WATER

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Letter to the Director of MDC

 

From Larry Dablemont

 

To Mr. Jason Sumner,  

Director-Missouri Department of Conservation

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Mrs. Kelly And Me

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

The “Sell Everything” Day

 

This is the 19-foot square stern canoe I am selling, minus me and Uncle Norten

         Readers of this column may recall that weeks ago I wrote that I was going to have a big sale here on Lightnin’Ridge on September 26.  I have decided, because it may be so hot then, to postpone it to Saturday, October 24. If it rains we will have it a week later. The list of things to be sold will be put on my website early in October, but it amounts to a ton of stuff I have accumulated over 60 years of hunting and fishing and a life in the outdoors.  I hope I have enough room up here beneath the oaks to put all of it out, and enough tables.  I don’t like the thought of an estate sale when I kick the bucket and I am not expecting to live but another twenty years or so!

         When I was only about thirteen years old I had such a fascination with outdoor magazines that I bought every one I could afford. I remember buying twelve bound volumes of Forest and Stream magazines about 1970.  They were from 1914 to 1926 and I paid 200 dollars for the whole bunch, about 150 magazines which had once sold for only ten- to fifteen-cents.  In 1959, Outdoor Life and Field and Stream and Sports Afield were only a quarter.  I wrote my first article for Outdoor Life when I was nineteen and my first article for Field and Stream and Sports Afield when I was 22. By then they were 60- to 75-cents apiece. Can you believe I still own all of them?  

         But that’s not all.  I now own thousands more, going back to 1908!  I started collecting old magazines and couldn’t stop.  I have about 20 titles of various antique magazines and I have an entire big basement room full of them, plus a couple of hundred or more of my own magazine…the Lightnin’Ridge Journal.  I also bought old outdoor and nature books that I hate to see go. As an Arkansas State naturalist and then NPS naturalist later on in my life, I learned so much I needed to know from those books, written by great naturalists who came along a century or more ago. I enjoyed them and learned so much more from them than my college books on fish and birds and plants and wildlife.

         It is hard to sell a magazine or gun or fishing reel that you have had since you were a kid in the 1950’s.  One of the hardest things to see go is my 19-foot Grumman square stern canoe that I have floated in since 1972, when it was given to me by the Grumman Company from Marathon New York.  I had graduated from college and became the Outdoor Editor for the Arkansas Democrat newspaper in Little Rock.  I was only 21 and poor as a dust-bowl gopher.  The only boat I had to use then was a wooden johnboat built by my dad that I had brought down from home.

         I had written an article for Outdoor Life about my Uncle Norten acquiring and guiding float fishermen out of a brand new Grumman 19-foot square stern and I had made a trip or two with him. I said I was envious of him, having something almost better than our johnboats. Grumman officials saw the article and told me they were sending me one at no charge on a train to Cabool, Missouri. I couldn’t believe my luck and I picked it up and used it a day or so later for the first time on the War-Eagle river in Arkansas, then Crooked Creek and then the Kings River.  In time I brought it up to the Big Piney and my dad, with a couple of his good johnboats sitting on sawhorses in the back yard, went with me on fishing trip.  This was a man who said he wouldn’t ever even sit in a canoe.

          In fifty years that Grumman canoe has been used in 5 states and 2 provinces of Canada, including the boundary waters. No Dablemont that I know of actually floated in a 17-foot canoe, but that wide, square-sterned canoe eventually became something several of my uncles and cousins acquired and used.  I have no idea how many trips that old 19-footer of mine has been on or how many miles of water has passed behind it, but I’ll bet that it is still being used 20 years from now, when it will be 100 years old.  Other items I hate to see go are my Bigfoot goose decoys and my duck decoys.  A few years back I would have told you that I would never give up those treasured items nor the great wildlife art that is hanging on the walls of my den.  But someone now needs to enjoy everything I have as much as I have.

         In early October as I start to get my ‘sell everything’ sale organized I will put a list of everything we are selling on the Internet under, larrydablemontoutdoors.  My fall magazine is ready now; to get a copy just email me at lightninridge47@gmail.com or 

Fall Issue and Christmas Issues

 

FALL 2026 ISSUE 

The Fall Issue of The Lightnin' Ridge Outdoor Journal will come back from the printers this week and will be sent out probably the first of next week. It's not too late to order a copy. It's $8.50 a copy and you can either send a check to LROJ, Box 22, Bolivar, MO 65613 or call our office at 417-777-5227 to pay with a card.

