We decided to take a short float trip one November afternoon, down the river bordering some public hunting land. We have killed several deer in such a manner; just drifting along so slowly and so quietly you are scarcely noticed by wild creatures along the stream. Often, we cover the boat with a blind, but that afternoon, we didn’t. Not much reason to disguise it when the occupants are wearing blaze orange caps and vests.
An hour into the trip, we passed a harvested cornfield, and I heard an unusual sound—something like a Canada goose honking but louder, coarser, longer note. In a matter of a few seconds, big birds soared up out of the field and turned upriver at treetop level. One of them continued to uh, well… sound a little like a trumpet. It was the first time I have ever heard a trumpeter swan, and though I have seen a few at a time on the water in various places in the Ozarks and in Canada over the past twenty years, I have never seen a flock of them that large.
But there they were, eleven trumpeter swans in a line just over us, big and graceful. Trumpeter swans are rare sights, but they gather in the winter in good numbers at a semi-refuge in Arkansas, south of Greer’s Ferry Lake. Obviously, they are gaining in numbers little by little. That flock of eleven is something I will not forget seeing.
We didn’t get a deer that afternoon; in fact, we never even saw one. We did see a wild gobbler and a half grown wild pig, coal black, and hard to see in the underbrush. Had I seen him in time, we would have some pork in the freezer tonight. Squirrels, of course, were thick. If you are a squirrel hunter, you should have a good year, with all the acorns and nuts and berries we had this fall. They should be fat and good to eat.
It occurred to me that I ought to pass along more wild game recipes with this column, so here’s one I call “squirrel pizza.”
The first thing you do is fry a couple of young squirrels and take all the meat off the bones. Then buy a pizza and remove all those little round pieces of meat that you always see on pizza, about the size of a half dollar. They are not good for you, and you need to take all of them off. Then distribute the squirrel meat all over the pizza and warm it up a little. There you have it. Next week I will perhaps give you my recipes for duck pizza and rabbit pizza.
Someone sent me an outdoor page recently, from a large daily newspaper in the Ozarks that showed a photo of a big hornet’s nest that had fallen to the ground. Their outdoor writer called it a wasp nest; obviously not having spent enough time outdoors to know what it was. He dutifully noted that he had left it there because it was a part of nature. It won’t be part of nature long!
Hornet’s nests are collected in the winter by many who know that woodpeckers and other birds will tear them to pieces trying to get the larvae inside. No hornet’s nest I ever saw survives the winter. But if you take one into the warmth inside a building, you need to be sure those larvae aren’t going to mature and create a swarm of hornets in your home next spring. That has happened on occasion.
No newspaper would allow glaring errors on their sports page. If a sportswriter didn’t have better than average knowledge about basketball, football and baseball, he wouldn’t last long. There was a time when outdoor writers were men who grew up outdoors and had a great deal of experience in their field. Those days are nearly gone. Today, if an “outdoor columnist” makes glaring errors, who knows? Newspaper editors in larger cities don’t know a fly-rod from a flatfish, so if mistakes are made, they seldom see it. And I doubt they care much because they figure readers don’t know much about the outdoors either.
In a couple of weeks, I am going to put one of our better photographers in a special camouflaged and covered boat, and drift down one of our rivers with me at the paddle, to see what kind of photos we can get. I’ll have to leave my gun at home, or I would be tempted to shoot some ducks for duck pizza.
