by Gaila Oliver | Nov 2, 2017 | Bird Watching, Cooking, Dogs, Hunting, Lyme Disease, Membership Subscriptions, Robert Hitt Neill, Shooting, sportsmen, Uncategorized, Wild Turkey Hunting, wildlife
For years, my youngest daughter has belonged to a cult of pumpkin carvers. These young people take great pride in the production of Jack-O-Lanterns at Halloween, even to the point of purchasing special sets of pumpkin-carving tools to work with. They even have contests to choose the most intricate and scariest of their productions, which are sometimes accompanied by props, such as hers was this year.
In addition to carving a web across half the pumpkin, which really looked scary when she placed a lighted candle therein, she made huge black tarantula-looking spiders out of pipe cleaners that were clinging to the sides of the web, just waiting for an unwary victim to get close enough for them to get their fangs into. You didn’t even want to go into the same room with it!
A few days after Halloween, she set the pumpkin out on the back porch to await the sad fate of Jack-O-Lanterns the world over: I was to set it out with the rest of the garbage that week, on collection day.
That day rolled around, and I got the garbage together from the rest of the house, took it to the kitchen door, and was fixing to take it out onto the back porch, but fortunately I glanced out there first, and froze. At the foot of the chaise lounge, its black and white fur rippling softly in the morning breeze, reclined a skunk!
We have always had skunk problems in the country; comes with the territory, so to speak. Once Betsy went across the covered walkway to our guest house, “The Store,” for something at night, and when she opened the door to return, a skunk sat in the middle of the boardwalk, regarding her nonchalantly. She yelled for someone in the house (me or Adam) to come to the rescue, but I was reading in the den, with the stereo up loud enough for me to hear, which means loud enough for the neighbors to listen, too, if they want to. She ended up spending most of an hour besieged in The Store, and was sho’nuff hot at me for not coming to the aid of a fair damsel in distress, no matter that I had no idea the fair damsel was in any distress atall.
Labrador Boo once chased a skunk away from entering the back porch, but the skunk took offense and sprayed both Boo and the porch, which meant bathing both in tomato juice several times over the next week. We decided it might have been cheaper to let the skunk walk through the screen porch undisturbed. I know Boo concurred.
Yet here was a skunk apparently napping on the kitchen end of a 50-foot-long screen porch. I couldn’t get out the door without arousing it, though I could see the close screen door hadn’t been pulled closed the night before. Yet shooting him there was unthinkable. Skunks don’t take kindly to shooing, either. What to do?
I turned and went through the house to the garage door, and slipped outside there. Going to the door from the garage onto the back porch, I gently eased that door open and propped it with an anti-freeze jug. I peered in, but could barely see the black and white fur rippling on the other side of the chaise lounge. I turned and exited the garage, slipped around to the screen door from the porch onto the boardwalk to The Store, and eased it open, taking the spring loose, so it would stay thataway. Now the two doors at the other end of the porch from the skunk were open for its exit, if I could arrange that.
Okay, now I needed to open the screen door opposite the kitchen, which was only maybe ten feet from the reclining skunk. Using the rosebush for cover, I snuk silently toward the visitor, knowing that if it was aroused, the screen would give little protection from the stinking spray. For the last few feet, once I had to leave the rosebush’s cover, I went to hands and knees. Finally, I was at the screen door. I reached out and snagged the bottom of the door with my fingernails and began to ease it open, peeping fearfully at where the skunk rested as the door gradually swung to reveal the black and white fur… that from this close appeared to be more grayish. Maybe an old skunk? I eased the door more open, squinting with concentration. The fur WAS pretty gray.
Then I saw it had an orange base, barely visible.
Pumpkins, when set out unattended in the Southern heat and humidity for several days, produce the most beautiful mold, fully two inches of hair-like fungus that starts out rather tarantula-black at the base, but gets lighter as it gets longer, becoming almost white.
