Outlaw

 

Outlaw

         I don’t remember when the old hound wasn’t around. He was that old. Jess called him Outlaw…raised him from a pup. In his day he was a big powerful trailing hound with a voice they talked about all across the county.

         I remember those nights in the Big Piney River valley when old Outlaw struck a hot trail and all the talk around the campfire would stop In the silence, the lonesome bawl of the legendary hound floated over the hills, distinct from the baying of the other dogs, so powerful and strong it sent a shiver down my backbone.

         Maybe you wouldn’t call it music, but Jess and the other men knew it as such. All I know is, the voice of old Outlaw was different than any fox along the river had ever heard before. I remember that year as I grew older and winter came on, how the aging hound became stricken with disease. He didn’t eat much and he lay around most of the time growing thinner and lazier by the day. He was beginning to lose his teeth when Jess brought Outlaw to the vet.

         “How old is this hound, Jess?” the veterinarian asked, shaking his head as he looked him over.

         “Right at fourteen years, I reckon,” the old woodsman answered.

         With sympathetic eyes, the doctor looked into the weathered face of the hunter He knew Jess and he knew his advice wouldn’t be easy to swallow.

         “He’s old and sick, Jess,” the vet told him. “Maybe if he was younger I could help some, but at this age there’s nothing I can do. He’ll just go downhill and sooner or later you’ll need to put him to sleep to keep him from suffering.”

         Jess took it hard but he never let it show. The ring of old-timers who looked forward to those late winter fox hunts with such jubilance now prepared for a hunt with sadness. Jess had announced it would be old Outlaw’s last chase. It was cold that night and some said they could feel snow in the air. Fallen leaves lay along the old logging road that led down the river and they crackled beneath the shuffling feet of the hunters. It was just like always before, with most of the men joking abut someone else’s dog or telling some wild story about the past deer season. Only Jess was quiet.

         Everyone acted like nothing was different, but there was a strained atmosphere that night. Grandpa had instructed me to not ask any questions and that was a tough job for a 13-year-old boy. But I tagged along quietly behind him and Jess, heart saddened and feet heavy.

         Old Outlaw walked beside Jess for a long while, unlike the times in years before when he was the first hound on the trail. The other dogs had headed for the river upon being released. Jess’ other hound, a young pup, kept returning to the group as if urging old Outlaw to join him.

         But the big hound stayed by the side of his lifelong friend and master, his muzzle ever far from the old woodsman’s hand.

         No one seemed to notice when he left us, but as we grouped around the fire on the river’s edge, I noticed that Outlaw was gone. The other hounds had a chase going back to the south and most everyone assumed he had joined them. But as the first chase faded farther away, there came a long deep bawl from the low ridge to the east witch paralleled the river. There was no mistaking that voice.

         Suddenly the talking stopped and most of the men rose to listen one last time to those clear, long, drawn out notes. I stood too with those chills playing up and down my spine again like always before. Jess’s young dog joined Outlaw for awhile, but as the chase left us and crossed the river downstream, the young dog returned to the fire, apparently somehow aware that this trail belonged to Outlaw alone.

         Across the river, the pursuit turned upstream again and Outlaw’s voice became strong as he moved near us. I wondered how that voice could remain so clear and deep and strong while the old hound became weak and fail with age. Most of the men couldn’t believe that those aging legs could carry the big hound as far as the chase had led him, but the voice never wavered and Outlaw forged on, hot on the trail of another fox. Jess moved out away from the fire and stood alone, his hands thrust down into the pockets of his overalls, his mind way up on that ridge with his dog. I was glad that the darkness prevented everyone from seeing his face… and mine.

         But then the chase turned away, high into the hills across the Big Piney, westward into the vast timbered expanses of the National Forest. We listened in the stillness as the old hound’s deep, bellowing voice became harder and harder to hear, eventually silenced by the distance.

         Outlaw never returned that night. He must have sensed it would be his last chase. Oh, I knew that dogs couldn’t think or reason but I liked to imagine the big hound knew it was better that way, better especially for the old man who loved him so much.

         Some of the men figured he had caught up with big old red wolf that they said roamed those river hills and some said maybe he trailed a mountain lion to his doom But I don’t know, I wonder if he didn’t just keep running until those tired old legs would carry hi no farther.

