In an attempt to make this column more appealing to all the lady readers out there, I spent much of the past week hunting and fishing with a pair of younger ladies.

I recommend that very thing for all you grizzled old veteran outdoorsmen, if you can find any ladies which will indeed go hunting or fishing with you. It’s kind of a nice change from your regular buddies.

Since the weather had been unseasonably warm for November I suspected that the fishing would uncommonly good for November, and I was right. I took this lady I have known for some time on a fishing trip, up the river to some shoals I know about where the smallmouth and largemouth are congregating, gorging themselves in preparation for harder times which goes along with colder weather.

Knowing her as I do, I have never known this particular lady to use casting gear, which most bass fishermen in quest of lunkers are wont to do, because of her aversion to backlashes. Instead, she likes to use a spin-casting outfit so I fixed her up a medium-light spinning rig with six-pound line.

I tied on a spinner bait worth about $3 dollars, and asked myself if I wanted this younger and far less experienced lady I was with to lose something worth that much to a rock on the bottom or a submerged log in swift water. It seemed wise to tie on a more economical suspending Rogue, since I have several, and can acquire more at a local thrifty junk shop for 50 cents each.

The suspending Rogue is a lure that doesn’t float, though it is made much like the floating Rapalas and Rebels shaped something like a long minnow. It sinks down very slowly and stays up off the bottom, therefore making it more difficult to hang up. I told her to fish it with jerks and twitches and try not to bother me with questions while I was landing any fish.

And shortly afterward I heard something splashing around behind me and I’ll be darned if she didn’t have a nice smallmouth on that doggone Rogue. Who’d a thunk it?

Sometimes you take someone who you figure isn’t going to distract you much from your fishing, and they start catching fish right and left, and that is pretty much what happened for awhile. I figured eventually I would start hauling them in on my spinner bait, and about that time my lovely feminine guest sees an old building up on the bank. Suddenly she wants to

see it a whole lot worse than she wants to catch fish.

Women are like that. They are always getting something romantic in their head about how some old barn or chicken house was akin to a little cabin in the woods where someone once grew magnolias and roses and had a husband who looked like Clark Gable. They get that from sitting around reading romance novels, and writers like me take note of that. I myself intend to someday write a romance novel, strictly for the money in it. I will use a pseudonym of course!

Well, I guess it was the romantic side of me that caused me to agree to tie the boat to a sycamore root and help her up that steep bank trying to keep her from falling in the river, just so she could see that old shack and carry on about finding some pretty rock. The whole thing amounted to me getting mud in my boat and skinning my elbow and losing a good 30 minutes of prime fishing time. I displayed a gentlemanly nature and refused to complain.

Shortly afterward, watching her little spinning rod bent double on another 16 or 17-inch brownie, I took her lure and tied it on my line, and found another one in the tackle box for her to use.

Gloria Jean has always been awfully lucky. On her honeymoon, she caught her limit of rainbow trout and mine too, before I landed one fish. Lucky for her I was there to bait her hook. In Canada once a few years back, she landed a 20-pound northern on that spinning outfit of hers with no steel leader. She is very, very lucky, and her friends tell her that quite often as you might imagine. But even luck can’t explain how that evening last week.

I expertly cast my lure around a log three or four times and caught nothing and she cast hers at it and didn’t even get close and a big largemouth inhaled it and fought all around the boat, jumping out of the water twice still keeping the hooks in his mouth. It was 20 inches long. I think maybe the biggest largemouth she ever caught.

There are some good things about taking a younger woman fishing. She makes good sandwiches, and brags on you a lot when your best friends won’t. And she is not liable to second guess you if you say a bass weighs five pounds. But if she is anything like Gloria Jean, don’t let her back the trailer in the water when you load the boat. Just have her go off somewhere and look for flowers while you get that done.

I took my daughter Christy deer-hunting on opening day. If it weren’t for her I wouldn’t go hunting at all on the first weekend of deer season, but I set up a nice two-person deer stand out in the woods and we found ourselves there 15 feet off the ground a little before daylight, with wild turkeys roosting all around us.

Christy has killed three bucks the last three years, each with one broken antler. I have never seen anything like it. It must say something about her, but I don’t know what. She is quite an outdoors-lady, unlike her mother, whose only attempt at deer hunting ended when she closed her eyes and shot at a button buck only 20 feet from her gun barrel and missed it.

Gloria was really happy when that little deer ran away, and I never had her carry a gun again, although she has often gone with me on hunting trips, carrying a camera.

Christy, a science teacher and park naturalist during the summer, has done a lot of hunting with me, and she does not feel sorry for any deer she aims at, because she missed quite a few she did not intend to miss when she was younger. Saturday morning, a buck walked through the woods about 70 yards from us, and she waited until he reached an opening, whereupon she dropped him with a well-placed heart shot.

And though this is hard to believe, he would have been a 21/2-year-old 6-pointer except for the fact that one antler was broken. That makes four in a row. I ain’t never seen such a thing…or did I already say that?

I just wanted to let all you ladies who referred to me as a chauvinist just because I once said that female bass were easy to tell from the males because they are fatter when they get older and easier to fool, that Christy thinks I am a fine example of what men ought to be. Gloria Jean probably would prefer me to be a little more like Clark Gable.

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