I gathered up the remains, for the garbage truck, then went to beat my daughter.
by Gaila Oliver | Oct 23, 2017 | Bird Watching, Cooking, Dogs, Hunting, Robert Hitt Neill, Shooting, sportsmen, Uncategorized, Wild Turkey Hunting, wildlife
It was a few winters ago, and my son and a cousin were getting up early for a hunt. Adam arose in his upstairs bedroom, and stepped out on the balcony to check the weather. As he stood admiring the stars and trying to assess wind direction and temperature, he suddenly was aware of a Presence nearby.
He stepped to the edge of the balcony next to the low roof of the house. At the same point where the south side of the balcony meets the low roof over the garage and back porch, the steeply-pitched upper roof joins the low roof. In the shadow of that high roof, he discerned a darker shape, and bent cautiously for a closer look.
“Want some coffee?” I asked.
“You can use my cup,” his mother offered.
It was obvious that the boy was confused, when he realized that his parents were lying on the roof an hour before daylight on a cold winter’s morn. “What the heck are y’all doing up here?” he asked, followed quickly by, “Or maybe I don’t want to know!”
“Watching the meteor showers,” Betsy and I responded. She again offered him some coffee. He just shook his head and went back inside to wake up Cuz and bring him out to observe his crazy parents.
It was the occasion of the Leonid Meteor Shower, advertised to be one of the best in our lifetime. Only problem was, the peak of it was about four in the morning. Yet we both decided when we hit the hay about eleven that if it was clear, we’d get up to watch the shooting stars, which we’ve done often before from the roof. Usually, though, they have showered during warm weather, when the main problem is mosquitoes, not clouds. I was to be the scout, in charge of getting up and seeing if the weather was going to be clear or cloudy.
It was clear when I arose at 3:30 a.m. I headed to the kitchen to boil water for coffee, then found my thermos bottle and filled it with hot tap water to be ready to keep our coffee hot. I make the old-style boiled coffee, with the grounds in the bottom of the pot, some of which pour out into the cup, so that you dare not drink the last swallow, unless you want to chew it. Betsy says my coffee is “Good to the last bite!”
Made coffee, filled the thermos, grabbed two travel cups Mr. Hurry gave us for Christmas one year, and took them up the outside staircase to the low roof, along with a basket of apple muffins Betsy had made up. Then I snagged a big foam pad and a large 2-for-1 sleeping bag, plus two pillows, and arranged them so that we could lie on the low roof, with our heads propped against the steep roof to watch shooting stars. Only when the stage was set did I wake my sleeping bride. She slipped on warm-ups and socks, picked up a quilt from the bed, and we hiked up the outside stairs. As she snuggled into the sleeping bag and arranged the quilt, I poured our coffee and slipped into the sleeping bag beside her. She passed me an apple muffin just as a light flashed over us that I initially mistook for a flashbulb. It wasn’t. It was a meteor!
We lay there on the roof until sunup, disturbed only by Adam and Cuz. During those couple of hours, we saw several hundred shooting stars, many just brief pinpricks of light. Some, however, curved halfway across the heavens before burning out. Many times, a half-dozen were in sight at once. Just before dawn, after the hunters departed, we saw what must have been a satellite speeding over from north to south. It was a great way to start the day.
While we lay there snuggled together, drinking coffee and eating muffins, we also heard two coyote packs, one coming by right across the Mammy Grudge, less than a hundred yards away. The red wolf howled for a few moments, seemingly in answer to one of the coyote packs. A barred owl hooted almost angrily at the close pack, and as the eastern sky began to pinken, a pair of screech owls sounded off from the ditchbank.
We almost hated to leave our bedding to get ready for early choir and Sunday School, but the show was over once the sun came up, of course. I had to make a second pot of coffee. As I poured a cup, I thanked God for the show. What a morning!
by Gaila Oliver | Oct 9, 2017 | Bird Watching, Cooking, Dogs, Hunting, Lyme Disease, Membership Subscriptions, Robert Hitt Neill, Shooting, sportsmen, Uncategorized, Wild Turkey Hunting, wildlife
Lyme Disease victims almost never reach REM sleep, so I am a usual light sleeper, and don’t dream. Rapid Eye Movement stage of sleep is when most dreaming takes place, so I knew I wasn’t dreaming when I awoke in the middle of the night last week, and faintly smelled woodsmoke.
