 17 stories   high.  When it landed that helicopter was on the very top of the building.  They put me on a gurney that was on wheels, and it appeared that the edge of that roof was only about 30 feet away.  I prayed that they would hold onto that cot-on-wheels as my heightrophobia came back strong.  It wasn’t that I dreaded so much what a 17-story fall would do, it was more the apprehension concerning what a long time I would have to think about it.

         They took me to a room and I met with the head cardiologist, a Dr. Shultz, who got me prepared for surgery early the following morning.  Christy got there just afterward, a big relief to me.  They told her that she could sleep in the hospital room on a folding couch, which was another big relief. That operating room the next morning was impressive, but I didn’t get to see much of it.  

       As I talked with a couple of nurses, I fell asleep and woke up just an hour later.  Christy was there, smiling, which told me I hadn’t had to have any kind of bypass.   A nurse explained I had received three stents, something they do when small arteries are blocked up.  I had some blockages amounting to 90 percent but thank the Good Lord in Heaven, no heart damage.

       The nurses and doctors and people there were good folks, it seemed to me.   On October 11, my birthday, a heart doctor spent about an hour in my room with a drawing board showing me everything about my heart, what had went wrong and what they had done to fix it. I learned a great deal from him about what I need to do to keep it working right.  He talked a little about diet, then brought Christy and I, a couple of pieces of birthday cake an hour later.

       A week and a half after we returned home, I went    back to Lake of the Woods to retrieve my boat and gear and to see my old friend, Tinker Helseth and his family. Two years ago I was up there on my birthday fishing some little-known lake by myself and caught a 6-pound smallmouth, my biggest ever.  Thank goodness I didn’t have my heart attack me then.  If I hadn’t had Christy with me, I don’t know what I would have done.  But the poor girl never got to fish.  Her younger sister, Leah Noel and her mother, Gloria Jean got to go back a week later with me, and the weather was great.  We just caught walleye one right after another.  We brought back fish and gear and the boat!            

       Christy says she brought back something of greater importance… ol’ Dad.   Might be that no one else would value this old timer above three days of good fishing.

Attacked in Canada

 

      I took my daughter Christy to Canada on October 7 to fish some wilderness waters near Nestor Falls Ontario. We got there at midnight, got a good night’s sleep and woke up just after sun-up to the dawn of a beautiful day.  Or so I thought!

      I looked out the window of our cabin to the gentle waves on the lake and began to plan the day.  But the Good Lord had other plans, I reckon!  I was suddenly hit with a hard bolt of pain at the left center of my chest and there was no doubt what it was. In minutes my daughter was driving me back to a small hospital in International Falls Minnesota, an hour or so away. 

      A doctor there gave me some medicine to   stop the pain and it was a tremendous relief.  About four hours later he had a helicopter landing just outside and finally they loaded me into it and we headed for Duluth where there was a nearly new hospital with several cardiologists. 

      We landed just after sunset on the seventeenth floor of Duluth’s St.  Mary’s hospital overlooking Lake Superior.  I   was whisked into ICU and met the senior cardiologist who began all kinds of testing and told me they would do surgery the next morning.  Twenty-four hours later they added three stents where there had been two put into small arteries many years ago.  I guess maybe they had rusted out! At any rate I thank the great Creator that there was no damage to my heart.

      My daughter drove down to Duluth in my pickup and stayed there in the hospital to be of help to me and the nurses and doctors there were wonderful. On the third day a heart doctor spent an hour with a black board diagramming what had happened and what they had done to me. When he found out it was my birthday he brought two pieces of cake in for Christy and I.  For four days they made sure there was no lasting affects and then dismissed me. We finally headed home.

      I am feeling great now and will head back to Canada this weekend to get my boat and   camera and fishing gear.  If it doesn’t come a blizzard, the fishing will be great and Christy will finally get a chance to sample it.

Remember that I   had that heart attack a full day before it was fixed   and yet there is no lasting affect.  If you   experience that   heart pain, get it examined quickly   and be confident that   you will recover as I did.

What Sounds Like a Trumpet?

This is a column I wrote years ago that I thought today’s readers might enjoy.