CHRISTMAS 2026 ISSUE

We also have a Christmas Issue that will be mailed the first of December.  If you would like to get both issues the price will be $17.00.   Don't forget, Our magazines make great Christmas or Birthday gifts.  We also have more than 50 back issues available for purchase at $5.00 each or if multiple magazines, the price is lower depending on the number. You can see all of the available issue by going to Larry's website larrydablemont.com BUT to save money, choose the issues you want, then contact our office and pay us directly.  

September Catfish

 

Flathead catfish we caught on a trotline

     Trotlines are productive, and they are enjoyable this time of year when the heat makes nighttime activity more acceptable. But trotlines are hard work, and they are dangerous. It has been said that trotlin­ing isn't "sporting." I can agree with that if you are after a small catfish. Trotlines set in shallow, flat lake coves where channel cat are abundant will often produce only small cats that don’t fight much, although there will usually be plenty of them. When you get ahold of a 30 or 40 pound flathead you have a struggle on your hands

    It takes time and knowledge of the channels and substrate to find big flathead, also known as ‘yellow’ catfish, in a large lake, and it's hard to set lines that don't become entangled, because of submerged stumps and dead timber. 

 

Grandpa Dablemont caught a 72 lb catfish the night I was born

       My grandfather, who was so much of a trotliner he considered all other types of fishing a waste of time, traveled often to Norfolk and Lake of the Ozarks with fishing clients where catfishing in his day was excellent. But he sought out the major tributaries and set his lines where the lake was more of a river. That’s where there were the distinct bluffs, overhangs and underwater ledges where flathead catfish seemed always to be found.

    That time of year, those tributaries see little fishing action. No one is that crazy about fishing in this September heat. Any small stream that feeds a lake, and has “bluff” holes will probably shelter some nice catfish. Of course the Ozark rivers that are free flowing also harbor big flathead, lots of them. And flatheads are especially hungry in September when the water is low, and the nights are dark. Find a deep hole, 15 to 20 feet deep with big rocks or a bluff, and you may find several flathead catfish in the 30- or 40-pound range.

    I've caught a half dozen 25-to 35-pound flathead out of one hole. Not on the same night of course. And once got three flat­head from 36 to 42 pounds taken from a bluff-hole on the upper portion of the War Eagle River near Huntsville. 

    Big rivers like the Missouri and the Osage get plenty of at­tention from trotline fisher­men after lunker cats that can get to be 80 to 100 pounds, but small streams don't. Some holes that we trotlined when I was a kid haven't been seri­ously fished in many years. Flathead don't move a great deal in the summer and early fall when the water is as low as it is now, and not yet cooled. They lie beneath a big rock or ledge or log in deep water, and sometimes wait for their meal to come to them. I believe their skin is sensitive to moonlight, explaining why they feed and prowl better on dark nights. They seem to really turn on when there are those violent late-summer storms at night that may even raise the river a couple of inches.

    Trotlines should run across the hole at an angle, within a few feet of any big rocks if pos­sible. If there's nothing but a bluff, angle the line across the hole just above the bluff, cut­ting through the deep water at a pretty good angle down­stream to the opposite bank. Tie to good solid roots or sapl­ings, and then go back to tie on sinker rocks to your main line every 12-15 feet. These rocks, picked up on a nearby gravel bar, should be about the size of your fist. The main line should be 300- to 400-pound test nylon, stretched fairly taut, but not tight along the surface before the weights are added. If there is a little slack in that main line the weights will stretch it and carry it down. You don’t want it loose enough for a big flathead to move it far enough to hang it up.  Loose trotlines don’t work well. For big flathead, use large number 6-0 or 4-0 hooks, and keep them sharp. They should be at­tached to the main line with 15 to 18 inch "stagion" lines, 50-70 pound test. Some trot-liners use a wire clip to attach these stagions, but with big flathead you shouldn’t mess with them.  Use slip knots and draw them good and tight. 

    To keep stag­ions from slipping up and down your main line, tie knots in the main line every one to two feet. The law requires that trot-line hooks be spread at least three feet apart, and not be left unattended for more than 24 hours. Each line must bear the name and address of the fisherman on a small wood or plastic tag, at one end. And you are allowed only thirty-three hooks.  If you are fishing in another state than Missouri, check to see if trotline laws are different.