Having been through two costly house fires, I am especially attentive to the smells associated with house fires: woodsmoke and propane or natural gas, which smell similar to me. Without moving, just trying to extend my nose outside the light blanket we were sleeping under with the windows open, I was pretty sure I wasn’t smelling wood afire that belonged to me and Betsy. This had a twang of campfire smoke maybe, and was pretty far off, smelt like.
I have read that when a person loses one sense, other senses grow more acute to compensate. My hearing has always been poor, since early bouts with ear infections, plus shooting right-handed shotguns left-handed. Naval gunfire might have contributed as well. Whatever, my smeller seems more sensitive than other folks’ olfactory talents. But I clearly heard at this point what had awakened me: a screech owl sounded off again from the persimmon grove across the driveway.
There just ain’t a better fall sound than a screech owl’s quavering cry, that some of the little predators can stretch out longer than they look like they’d have breath for. The owl in the persimmon tree was answered by another from back toward the Mammy Grudge ditchbank, behind the house. Screech owls not only make wonderful pets, but they seem friendly in the wild, often coming to perch close to a campfire and enter into the conversation at night. I drifted back to sleep, thankful for the serenade, blending with nightsongs of crickets, frogs, and katydids.
Investigation the next morning revealed unto me that the woodsmoke came from behind a neighbor’s house, across the pasture where we’d dragged up broke-off pecan limbs after Hurricane Harvey’s winds. As I figured that out, I was standing under a vine-covered hackberry tree, and the smoke smell mingled with the tangy odor of possum grapes hanging from the vines. I just made a trip with a couple of friends to visit a burn-victim friend in Memphis, and Betsy had sent us off before daybreak with a bag of biscuits slathered with pear honey or muscadine jelly, along with two thermoses of my Slung Coffee. JuBaby made the remark as we breakfasted on the road at sunup that he gussied up his muscadine jelly with juice from possum grapes: “Gives it a little tartness,” he boasted. I had never heard of doing that, though I’ve eaten lots of possum grapes.
The smell of woodsmoke and possum grapes also mingled, as I crossed the yard, with the aroma of ripe persimmons. Uncle George Vickers, a former resident of Brownspur, used to make persimmon beer that he aged in buried kegs. I have also eaten persimmon bread, but it takes a LOT of persimmons to get enough pulp for that or persimmon preserves, because of the many large seeds in the fruit: as in the old country saying: “He was shiverin’ like a dog passin’ persimmon seeds!”
I didn’t shiver that badly, but I did experience that delicious little dancing across my spine that my grandmother used to say was “A goose just ran over your grave.” I breathed: woodsmoke, wild grapes, fallen persimmons, the scent of ripe cotton before defoliation, the heavier odor of harvest dust from corn and beans being combined down the road. Betsy had just finished a making of pear honey back in the kitchen, and I had tested it with my last cup of Slung Coffee, the empty cup still swinging on my finger. It was a cacophony of autumn smells!
It was missing one thing. I thought I’d go back into the den and take my left-handed Remington 870, “Southpow,” out of the gun cabinet, picking up a couple of shells. There was a squirrel that needed a scare out on the Mammy Grudge ditchbank, for Betsy begrudged him the pecans he was invading her yard to pilfer, when he should have been content with the pignuts in his own back yard. The smells that were missing from this almost-perfect-smelling morning were the combined aromas of gun oil and burnt gun powder. I figured to make it perfect!
by Gaila Oliver | Sep 15, 2017 | Bird Watching, Cooking, Dogs, Hunting, Membership Subscriptions, Robert Hitt Neill, Shooting, sportsmen, Uncategorized, Wild Turkey Hunting, wildlife
Over a decade ago, I was associated with a Delta television station in several capacities, the most enjoyable of which was been the production of commercials. The success of my very first one I owe to an Ole Miss friend, Joe Camp, who produced the popular “Benjy” series of movies. Joe told me that his dog trainer had confided to him, “You can make a dog do anything with a pound of bacon and a microwave!”