We decided to take a short float trip one November afternoon, down the river bordering some public hunting land.  We have killed several deer in such a manner; just drifting along so slowly and so quietly you are scarcely noticed by wild creatures along the stream.  Often we cover the boat with a blind, but that afternoon, we didn’t.  Not much reason to disguise it when the occupants are wearing blaze orange caps and vests.

An hour into the trip, we passed a harvested cornfield, and I heard an unusual sound, something like a Canada goose honking, but louder, coarser, a longer note.  In a matter of a few seconds, big birds soared up out of the field and turned upriver at treetop level.  One of them continued to uh, well… sound a little like a trumpet.  It was the first time I have ever heard a trumpeter swan, and though I have seen a few at a time on the water in various places in the Ozarks and in Canada over the past twenty years, I have never seen a flock of them that large. 

But there they were, eleven trumpeter swans in a line just over us, big and graceful. Trumpeter swans are rare sights, but they gather in the winter in good numbers at a semi-refuge in Arkansas, south of Greer’s Ferry Lake.  Obviously they are gaining in numbers little by little.  That flock of eleven is something I will not forget seeing.

We didn’t get a deer that afternoon; in fact we never even saw one.  We did see a wild gobbler and a half grown wild pig, coal black, and hard to see in the underbrush.  Had I seen him in time we would have some pork in the freezer tonight.  Squirrels of course were thick.  If you are a squirrel hunter you should have a good year, with all the acorns and nuts and berries we had this fall.  They should be fat and good to eat. It occurred to me that I ought to pass along more wild game recipes with this column, so here’s one I call ‘squirrel pizza’.  The first thing you do is fry a couple of young squirrels and take all the meat off the bones.   Then buy a pizza and remove all those little round pieces of meat that you always see on pizza, about the size of a half dollar.  They are not good for you, and you need to take all of them off.  Then distribute the squirrel meat all over the pizza and warm it up a little.  There you have it.  Next week I will perhaps give you my recipes for duck pizza and rabbit pizza!

      Someone sent me an outdoor page recently, from a large daily newspaper in the Ozarks that showed a photo of a big hornets nest that had fallen to the ground.  Their outdoor writer called it a wasp nest, obviously not having spent enough time outdoors to know what it was.  He dutifully noted that he had left it there because it was a part of nature.  It won’t be part of nature long!

Hornet’s nests are collected in the winter by many, who know that woodpeckers and other birds will tear them to pieces trying to get the larvae inside. No hornet’s nest I ever saw survives the winter.  But if you take one into the warmth inside a building, you need to be sure those larvae aren’t going to mature and create a swarm of hornets in your home next spring.  That has happened on occasion.

      No newspaper would allow glaring errors on their sports page. If a sports writer didn’t have better than average knowledge about basketball, football and baseball, he wouldn’t last long. There was a time when outdoor writers were men who grew up outdoors and had a great deal of experience in their field.  Those days are nearly gone.  Today if an ‘outdoor columnist’ makes glaring errors, who knows?  Newspaper editors in larger cities don’t know a fly-rod from a flatfish, so if mistakes are made they seldom see it.  And I doubt they care much because they figure readers don’t know much about the outdoors either.

      In a couple of weeks I am going to put one of our better photographers in a special camouflaged and covered boat, and drift down one of our rivers with me at the paddle, to see what kind of photos we can get.  I’ll have to leave my gun at home or I would be tempted to shoot some ducks for duck pizza. 

      The Winter/Christmas edition of my Lightnin Ridge  magazine is being printed in a week or so. If you would like to have a copy, call my secretary, Gloria Jean, at 417 777 5227.

 

How to Spend a Fall Day

 

What a banner year it is for walnuts and acorns and hickories.  There are nuts everywhere!  If I can just get my daughters and grandsons out here on Lightnin’ Ridge picking up walnuts I will sell enough of them to pay for my duck stamp.

The best parts of the year come and go so quickly.  Fall is like that, more than any other season.  It is my time of the year.  Half of October is gone and I haven’t yet picked up my .22 or shotgun for a hunting trip.  I realize now that it is time to spend more time in the woods or on the river than ever before, to try to see and experience as much as possible while it is still here.

Tonight I need to put some new line on a couple of reels, because over the next 3 or 4 weeks there will be some great fishing in the Ozarks.  Fish feel that cooling water, and begin to abandon the shallow water, heading to deeper spots.  But they do not yet reach that point where metabolism decreases.  