Uncle Norten and I with a flathead caught on trotline

    In small streams, I use large live minnows, chubs, small suck­ers or live sunfish for bait, either seined or caught via hook and line. For flatheads you have to have live bait. Cut bait or dead bait works for channel catfish or blue catfish, but not for flatheads.  Night-crawlers do catch some flatheads but they are a poor substitute for live bait, usu­ally stripped off hooks by turtles or crayfish quickly. Have enough bait to run and rebait your lines every three or four hours dur­ing the night if you can stay awake. To do that have a good headlamp.

    Trotlining is dangerous be­cause if you get hooked, the weighted lines can pull you to the bottom. Have a good knife at your belt.  I keep two because I have needed them twice before to cut a line I got hooked by.  When I was 17 I got pulled out of my johnboat and entangled in a line when I lost my balance. Thank goodness for that sharp knife then. Never stand up when running trotlines and by all means use a good stable boat. Kayaks and small canoes, even 17 footers, are too risky for trotlining; those can get you drowned.  So if you drown because you capsize while you are trying to land a big hard pulling catfish from an inadequate boat, don’t complain to me, I warned you!

 

A Bass in the Evening - and a sense of humor

 

Joe Smith ????

 

      It was a nice little cove with clear water, and it looked to be a good place to fish a topwater lure, late in the evening as the hot sun dipped below the horizon. There was a nice little rock cliff not far away, some timber sticking up out of the water nearby, and no one there but me.

       I had something swirl the water behind the lure once, but for a half hour or more I didn’t get much other action than that.  And then, the lure landed just right in a spot next to a fairly good-sized sycamore sapling and a bass sucked it under.    There wasn’t much commotion, nothing like the demolishing,  ‘jump out of the water” attack you sometimes see from a marauding bass looking for an easy meal.  This one just pulled it down and took off with it, and I set the hook when he did.  All I had to do was keep the bass out away from a couple of snags, and I had casting gear with line strong enough to do that.

       The fish lunged and struggled and broke water once, but it wasn’t a fight he was going to win.  Eventually I brought him up alongside the boat and got my thumb in his mouth and wished someone was along to take a picture.  A good photograph could have made that bass look five pounds or better, if it was taken right.  And honestly, he was almost four and a half pounds, give or take five or six ounces. 

 

      But I turned him loose, and fished awhile longer, as the dusk came on and the water was calm and the evening was still.  I caught another bass which also fought hard, but wasn’t half as big.  I put that one in my live well, because it was a Kentucky bass.  It would be eaten soon, and that would make me feel a little better about using all that expensive gasoline just to go fishing.

       It was getting dark back at the little gravel road where I left my pick-up, and when I backed my trailer down into the water to load the boat, two ladies drove up and prepared to catch some catfish from the bank.  They seemed very pleasant, asking me about my fishing trip and talking about how hot it was.  And they were both very nice looking ladies, or so they seemed to be in the late evening light, which has a tendency to make us all better looking.  As I grow old, I notice that more ladies are nice-looking now than they use to be, and there are a great deal more of them I meet who are younger than me.  Many of them though, seem to be harder to get along with.

       “You know,” one of them said as I prepared to leave, “you look a little like that guy who writes the outdoor column in the newspaper.”

       I came close to telling them I was, maybe even bragging a little bit about my fishing ability, but thank gosh I didn’t.  The other one made a nasty comment about that column I wrote a few weeks ago, the one about how you can tell a female bass from a male bass by their disposition and weight. It was something I meant to be humorous and light-hearted but it was plain she didn’t much cotton to my kind of humor.  So I told them my name was Joe Smith, and I was a little shorter and older and more sensitive than that no-account newspaper columnist.

       “I’d like to run into him just once,” one of them said, “I’d tell him a thing or two about his ideas concerning women.”  It was a precarious situation.  Somehow, I had let one of them get between me and the pickup, so I groped around in the live well and hauled out that little old Kentucky bass and asked if they’d like to have him.  It quickly diffused the situation, and they were all smiles.  

       I told them I thought it probably was a male bass, and deserved to be filleted and fried.  And then I got out of there in a hurry.  But they don’t realize that if either of them had just said they liked that column and got a good laugh out of it, I might have hung around awhile and helped them catch a few catfish.  So you see ladies, it pays to have a sense of humor!

 

Squirrels..Part 2

 

Squirrel in our bluebird house

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

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

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

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

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

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

    

Baby in a bucket

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

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

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

          

          

Squirrels

 

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

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

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

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

  
 

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

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

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

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

 

More about squirrels in next week’s column…

Crawdads for Fishin’ and Eatin’

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I Learned From Rufous

 

                                                            Large Camouflaged copperhead

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Too Soon Old

 

Grandpa McNew and me - 1953

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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