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.

Floating down the river in November and December of the 1960s as a kid with my dad, hunting mallards and wood ducks from our old johnboat, if we saw a few Canada geese on the river and actually had a chance to bring one home, it was a never to be forgotten experience.

The terms "spreading adder" or "hog-nosed viper" are common names for the harmless little snake, given to them by Ozark rural people.

We talked about how, years back, we would see eight or ten strutting gobblers and hens in March and April back in the reaches of green fields along timber edges.

Bow hunting should not be very high on any outdoorsman’s list in September unless he doesn’t fish at all or do anything else but deer hunt. It is a poor time to skin and hang a deer because it is always too warm. The dead of winter is bow-hunting time.

If it has been written once that dove hunting is a good way to get a youngster the chance to hunt and experience a day outdoors, it has been written a million times.

But I thought how great it would be if I was referred to at my funeral as “…a person who would give someone the shirt off his back.”

All dreams come to an end and my dream of making a Big Piney River Nature Center and Museum have ended

That is a quote from the written judgment. The kid didn’t prove he was innocent from the charge that he had killed the bear over bait! Read that again: He needed to prove he was innocent!

Patient I am not, so I drifted into a big deep eddy where the current swirled and stilled.

Froggers get scarcer every year. The men who once caught bullfrogs by hand as they traveled along Ozark rivers either wading or boating were real capable outdoorsmen.

The old men at the pool hall let nothing go to waste, claiming a clover-eatin’ groundhog was better eatin’ than a beaver.

The best thing about S of O was Lake Taneycomo, full of trout and ducks. The School sat on a bluff right above it.

At Schell Osage the blinds were spaced well and the pools were full of smartweed. Ducks of all species loved it.

In Ozark streams, green sunfish can get very hefty, and so can bluegills in our farm ponds and large Ozark reservoirs.

It is beyond understanding, even when you have seen as much and learned as much as I have in my life of studying and experiencing the outdoors.

Some of those casting reels I use for bigger bass on reservoirs, and fish with jigs or plastic baits and for those, I use heavier line and stronger rods.

Also this spring, we have been feeding grape jelly to several orioles, which nested here for the first time.

Friends who fish on Truman say the game warden does that often when the address on the jug makes it unlikely that the fisherman will come back to fight the phony charge in court.

I learned a great deal about hunting when I was a kid, chasing squirrels in the summer.