Fall fish feed in deeper water, but they aren’t on a diet yet, they are fattening up, sometimes eating more than they can hold.  It is primarily in the fall that I have seen white bass, and black bass gorging on shad, to a point where they attack a lure and have more shad or minnows in their gullet than they can get down. 

If you want to catch a big bass on a reservoir, fish deeper points and bluffs with a brown or black jig, with one of those salty rubber crayfish added to the hook.  But if you have some pork rind, up to four or five inches long, that will work too.  Some folks use nothing else but the pork, attached to a jig.  For big bass, I am not talking about small jigs, I like the big heavy ones that will fall quickly down over ledges into deep water, or scrape against the standing timber ten or twelve feet down.

Crappie fishermen love October, but I seldom fish for them after I catch them in Canada in early October.  I like smallmouth, and if I have a day to fish, I’ll probably be floating down a river, fishing a buzz-spin or a spinner-bait.  You would be surprised to see how big the smallmouth are on some of our Ozark rivers if you fish those waters without the bright canoes and kayaks seen there in the summer, banging and bumping by.  

The buzz-baits and topwater lures still catch fish in the deep water below the shoals, but they won’t work much longer.  Smallmouth later in the fall will be deeper, gorging themselves on crayfish, and anything that looks like a ‘crawdad’, as Ozark anglers call them, will attract smallmouth, Kentuckies and largemouth bass on our rivers. 

If a fisherman doesn’t have a knack for those jig and pork-rind combos he can do well with crank-baits that imitate crayfish.  Trouble is, in the fall, you have to fish a crankbait deep, but slow.  It takes a while to master that too.

There are few float trips I take in October when I don’t have a shotgun or .22 rifle along.  One of my favorite hunting guns is an over and under, .22-20 gauge combination my dad owned since I was a boy.  The rifle barrel is on top, and the shotgun on the bottom.  You flip a button on the side to determine which barrel you shoot.  

If you want a mess of squirrels to take home and cook on the grill, or with a pot of dumplings or stew, you use the .22.  If you go quietly down a river, you’ll see plenty of squirrels, and they seldom know you are there.  Close, still shots are common.

You do not use the brightly colored kayaks or canoes along a stream if you want to see wildlife, or catch big fish.  In fact, I would never ever hunt from a flimsy craft of any kind, and that’s what 17-foot canoes are, accidents waiting to happen.  My river boats are 19-foot or 18-foot square-sterned canoes, or 16- to 17-foot johnboats.  

In years past I have used my boat, with a blind attached to the front, to bow-hunt for deer.  And when November gets here, I will hunt ducks from my boat, while I fish a little as well.  But as I get older, the most important thing I have as I slowly and quietly move down an Ozark stream is my camera.  You can see some of the photos I have taken from my boat by visiting my website, www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com You can always contact me by writing to me  at p.o. box 22, bolivar, mo 65613  or emailing lightninrige47@gmail.com.

 

Geese Aplenty

 

 

      What a different creature Canada geese have become, with so many of them becoming non-migrators and just staying where they are, raising goslings on every little farm pond where cattle graze on permanent pasture.  Just think about it…. Not all that long ago, we never saw a goose in the Ozarks in the spring and summer and few in the fall and winter.  You seldom saw them, as they’d pass over in long strings, making beautiful music as the nip in the air and the falling leaves told you that winter wasn’t far away.

      Floating down the river in November and December of the 1960’s as a kid with my dad, hunting mallards and wood ducks from our old johnboat, if we saw a few Canada geese on the river, and actually had a chance to bring one home, it was a never to be forgotten experience.  Now, out hunting turkeys in the spring, it would be so easy to fill the freezer with Canada’s.  And while they aren’t as good to eat as wild gobblers; a smoked goose, or a roasted goose, certainly isn’t to be made light of.  It’s the goose-feather plucking that makes everyone think Colonel Sander’s fried chicken is the best route to take for Sunday dinner. But this fall I am going to get a goose or two for Thanksgiving and smoke it in my store-bought smoker.