A local shoe store wanted an ad for a Hush Puppy Trunk Sale. Betsy had a restored antique trunk upstairs, and I knew a lady with a month-old litter of bassett hounds. The rest was easy, with Joe’s advice. I bought a pound of bacon and got access to the lady’s microwave. We used bacon to get the dogs in the trunk and the lid closed. Then we used bacon to entice them scrambling out, going after the shoes. I’ve never done a more fun ad!
It was here at the house we did an ad for a glass company, part of which involved glass bursting. I used my .22 pistol with ratshot loads, and it worked perfectly for the water glass and a glass table. However, for the scene in which a sheet of window glass is supposed to break, the ratshot only made small holes in it. Finally, I went for a shotgun.
We were filming on our west balcony, and had the sheet of glass (4X4) propped up across the outside door, with the camera set up on the south side of the balcony. I was inside, out of sight. It was the day before Thanksgiving.
Betsy was downstairs, in the kitchen, on the east side of the house. She had gotten used to the faint “Pop!” of the .22. She did not know I now had a shotgun. Back upstairs, I loaded up, got the camera guy ready, then realized I needed to be far enough back for the shotshell pattern to expand, to get a really spectacular picture of bursting glass. No problem: there’s a long hall leading to the balcony door. I just backed down it 30 feet and told Landry to yell when ready. He yelled. I fired. It was, indeed, a spectacular shot of bursting glass. It was also a spectacular shot of the sudden appearance of a somewhat perturbed apron-clad wife, who was not prepared for an explosion directly above her propane stove!
We shot another commercial out here at Brownspur that attracted the law. It was an All-Terrain Vehicle ad, during a dry summer and fall – mud was scarce. However, I knew of a spring-fed mud bar down in the Mammy Grudge behind the house and downstream 300 yards. It was certainly suitable, for we stuck the machine and ended up having to take another couple of ATVs down there to get it out the next day. We got back to the house hot, sweaty, and muddy. I used the fire hose to clean the ATVs: most of the mud bar had come back with us through the ragweeds. Betsy made sandwiches.
We were loading the ATVs on the trailer, but the cameraman had another shoot, so he cranked his pickup to let the air conditioner begin to cool, shook hands around to say “Bye,” and scratched off. Just then a black helicopter appeared overhead, hovering.
The truck took off down the road, and the chopper headed right after it. I knew it was a narc chopper, and that they thought the path to that muddy spot in the Grudge led to a marijuana patch. We laughed at their ignorance, and then the ATV guys left for the dealership. Just as the chopper reappeared from following the cameraman for a mile. The helicopter swung around and took off after the truck and trailer of ATVs.
I had on cutoff jeans and a tee shirt, and was filthy, so I headed across the pasture to the Brownspur Swimming Hole. I was nearly there, when the narc chopper landed in the pasture. Two men in black jeans, tee shirts, and boots got out, as the pilot shut down the rotors, and one called, “What have you guys been doing, back there between those ditchbanks?”
Just as innocently as I could, I replied, “Making an ATV commercial, sir.”
“Right!” one snickered. “We’re gonna have to check that out.”
“Help yourself,” I offered. “I’m gonna be in the Swimming Hole here.”
The pilot eyed my muddy, sweaty person and the cool shady water under the huge cypress. “I’ll be at the Swimming Hole with him.”
He never said pea-turkey to me, but the agents showed up an hour later, hot, sweaty, and muddy. One whistled at the pilot to crank up the helicopter. They boarded and took off, with never even a “Good-bye.” Making commercials can be dangerous!
by Gaila Oliver | Aug 28, 2017 | Robert Hitt Neill, sportsmen, Uncategorized
I know, this a departure from the usual; but it gives a meaningful point of view.