         Age my have stopped those old legs and stilled his strong heart, but nothing could have stilled his voice. On a cold, clear winter night it echoes across the valleys of my memory and I can see old Jess standing there in the edge of the firelight saying good-bye to his old friend.

         Occasionally, hunters along the lower Piney claim they hear an extra voice in with their hounds on a cold winter night… a voice deep and clear, which seems to fade away into the timbered hills to the west. And one old trapper who travels the river in the midst of the winter, swears that on a still night, if you stand quiet and listen hard, you can hear the far away baying of a hound… a hound with a voice of pure gold, beginning and ending deep in the wilderness across the Big Piney where the spirits of old fox hunters are listening still.

The Miracle Fish

 

         There was no underestimating the size of the walleye I hooked. He was a dandy, five or six pounds a least and maybe bigger. You could see him easily as I fought him alongside the boat, with my fishing partner whackin’ at him with the dip net, something like a great blue heron would stab at a sunfish.

         I just didn’t have my drag set properly on my reel. Most generally that is something I do at the beginning of every fishing trip, I check the drag on whatever I am fishing with. And you need to check the last few feet of your line for any nicks or abrasions.  I am just getting too darned old to remember everything I guess, and I forgot to check either. When that walleye saw my fishing partner waving that net around like he was a highway department flagman, he really got wild, and he made a huge lunge for deep water and broke the line.

         The lure was nothing of great importance, it was one of those four- or five-inch black and white minnows that look like the old Rapala lures, one that you can jiggle around on the surface or yank down under maybe three feet or so when you reel it in. I was catching some really hefty white bass on it. I had some good ones and one walleye just a little better than fifteen inches long. Then that big walleye came up from the depths and engulfed it and the fight was on. He won, and I lost my lure.

But I have several similar ones that are even better, lures referred to as ‘Rogues’.  I tied one of them on and kept fishing.  And I didn’t throw my hat on the boat floor and utter an expletive and moan about that lost walleye like my fishing partners have seen me do before. A fisherman with my experience gets use to losing big fish on occasion when using light line and a switch for a fishing rod.

         You don’t become a grizzled old outdoorsman like me without watching big fish disappear in the depths on occasion, leaving you limp-rodded. You just figure God had a better purpose for that fish than a sizzling destination in my frying pan. You have to occasionally blame the Great Creator for your dirty rotten luck as a fisherman, unless you want to blame yourself for not checking the drag on your reel or not replacing old line.

         But now we are coming to the unbelievable part. I tied on that other lure, just like the one I lost except different, and almost an hour later down the river about a half mile, I made a cast and when I reeled the lure back, it had hooked and retrieved the one I lost. I swear folks, that is the truth! When I reeled it back in the boat, the one which broke off and last seen in the toothy jaw of that big walleye, was dangling from the back hook of the new one I tied on to replaced it!!! It sounds like something an outdoor writer might make up? But honest, I swear on the life of  my best coon dog and my camouflaged War-Eagle boat.  If I am lying, may it have a hole in the bottom it, and may my Ugly-Stick break right in the middle!!

         My fishing partners both ‘seen it themselves’, and you can ask them, a couple of the most honest men I ever met! But we hadn’t seen nothin’ yet. Wait ‘til you hear this! I tied that old lure back on, and reset my drag so that it was perfect. And I started catching white bass again. Its a drizzly, dark afternoon and one of my fishing partners caught two walleye that were 16 to 19 inches in length, fish that my previously lost lunker might have sired in his earlier days.

         And nearly two miles down the river from where I lost that big walleye, and a mile and a half from where I miraculously recovered my lost lure, I cast it out into a deep eddy below a shoal and a huge fish engulfed it only four or five feet from the end of my rod. He looked like a monster coming up from the depths. He stripped four or five feet of line against the drag and I told my fishing partners I was about to lose that lure a second time in two hours!

         But this time, one of them got the net under that big walleye and it was mine. I don’t know how much it weighed but it was 25 inches long and hefty. I knew that the Great Creator was trying to let me know how sorry he was that I had lost the first one. Maybe the fact that I am trying so hard not to cuss as much when I lose a fish is paying dividends. Or maybe He just decided it was that second big walleye’s time to finally sizzle in my frying pan, as he would, soon.