      What a difference there is in the Canada goose today and the ones I saw as a boy, only fifty-some years ago.  But then again, what a difference there is in this whole world today.  The creeks so full of water, in which I swam throughout the summer, are dry today by the time July and August come around.  The woodlots along the river bottoms have been bulldozed and are now fields of green grass.  Where there were a dozen old cows there are now great herds.  

      But not long ago I saw a Canada goose with her nest in a hollow sycamore limb jutting out over the river 20 feet above the water. I suppose that is evolution. Geese don’t nest in hollow trees, but she did. It was smart of her. Other geese which nest on the ground each spring often lose their eggs when the river rises with lots of rain.  A strain of Canada geese are only 8- to 10-pounds in weight, but another strain, known as giant Canadas, are found nesting in bluffs in the Ozarks.  They may weigh from 14 to 18 pounds.

      I love to hunt geese; one of my most memorable hunts being the last one, two years ago in a grain field in Ontario.  It was a morning when the overpopulation of geese we have today was evident. They came in by the dozens for three hours.  I was with a friend of mine who is Lake of the Woods guide and we brought in a limit of five apiece.  Thirty years ago we hunted Canadas and snow geese each fall in Manitoba. In all instances of goose hunting we would lie flat on our backs in a field with decoys spread where they wanted to feed.  I spent much of that time using my camera instead of my shotgun.   If you would like to see some of those photos, go to the website www. larrydablemontoutdoors.

 

In about three weeks we will finish the winter/Christmas issue of the Lightning’ Ridge Outdoor Journal, a magazine with great stories about   hunting, fishing, conservation and nature.  To get your copy send a check for 8 dollars to LROJ, P.O. Box 22, Bolivar, Mo 65613. To use your credit card call Gloria Jean at  417 777 5227.

Don’t Hunt Fall Turkeys

 

The bow season has begun, and while I once took part in it, I won’t bow hunt this year. When you are young you can sit in a tree stand and spend hours enjoying yourself even if you don’t see a thing.  At my age, you never have four hours to sit and do nothing.  You realize as you get older that hours are precious, and you have options of catching fish, shooting squirrels, hunting teal and working on things around the house.  Well, skip that last option.

       But really, since I will kill a deer for my freezer when the muzzle-loader season gets here, and that is all I can eat in a year, why hunt deer in September with anything?  Bow hunting should not be very high on any outdoorsman’s list in September unless he doesn’t fish at all or do anything else but deer hunt.  It is a poor time to skin and hang a deer, because it is always too warm. The dead of winter is bow-hunting time.

        I have caught a couple of big bass in late September and early October.  It isn’t something I do in a short time.  I caught another 22-inch largemouth bass this past week, and I fished for three hours with a topwater lure with no results before he hit.  When he did, it was some fight.  

You can’t catch a bass that size in a tree stand, watching for a deer, so that is one reason I won’t bow hunt this year. Another of the reason’s I won’t bow hunt is I also am determined not to give the Missouri Department of Conservation any more money than I have to.  By the time you pay for waterfowl stamps, turkey tags, deer tags and all the other special tags you have to buy, then add on the 1/8 th cent sales tax we ALL pay them, it costs more to hunt and fish in Missouri than any other state in the United States.  This year you are required to spend more to bowhunt if turkeys are involved and next year even more and on and on and on.  They waste millions of dollars each year and ask our Missouri citizens to fund the waste.  Eighteen million is being spent on a waterfowl marsh, and in five years after dishing out the money nothing has been done that amounts to good news for waterfowl hunters.  Bulldozers sit where wildlife species by the dozens once thrived.

I urge hunters to not hunt wild turkeys this fall.  Turkeys are at an all time low right now going back to the 1960’s.  Do like I do and hunt them with a camera.  Then if you want to eat a turkey, buy one at the grocery store. It is cheaper than a fall tag. My camera shoots wild turkeys several times a year and yet it lets them propagate next spring.  We only have a fall turkey season to bring in more money for the MDC.  Don’t help them trade wild turkeys for money in their bank account.

       

       The Chief of Enforcement for the Department of Conservation is Travis McLain.  I’ve been talking to him about some of the times that I believe conservation agents have violated laws and the rights of hunters and fishermen.  He sent me a form for people who have a complaint against an MDC agent to fill out and send back to his attention.  So now you can actually be heard. I don’t know what good it will do but it is at least an attempt by Mr. McLain to listen and take some kind of action.  