There’s quite a controversy going on in Mississippi these days concerning the state flag. Some folks say that the old flag is no longer realistic, and is to some extent hurtful in modern days. Some say that it is even racist and degrading. On the other hand, many supporters oppose changing the flag which has meant so much to them and their forebears over the past century or so. As the state is debating this, it’s just fighting a fight we already fit (and lost) at my Alma Mater, Ole Miss, several years ago.
My parents met at Ole Miss, like Betsy and I did. Big Robert and Miss Janice were married for 45 years before he died in a car wreck, and she passed on the next year, not wanting to live without him. Betsy and I have been married for 53 years and counting. So, whatever else Ole Miss has meant to this family, it’s meant true love! We had supper recently with a sorority sister of Betsy’s who was a bridesmaid in our wedding, and I regularly hunt with a half-dozen fraternity brothers from those days. Ole Miss has meant long-lasting friendships, as well.
It’s meant pride, too. I played Rebel football when we were the Number One Team in America, and while I was too small for a college guard and got hurt too much, finally rupturing a hip joint when I was clipped on a punt, no one can take being on the Best Team in America — shoot, in the world! — away from me. Betsy was a Top Six Beauty at a university which had produced two Miss Americas in the four years before she got there, plus she was a majorette (we called them Rebelettes), and as such, was closely associated with that Number One Team, too.
I’m saying that being a Rebel and a Rebelette means a great deal to both of us. It was a great time in our lives at a great school that almost was closed down by the politics of the day, and that Number One Team was a big factor in keeping the university open, when state and national politics could have closed it down.
I got out Momma’s 1936 Ole Miss Annual yesterday. While there was mention of “Ole Miss” aplenty, the team back then was called “The Flood.” I believe I’ve read that it was the next year when “The Rebels” was used for athletics. It’s an educated guess that the title “Ole Miss” refers to the mistress of the plantation, and during those days, the State was largely rural, and farming was the way of life. Nothing racial about that, unless you are just looking for something to gripe about.
There’s no mention I can find of “Colonel Rebel” nor of the flag commonly called “the Rebel Flag.” No pictures of it, either. My point is simply that the mascot of Colonel Rebel and the “Rebel Flag” in question became associated with Ole Miss during a time in American history when there was little racial controversy. This was when Germany was powering up to start World War II. To be factual, the Confederate Flag was never the flag we waved at Ole Miss, nor is it the flag included in the canton corner of the state flag. The “Rebel Flag” was designed by General Beauregard after the first Battle of Bull Run, when similarly uniformed troops mistook the two similar flags of the USA and CSA. It was used as a battle flag by the Army of Northern Virginia, and other units, and black, white, and red Confederate soldiers fought and died under that banner. Seems like the last Confederate general to surrender was a full-blooded Cherokee Indian.
But enough history. I wanted to give y’all a different perspective. A decade ago, I was on the staff of a writer’s conference, and Alex Haley, the author of ROOTS, was also on staff. Several of us were in the restaurant lounge one evening planning seminars, when the TV news came on. The first story covered a demonstration in either Georgia or South Carolina by people wanting to remove the “Rebel Flag” from the state flag.
This was followed immediately by a story on yet another famine or war in Africa, with gruesome pictures of the dead and dying, and the inevitable shots of starving children, bellies distended, runny noses, flies all over everything. Awful!
And the author of ROOTS declared, “You know, every time an African American sees a story like that, he ought to go find a Rebel Flag and kiss it! Because, there, but for American slavery, would be me and my descendants! Thank God I’m here, not there!”
The perspective of a nice guy, who was black, saying that America is truly a land of opportunity — if you will live in the present, and not sweat the small stuff of the past.
by Gaila Oliver | Aug 18, 2017 | Bird Watching, Cooking, Dogs, Hunting, Membership Subscriptions, Robert Hitt Neill, Shooting, sportsmen, Uncategorized, Wild Turkey Hunting, wildlife
Sunday was a wasp day!
This ain’t a religious column, either.
