This fall, there are mushrooms everywhere.
We have hen- of-the-woods mushrooms all over the place up here on Lightnin’ Ridge, and there are bushels of coral mushrooms if you want to get out and look for them.
Both are edible, and delicious if cooked right. But don’t take chances, be sure you know what you are looking for, and what you are eating. Coral mushrooms are easy to figure out though, and excellent eating. You just fry them with flour and seasoning.
There are so many hickory nuts, walnuts and white oak acorns that you have to be careful around my place or you’ll get whacked on the head by one, falling from a tree. Big white oaks hanging over my back decks keep me awake at night, dropping their acorns. I have enough walnuts up here that if I can get my grandsons out here with a pocket full of nickels to entice them, I should be able to fill my pickup and a trailer with them. I might, without straining my back too much, have enough to buy shotgun shells ’til Christmas.
If you like to hunt squirrels, I was at Rich Abdoler’s home a week or so ago and ate a couple of young squirrels his wife Debbie had marinated and cooked on a grill. I never ever ate a squirrel that was so good. Until now, I always figured she got the best of the deal when they got married, but it has cast a new light on my old hunting partner’s wife, who has not been on my good side in many years because she won’t let me and Rich hunt with her little terrier house-dog, which is the most natural squirrel dog I ever saw.
I will put that marinade recipe in the first few pages of my magazine, the October issue of “The Lightnin’ Ridge Outdoor Journal,” and I think it makes squirrel better eating than prime rib. Although it has been a while since I’ve had prime rib!
Ryan, my little grandson who just turned six and started to kindergarten, comes in my office and reads books on dinosaurs and wildlife, and reflects on things that makes you wonder if he shouldn’t be starting high school.
He was sitting there the other day, and asked me if I was aware that the opossum is the only marsupial in America. “All other marsupials,” he said, are on the continent of Australia.”
I told him if he meant to run with me he needed to start calling it a possum, not an oh-possum.
Later that day, we were on our way to a neighbor’s pond to do some fishing and he was very worried about the cows standing in the farm lane. I explained that if we drove very slow, the cows would get out of the way with little exertion, and those dents in my old pickup’s fenders didn’t come from running into cows, but rather trees, which will not move, even when you drive slow.
A little while later we were at the pond and a big hefty bluegill took off with his lure. He was quite excited, but I noticed he was reeling backwards, and the bluegill was gaining on him. I finally got him reeling the right way and he landed the fish, much to his delight.
It worries me to see a kid who can read on the same level as his grandpa, but cranking a spinning reel backwards. I think that might go back to the fact that his father is from Boston. But then he caught a nice bass, and seemed to be developing the technique to be a good angler.
His little brother Alex is quite a bit more like his grandpa. Alex just turned four and doesn’t read much. He addresses little problems which arise by hollering and yelling and throwing a fit, and eventually getting a spanking. I use to be that way. I certainly never realized, until I was a couple of years into college, that a possum was a marsupial.
Ryan took notice of a big bass in shallow water slashing away at some minnows, and my little grandson compared it to the predatorial attitude of tyrannosaurus rex, a dinosaur which he has been reading about, and is scared to death of.
On the way back to my house, he commented on how I was certainly a considerate grandpa to go so slowly and let the cows get out of my path with so little effort. I allowed as how my neighbor, who owned the cows might not let us fish in his pond if we weren’t nice to the cows. But Ryan said that seemed to be typical of mankind.
“Grandpa,” he said, “Did you notice that humans are the only predators which are kind to their prey.”
I thought about that for a minute, dumbfounded that a 6-year-old would even think of such things. Ryan went on to explain that the bass and tyrannosaurus rex and wolves in particular were very cruel and vicious in catching and eating their food. Now that I think about it, he is right, but then he wasn’t around to see me and my cousins come to the breakfast table on my grandpa’s farm.
It is nice to have grandsons who finally get to the age you can start to teach them to hunt and fish and not worry about them wetting their pants anymore. I am going to enjoy these next few years if I can keep their mother in the dark about some things.
I think Alex and me will be very much on the same page, as you can see him on schedule to be a grizzled old outdoor veteran like me at a young age. He’ll likely never call a possum anything but a possum, and he can already spit.
But Ryan may soon be on a level way over my head. I didn’t even know I was a predator until I had eaten enough squirrels and rabbits and ducks to fill a pick-up bed. And I wasn’t reading until I was forced into it.
I will be writing more in upcoming columns about the Missouri Department of Conservation and some things you need to know about what they are doing. And I will write more about the book I am planning to do on Ozark War Veterans from WWII. We still intend to celebrate Uncle Norten’s birthday around Veteran’s Day with a get-together and dinner for WWII paratroopers.
Address correspondence to Larry Dablemont, Box 22, Bolivar, Mo., 65613. Send e-mail to lightninridge@alltel.net, check the Web site www.larrydablemont.com, or call (417) 777-5227.