         Maybe that second lunker wasn’t as deserving as the first, I can’t say. But that two hours and the course of events in which a lost lure was found, and a second lunker walleye was hooked on it, certainly makes a man think; something I don’t do a lot of.

         I swear this story is the truth, all of it. It happened in February a couple of years back. I can show you that lure. It has big tooth marks all over it!

 

The above story is an excerpted chapter from the   book “Recollections of an Ol-Fashioned Angler”  To get an autographed copy call my office at 417 777 5227   or email us at lightninridge47@gmail.com  See all my books and magazines on the website… larrydablemont.com

Where Common Sense Doesn’t Work…Isn’t Tried

 

CHECKING DEER FOR CWD

       The Missouri Department of Conservation has told a few dozen landowners in Texas county they intend to come into a 25-square-mile tract of land and set up bait and lights to night-shoot 110 deer.  This is part of an attempt to find transmissible spongiform encephalitis, which they commonly call CWD or ‘chronic wasting disease’. It is all the result of finding one buck with the disease last September. And yes there are better ways to do this, but the MDC is accustomed to telling folks what they are going to do whether it makes common sense or not, and whether they like it or not.

       If they were to send their biologists to the area in September and October and require hunters to check the first 110 deer killed they would accomplish the same results.  They won’t! Common sense and the wishes of the landowners be damned!   If they checked road-killed deer over the next year in the county they could accomplish the same result… but they won’t.    Again, that makes too much sense.

       What they have chosen is an ‘in your face’ method that will result in the   taking of probably 80 or so pregnant does with fawns soon to be born, which will make the total of the kill more like 200 to 250    deer, considering what those fawns will amount to, fawns that will die inside the womb of those female deer.  Of course 30 or so of the 110 deer killed by spotlighting over piles of corn at night will be bucks that local landowners who hunt with their families will never see next fall.

       One of the landowners told me…”I don’t want to be a part of that… bucks don’t   set in one place, they travel in the fall and one or two that I might see on my place then might be killed this month by these government shooters. It is going to affect my deer hunting in a bad way, and they just don’t care.”  He is right… they don’t care.  The MDC doesn’t need country people.  As long as St. Louis and Kansas City and Springfield hunters give them thumbs up, they can do without landowners and rural people.

        The science of this is faulty, because this isn’t necessary.  The landowners who permit this will not be scattered.   The 110   deer will come from a concentrated area, and that area will lose a lot of deer over the next three years because of it.  And all because the MDC wants to test these deer NOW rather than next fall.  It seems so senseless.

       I met   with and interviewed the new MDC director a month ago and brought up that very thing.  “You seem to grab onto your own answers and ignore others that make more sense”.  That interview led me to believe nothing is going to get better.   That director has an attitude of being carried away with their power to do whatever they want, and then pass it off as science. The truth is, the people they have hired have been through what is known as DEI and there is rank inefficiency and incompetence.  I see it when I talk to biologists. I have the same degree from Missouri University they have and years of study and experience they do not have. The MDC is a bureaucracy out to make as much money as possible and country people are of little consequence.  They see public-land timber as a money maker, deer as a money maker, wild turkey as a money maker and declines in all three can’t cost them anything.  This killing of 110 deer in that small area by spotlighting over bait, is ridiculous.  But again, it is what happens when you give a state agency ultimate power, as that 1/8^th cent tax did, decades back.  The state legislature can do nothing about any of this. 

This slaughtering of 110 deer in a confined area cannot be stopped, and it has been and will be carried out  in other parts of the state.  But it is fake science.  How I wish common sense could come back.

A Scientific Approach

 

Sick buck couldn't get up when I walked right up to him

       During the archery season in September, a hunter killed a young buck just west of Highway 63 between Houston and Licking Missouri.  It looked healthy but testing showed it to be infected with TSE, (Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy). That is the disease where disfigured proteins riddle the brain.  Thousands of humans have died from those proteins, known as prions, infecting the brain.  In England, years back many humans died from eating cattle infected with those prions.  That was TSE… but called Mad Cow Disease in England.