Walked into church before Sunday school, and right there in the hall, a lady wanted to know what was the best thing for a wasp sting, because the janitor had gotten stung several times by those big ole man-eating red wasps, and she remembered a recent column on sting remedies. Meat tenderizer was the remedy she was trying to recall, but the day after that column came out, an insurance lady across the street caught me to say that Elmer’s Glue worked just as well: put a drop on the stung place, let it dry, then peel it off, & presto: no pain. Your call.
But after church some of us walked around and discovered two more huge nests, one of red wasps, a second of those smaller striped yellow & black guinea wasps. Betsy got buzzed by one of those, but didn’t get stung. Someone went after the bug spray in the church, but we skedaddled.
After lunch, I changed into trunks and headed for the Swimming Hole, as usual, glancing at the thermometer on the way out of the porch: 102 in the shade! Lordee, this has been the hottest summer I can remember, although I’ve had Lyme Disease, so have a medical excuse for forgetting. One day last week that in-the-shade thermometer was 105 degrees! Yet the water coming out of my well into the Swimming Hole is 68 degrees, so I was headed for a comfortable place for my Sunday afternoon nap, floating on a net & air mattress that lets you recline half submerged. No better place in the world to be on a hot afternoon!
However, the sun was burning through my eyelids, felt like. No problem: my Grunk cap (Granddaddy Uncle Bob got shortened to GrandUncle, then Grunkle then Grunk) was hanging on one of the smaller cypress trees by the pool patio. I waded out to get it.
I grabbed it, lifted it off the branch, and it was full of red wasps!
My cousin Mountain Willie was a calm, controlled man who advocated never panicking in a situation where one is surrounded by stinging insects. “Just calmly back away and don’t let them sense fear, and they won’t sting,” he used to say. He’s dead now (not from wasp stings), but passed away before he convinced me of the value of remaining calm when a wasp nest is revealed unto me closeby.
There were probably ten plastic chairs, a couple of canvas recliners, four small end tables, and a couple of buckets on the patio behind me. I cleant those suckers out in a hurry; seems like I fell continually for five minutes before I reached a metal table and chairs that offered a firm support to stop falling, far enough away from the wasp-inhabited Grunk cap. One of the metal chairs against the table had a kid’s tee-shirt laid across it to dry. Someone left it while we were gone to Texas, and I hung it across that chair only a week ago to dry out.
When I grasped that shirt-covered chair back, another dozen wasps boiled out from under the shirt – they had built a nest there in a week’s time! I ran for the water. One sting on the right ring finger – no rings – and one below the right knee, which is a good place to get stung, since I don’t have much feeling there after the doctor cut out the gangrene in that leg.
When the buzzing settled down, I hied me to the house for some bug spray, returned, and used up most of the can on the two nests I had discovered, then sprayed under tables and chairs, just in case. I lifted the lid on the plastic garbage can out there, to toss the empty spray can.
Would you believe there was a wasp nest under that lid??!!
Two more hits, one on the forehead, one behind the ear.
I did have another can of spray back at the house, plus some meat tenderizer.
Okay, it’s Sunday: tell me again: just why did the Good Lord make wasps?
I know: that ain’t Neill’s Department – ‘way above my pay grade!!
by Gaila Oliver | Aug 9, 2017 | Bird Watching, Cooking, Dogs, Hunting, Lyme Disease, Membership Subscriptions, Robert Hitt Neill, Shooting, sportsmen, Uncategorized, Wild Turkey Hunting, wildlife
I was doing some storytelling at a Youth Art Camp once up at the Bologna Performing Arts Center at Delta State, and during lunch happened to sit across from a co-ed counselor. Since the next day was scheduled to be Friday The Thirteenth, the subject naturally got around to bad luck. Some people don’t believe in luck, good or bad, someone pointed out. The co-ed heard me mutter something like, “Yeah, and you ain’t got over 24 broke bones, either.”
She reached across the table to catch my eye and mouthed, “You’ve got 24? Why, I’ve got 14 myself!”
“Were you in a bad car wreck or something?” I asked.
“No, I’ve just been a klutz all my life,” she shrugged. “Is that how you got all yours – in a wreck?”
