Most of you who read this column know I don’t often make mistakes.

At least I don’t often admit to any. However I made one a month or so ago during turkey season and I feel I should correct it before I go on. I wrote about having some dry Browning boots, which I had purchased on sale in a Cabela’s store way up in Nebraska in October of 2007.

I was on my way to Colorado to hunt elk for the very first time in my life and if they hadn’t been on sale, I probably wouldn’t have been able to afford them. But they were and I did, and during this spring’s wet turkey season they kept my feet dry, which is a real testimony to their quality.

No one is harder on boots than I am, because I put a lot of miles on a pair of boots in one season due to my inability to sit still very long. I like to walk when I hunt, and in a years time I climb a lot of Ozark hills looking for some valley I haven’t seen before.

Of course I also use them when I am cutting firewood or looking for mushrooms or poke, or arrowheads or blackberries, or speaking to country people at some sort of wild game dinner or meeting.

When I talk to city people I always wear my church shoes, and they have lasted me for and years. I don’t walk far in my church shoes, and they are comfortable enough to sleep in.

Anyway, I wrote that I had a pair of Browning boots but had never owned a Browning firearm. I was wrong about that, though the one I own is as much someone else’s as it is mine. A couple of years ago, a reader, Jim Lucas from over in eastern Kansas, won a Browning pump shotgun at a Ducks Unlimited dinner, and he felt he would never use it, and wanted to give it to me as a gift of appreciation for writing occasional stories which he enjoyed.

I met Mr. Lucas and had dinner with him and offered to pay him for the gun, but he refused, and asked only that I use it with conservation ethic and remember where it came from.

Using that beautiful shotgun was hard to do, because basically it is a waterfowler’s gun and I can’t bring myself to take it out in the mud and the fowl weather of a duck blind. I put it on the wall in my office with a little note about it being a donation to Lightnin’ Ridge Publishing Co. from Mr. Lucas.

On several occasions I did shoot trap with it, and I love the shotgun. I had to try really hard to miss a clay pigeon with it. It is, as most firearms Browning makes, a thing of beauty and quality. Most of my life I have hunted with Winchesters and Mossbergs and Remingtons, and a very special old Smith and Wesson.

Jim Lucas called to remind me, after that column, that I do own a Browning shotgun, and at his insistence I promised I would take it hunting. He said he was beginning to think he should have donated the shotgun to a charitable cause so it could see some action.

Two days later I carefully took it turkey hunting, after days of very difficult and unproductive hunting, and it brought me luck the first day in the woods. I never spent a more careful morning with a shotgun, and I am happy to report the beautiful walnut stock still has no scratches.

About ten that morning, I aimed down its barrel at the red and white head of a two-year-old gobbler, one of three trying to figure out how to get to the hen they thought they had heard ahead of each other.

I guess it will go duck hunting with me this fall, but it is hard to take a beautiful gift like that out in the woods. I remember how great those Browning boots looked when I got them, and they really look awful now. I need to find out if they have a warranty.

You might also remember that I have written about hunting ducks as a boy with a 16-gauge Iver-Johnson, single-shot, shotgun. This past week, outdoor writer Jim Robbins who originated from Tennessee and has recently moved to Missouri, passed through my area and came by our executive offices out here on this wooded ridgetop in the middle of nowhere, had a cold glass of tea on my back porch and presented me with an old 16-gauge Iver-Johnson just like the one I first used at age 11, hunting ducks and squirrels and rabbits and quail on the watershed of the Big Piney with my dad and grandfather.

I swear it looks like the same gun, and it just might be. I can’t wait to go shoot some squirrels with it when the spring season opens, and when my grandsons, Ryan and Alex, now 6 and 4, go squirrel hunting with me for the first time, I will let them use that little light, short shotgun just made for a boy.

Old things mean a lot to me. My office is cluttered with old sassafras paddles my grandfather made, old fishing reels and gigs and game calls, old lures and old magazines and old ideas. On occasion, my executive secretary, Ms. Wiggins, looks young beside everything else on the walls around her, and that takes some doing.

Old hunting and fishing pictures abound on desks and tables, that I seem to remember taking only yesterday. There are old duck decoys, old fishing rods, an old muzzle-loading shotgun and a J. Stevens single shot rifle that was made when my grandfather was only 12 years old.

I have boxes of old things like that, and someday I will try to create some kind of museum for all of it, someplace where folks want to see what Ozarkers used in the days of wooden johnboats, when the rivers had lots of water and all of it was clean.

But I do have a Browning shotgun after all ... Mr. Lucas and I. It hangs beside the old ’97 Winchester my dad once used in the days of my boyhood to bring down wood-ducks and mallards on the Piney. My grandfather would have held that new Browning and marveled at the balance and mechanics and the quickness of it.

But still, and maybe Mr. Lucas could understand this, I have spent quite a bit of time lately sitting on the back porch up here on Lightnin Ridge, holding that little Iver-Johnson, remembering long ago days, and looking forward to squirrel hunting this summer.

Address correspondence to Larry Dablemont, Box 22, Bolivar, Mo., 65613. Send e-mail to lightninridge@windstrea.net, check the Web site www.larrydablemont.com, or call (417) 777-5227.