       In deer and elk TSE is given the common name of ‘Chronic Wasting Disease’.  It is said often that humans cannot get Chronic Wasting Disease or CWD.  Doctors I have talked to and researchers from other states say otherwise.  Relatives of people who have died of TSE from eating deer meat are never allowed to tell their stories in the media, though I have interviewed several whose accounts of their loss of a loved one sounds very credible and horrible.  Two men in a Montana hunting lodge died recently from TSE. They had cleaned and eaten the same deer meat one had killed.  I am certain that people have died from getting prions from deer meat, and I am also certain that there are some people that have eaten deer with the disease who didn’t get it. It may well be like the roll of the dice.

       Whatever you believe, you darn sure aren’t going to eat a diseased deer if you know it.  I hope that bow-hunter who killed the diseased buck didn’t eat any of that one.  The Missouri Department of Conservation will not give his name. Now the MDC wants to create a twenty-five square mile of ground around where that buck was killed and send their ‘shooting teams’ to kill and sample another 110 deer.

       Shooting teams are made up of Conservation Department personnel and some members of the US Dept of Agriculture, according to MDC’s deer biologist Jason Gabriel. He spoke to a gathering of about 75 people, most of them from that 25 square mile area, this past Tuesday night in Houston.  His presentation was very good, but much of the terminology is difficult for the average person to understand.  Gabriel did his best to explain it all.  But the gist of his talk was trying to explain that the MDC feels they have, by using this late winter harvesting tool, held CWD at bay in the Ozarks.   While other states, especially Wisconsin and northern Illinois have found 60 percent of the deer with the disease; in Missouri the percentage is only two percent of those sampled.

       Gabriel felt the ire of audience members who owned land in that square who did not want the sampling to take place because at this time of year, many doe deer carry two or three fawns almost ready to be born.  When looked at in such a manner, the 110 deer killed ends up taking perhaps 300 deer from the 25 square miles because of the unborn fawns.  And then there’s the method used; deer killed by spotlighting over bait.  Big antlered bucks aren’t spared, and hunters who want those antlers will never be able to take them next deer season.  Too many big trophy bucks will be in that total of 110. 

       So while Gabriel’s biological method of controlling CWD in the Ozarks makes scientific sense, that approach does not set well with hunters and landowners.  Of course individual landowners can say no, but deer do not confine themselves to fenced-in boundaries.  If the guy next to you welcomes those shooting teams to his land, the deer killed will likely be part of the deer herd that spends time on your place. Whether you like it or not, big bucks and pregnant does will be killed… a lot of them. The whole thing can be forced upon those landowners, and will be.  No one can stop it from happening short of a court order, and no judge will go against the MDC with their money and power!  

       A good alternative was discussed at that meeting… why not start checking the deer killed along the highway? No dice!  “It isn’t necessary,” was the response from Jason Gabriel, sewing a seed of discourse amongst country landowners and hunters all around Texas County and elsewhere.  That approach may be sound reasoning, but the MDC often rejects sound reasoning.  Gabriel has people above him who control what he does. Even if he thinks having a team to check road-killed deer is a good idea, he can’t say it should be done.   Such a decision would likely get him fired.

        But why not check road-killed deer? If 30 or 40 deer killed along the highway had glands removed and sent in, that would mean Gabriel’s shooting team could kill less live deer.  If you use volunteers like me, who know where the glands are and how to remove them, then think of the money that would be saved.  And after all, money is the greatest motivating factor in everything the MDC does.  Who knows how much money will be spent in having those shooters kill 110 live deer in that 25-mile square acreage.

       I will discuss this more in next week’s column and then promise to move on too more important things, like catching winter crappie or walleye.

       Speaking of walleye, I will be speaking to a walleye fisherman’s club at Clinton Arkansas, at the Fairfield Bay Resort on Greer’s Ferry Lake the evening of January 20.  If you have an interest in attending, there is further information about this event on my BlogSpot, larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com. Or you can contact me at lightninridge47@gmail.com or by calling my office at 417-777-5227.   