       I encourage those who are being or have been victimized unlawfully by agents to use this form and send it in.  Until now I didn’t know it existed and it may be something new.  If you want my help in getting the form and getting it filled out, contact me… P.O. Box 22, Bolivar, Mo 65613.  I have copies of the form I can send by regular mail or email to you. You can also email me to get it … lightninridge47@gmail.com

If you want more information about our new Lightnin’ Ridge Outdoor Journal magazine coming out in November, you can call my office and find out what it is and how to get it. The number is 417-777-5227

 

The Low-Down on Doves

 

Did you know that a mourning dove has 2,635 feathers? I found that statistic in a book written by John Madson, entitled “The Mourning Dove”. Madson is gone now, but he was a top-notch outdoor writer, on of the old-timers who actually grew up in the outdoors, unlike the suburban outdoor writers that dominate the pages of our larger newspapers today. Madson worked for Winchester Arms and Ammunition, and he published several books about wild game birds and animals through Winchester Press..

Madson reveals many fascinating things about the dove. As a writer, I have likely written a hundred newspaper columns and perhaps a dozen magazine articles about dove hunting. It is so simple and so uncomplicated, what can you say about dove hunting that hasn’t been said a million times. You can’t tell a shooter how to hit one. Sometimes early in the season when the younger doves are coming to a feeding spot, or to a water hole, they are so easy to hit it is simpler than catching sunfish on worms. Sometimes, after they have figured out that hunting season is open, they can elude a shot pattern with ease, diving, twisting, and turning. At times it is something like hitting a butterfly with a rock. 

If it has been written once, that dove hunting is a good way to get a youngster the chance to hunt and experience a day outdoors, it has been written a million times. If you have seen, at the beginning of September, a story talking about training a young Labrador to retrieve, and how the heat can be hard on him so you need plenty of water, that too has been said again and again in print by some enthusiastic woods and waters journalist. If you haven’t heard that number seven and one-half or eight shot, light loads is best for doves, you’ve never read a doggone thing about hunting. So what is there to say about dove hunting. Not much. Heck, let me rephrase that… not nothing.

I might point out that hunting in a crowd isn’t my thing, but I have often written that. I have often said that I do not like to hunt in the heat, and there is never an opening day that doesn’t seem hotter than an August manhole cover on main street. What I don’t often say is that two or three weeks later, when it cools down and you can hunt in midweek and find the right spot, you can hunt doves in a long-sleeved shirt and all alone with your dog. But I’ll be darned if I am going to tell anyone where the hunting might be in early October.

Early hunting seasons interfere with some good fishing, and one good catfish equals a whole tubful of doves. Be that as it may, if you think you have indeed read everything there is to know about dove hunting and doves, get your hands on John Madson’s book. It was he who pointed out that in the bird family called Columbidae there are 269 doves and pigeons, two thirds of them on the other side of the world. Doves and pigeons, Madson said in his book, are the only birds that can drink water by suction, with their heads down, never lifting their beaks, as other birds must do.

 Mourning doves nest from southeast Alaska all through Canada, and each of the 48 contiguous states in the U.S. Forty years ago, they were not known to nest in such northern climates. Some never migrate. Some stay where they are all winter, and northern doves often lose toes to the cold. Doves and pigeons feed their young with something called pigeon milk, as most folks know, and as most folks don’t know, the most deadly dove disease, known as trichomoniasis, is a growth of cankers in the mouth and throat, caused by the ingestion of a living protozoan usually picked up in water.

You can learn a great deal more about doves if you can find John Madson’s book. Even the hunting tips we have all heard a million times. But as to how that study turned up 2,635 feathers on one dove, I don’t know. Probably some college kid counted them one at a time and got a thirty thousand dollar grant from a state conservation agency to do it. But I wonder, how would anyone know if he really counted them all or just gave up and guessed at it?

 

Contact me if you are interested in reading one of my books or the new magazine coming out in November.  My address is PO Box 22  Bolivar Mo. 65613. Or there is my office phone, 417 777 5227. The email address is lightninridge47@gmail.com

 Other columns I have written and my outdoor photos can be found on the computer at larrydablemontoutdoors.