“Nah, I broke four vertebrae in a wreck right after I got out of the Navy, but I mostly just break one, maybe two at a time on a regular basis. I’ve also had 14 major joint injuries besides the 24 broken bones,” I noted. “Plus six concussions, being struck three times by lightning and five times by poisonous snakes, and a few other little things like Malaria, West Nile, Zika, Lyme Disease and 2 brown recluse spider bites. Some folks obviously don’t believe in bad luck, but I ain’t planning on getting out of bed tomorrow for Friday The 13th.”
The co-ed agreed: “I’m planning on being especially careful tomorrow, but I have to work with these kids. I’ll keep my fingers crossed the whole day, though. Wonder why some people have good luck and some have bad luck?”
“Well, let me ask: are you right-handed, or left-handed?” She held up her right hand in answer. “Then, when you were young did your parents switch you from your left hand? Like, sort of trained you to be right-handed?” I continued.
“I don’t know,” she shrugged again. “I was adopted when I was eight, so I have no idea what my biological parents might have done when I was a baby. Why do you ask?”
I shoved across a scrap of paper and handed her my pen. “Write ‘Mary had a little lamb’ on that for me,” I requested. She frowned, but did that and shoved the paper back to me. I nodded in understanding: her letters slanted almost backward for a right-handed writer, just like my own writing does.
“See, your writing shows a tendency toward left-handedness, even though you are writing right-handed. It’s a right-brain function. When I was an infant, they told me that my left-handed mother declared that she was not going to raise a child of hers to be wrong-handed in a right-handed world. So whenever I’d pick up something with my left hand, she’d take it away, put it in my right hand, and spank my left hand. She meant well, I know, but a medical study released five years ago shows that people who have been changed from one hand to the other, for any reason up to and including amputation, are ten times more accident-prone than the general population. I’ll bet you were changed when you were young too.”
At this writing, I don’t know if the girl made it through Friday The 13th okay or not, but I survived it. But here’s the point: if your kid shows a left-handed tendency, let him or her alone with it. It’s okay. The Bible even speaks of left-handed warriors, so it would seem that southpawism is God-given, an assertion that most baseball managers would agree on, I’m sure. Matter of fact, left-handed pitchers go at a premium these days, so if your little boy is a lefty, give him a baseball in his crib! He just may put himself through college thataway. Mine did.
But if he’s a righty, don’t change him over, either. The curse works both ways. Whatever handed your kid is, let it be. It’ll save lots of money on casts and stitches during his or her lifetime. If I was a betting man, I’d have bet that all the rest of the people at B-PAC that day couldn’t have come up with nearly 40 broken bones between them all, like me and the co-ed across the table had!
by Gaila Oliver | Aug 4, 2017 | Bird Watching, Dogs, Hunting, Membership Subscriptions, Robert Hitt Neill, Shooting, sportsmen, Uncategorized, Wild Turkey Hunting, wildlife
We had a weekend’s worth of fun with both grandsons at the Swimming Hole, which is The Place To Be in the August heat. Water comes out of my well at 68 degrees, and we keep that valve cracked in August.
Uncle Dee had a couple months ago introduced water pistols to the youngsters gathered at the Swimming Hole, and Grandson Sir (Sean Robert Irwin, but the last initial goes in the middle, for monograms) had appropriated them for our water play, sneaking up on his Grunk (short for Granddaddy Uncle Bob) to splat me, or both of us sneaking up dog paddling on objects in the pool. On Saturday afternoon, the thunderheads threatened from a distance, and the snake doctors (dragonflies) just swarmed in the humidity, all around the pool, pasture, and nearby yard. Sir immediately saw the opportunity for target practice, and informed me of the plot. We refilled our guns and advanced from the water to the shade of an oak, where it seemed the biggest congregation of snake doctors (also called mosquito hawks) hovered.