                                                                                        

Fairfield Bay Resort, Clinton AR, Speaking Engagement, Jan 20, '25

 

 

The Greatest Man I Ever Knew

 

 

 

 

My dad, Farrel Dablemont

      

      

      My Dad’s birthday was this week.  He died at the age of 84 in 2011. I miss him most when I am on the river, where we spent so much time together.  Dad was several inches taller than me at 6’ 3”.  He was strong and quiet, hard working and dedicated to his church and community.  He was too young to fight in World War II, but when he was just barely 17 he joined the merchant marines and wound up on the high seas in liberty ships, which took a tremendous beating during the war. High numbers of them were sunk by German U-boats, and thousands of merchant marine sailors were lost at sea.

      Actually, it was my dad who taught me to fish and run the river when I was just a little tyke. I was floating the river with Dad when I was only 6 or 7, learning how to cast an old open-faced Shakespeare casting reel. 

      One of my best selling books is an account of my dad’s experiences he was just a kid on the Piney I the 1930’s.  It is entitled “Little Home on the Piney”. If you would like a copy, contact me. 

      The following is just part of a magazine article he wrote years ago and it is his memories of long ago days on the river….

 

 

      ----What fishing there was in those days!  The Big Piney River was full of bass and goggle-eye and black perch. It was nothing to catch 30 or 40 perch and goggle-eye in a single day, and a dozen or so nice smallmouth bass.

       I missed a lot of school in the spring and fall so I could guide fishermen, but it couldn’t be helped, the family needed the money. I made good grades because I studied hard and read a lot.  The schools understood in those days when boys were needed at home.

       My customers were mostly nice people and I enjoyed working for them.  I had one man who insisted on standing on the front seat to fish.  I warned him if we hit a submerged rock or stump he would fall out.  He told me he was a gymnast and an expert on balance.  So being a dumb kid like I was, I decided to see how good he was.  Going down a deep riffle, I saw a small stump just underwater and I built up a little steam and hit it head on.  I can’t describe how he looked flailing in mid-air with both arms and legs while he fought to keep his feet on that boat seat.  But he wasn’t the expert on balance he declared himself to be.  He went in with a big splash.  For some reason he never used my guiding services again, even though he caught a good mess of fish that day after he dried out.

       Then there was a man from St. Louis who wanted to photograph the Big Piney River.  He was to come early on a Saturday morning but on Friday we had a heavy rain.  He showed up the next morning with his wife and sister-in-law after the river had risen 15 feet.  I told him I was sorry but it was just too high to float.

       “I thought you were a riverman?” he said.  “I just want to take pictures. Couldn’t we make it?”

       So the four of us set out in a 16-foot wooden johnboat.  I knew the river and all the dangerous bluffs and crooked places.  So when the river was straight I stayed in the middle and in the main current, and where it was crooked I took to the edges and paddled through the fields where the water wasn’t as fast.  Boy, what a ride we had!  There were some tense moments when my passengers were hanging on for dear life, but we made it in four hours…a distance of 20 miles.  We even stopped twice to climb hills and take pictures.

       The gentleman paid me well but now that I’m older and wiser, I would never do it again, and shouldn’t have done it then.  We were all risking our lives.

       As a fishing guide I have seen strange things on river floats.  I took two lawyers from Springfield on a few trips.  I remember one trip in particular when they had done well in the morning but by noon they had downed most of a whole bottle of Jim Beam.  One threw a wild lure and caught the other one in the lobe of his ear.  I’m not much of a surgeon but I offered to cut the hooks and take it out.  The fisherman declined.  He wore that lure in his ear for the rest of the trip, taking a drink of his antiseptic every so often.  After that, I asked that fishermen take no alcohol on float trips.  It was one of the smartest moves I ever made.

       I have seen grown men cry when they lost a big fish.  One got so mad he broke his rod over his knee and threw it in the river. 

       I am so than thankful l that I lived the life I had as a kid, in a time when the rivers were clean and clear and God gave me the privilege of watching so many people catch fish while floating through those beautiful unmarred hills and valleys, which were then still much as He created them.  And I’m thankful he let me be a part of a vanishing breed…an Ozark riverman.  Only those of us who remember it the way it was then, know how bad it is now…and what God-given treasures we have lost forever.