Whether one is a grown-up or not, one cannot shoot a water pistol at a target without making the standard “Kiirr, kirr, kirr” imitation of a gunshot. Doots (Betsy’s Grandmother name) was tending Nil (Neill Leiton Irwin: ditto on mongrams) in the shade of the big cypress by the Swimming Hole, and they were initially started by the barrage of water-pistol shots from close by. “You can’t hide from me!” bellowed Sir at his prey (where’d he get that?). I actually got pretty close to several snake doctors with my first shots, and began taking more careful aim, thinking that dove season is only a few weeks away, and this was a less expensive tune-up than shooting clay pigeons in the pasture, like we usually do, “Turning money into noise,” as Mountain Willy used to call it.
“I’m outa bullets!” the leader of our posse called (he actually had a stick horse that Doots had made, complete with eyes, nose, mouth, ears, and mane sewn on a stuffed-sock head). “Back to the water!” he ordered, and we charged back into chest-deep water to reload. Moments later, he directed another charge into the midst of the enemy, firing at the darting insects, who after several successive forays seemed to catch the spirit of things, and actually looked like they were darting into our shots – or maybe our lead angles were just getting better. Sir was obviously catching onto a sense of ballistics!
When I was a kid, we gained our understanding of ballistics from whacking with sticks the bumblebees that hovered and darted about the cypress barn, houses, and commissary store on the plantation. Brer Beau was good enough for college baseball, having trained on bumblebees as a youngster. I whacked my share too, but the right-hand, left-hand thing got me. I made my mark in football.
Which I now was beginning to remember from my youth, too: we had to run and practice in the August heat to get in shape for the season, and Sir was a whole lot less tired than I was after a few dozen windsprints from pool to pasture and back to reload – which I began to stretch as long as I could, to the distress of my posse leader: “Come on, Grunk!” he urged.
Thankfully, the snake doctors were attracted to the pool as the afternoon waned, and we were able to designate a target-rich environment over the water which I, as a former Navy Gunnery Officer, was able to appreciate a lot more!
Much later in the afternoon we gravitated to BB gun practice, shooting at cans that did not hover and dart about. Yet I had to wonder: how could we market commercially this practice for getting ready for wing-shooting, which is right around the corner? Does Remington make a water-shotgun?
If not, here’s an opportunity for new businesses!
But lighten up on the Grunk, as far as pasture windsprints are concerned!
by Gaila Oliver | Jul 27, 2017 | Robert Hitt Neill, Uncategorized
I was relaxing out in the hammock the other day (with my eyes open) and caught a movement out of the corner of my eye. At the side of the patio, a chipmunk was doing something with a big pecan, sort of rolling it along. The nut was almost too big for him to get the whole thing in his mouth, although he was trying hard. He’d get it situated just right, make about three hops toward his burrow, and the pecan would pop out, sometimes at right angles to where he was headed. It was an entertaining few minutes, until he finally got the nut to the edge of the hole, where he rolled it in and followed it out of sight. Only a moment later, he popped out of the burrow like a cork, and took off for the pecan tree behind the Store, our guesthouse. I guess he was headed to get another. I thought about walking around to the pecan in the front yard, which has smaller nuts, but then thought, what the heck, he probably enjoyed the challenge. Sort of like hunting for a big buck.
After he left, I tried to recall when I saw my first chipmunk here at Brownspur. We didn’t have them in the Delta when I was a kid, though I had seen them when I visited Jackson, and saw many when I was courting Betsy, who was from Lexington, in the hills.
I had it: Adam was about eight, and we were rabbit hunting along the Mammy Grudge, almost to the old Cemetery, when the beagles struck and turned back toward us. We stopped at the top of the ditchbank, watching for the canecutter to come our way, when the boy punched me and pointed. “What’s that, Daddy?” he asked.
A hackberry tree was growing out of the side of the bank below us, and the first crotch was at our eye level. In that crotch were two chipmunks, obviously watching us and for the approaching beagles with some trepidation. That was in the late seventies, and those were the first chipmunks I had ever seen in the Delta. Why did they come here then?
Big Robert was killed in a wreck in 1983, and he never saw a fire ant mound on Brownspur. Later that fall, I was watching for squirrels in a pignut thicket by the north newground, and noticed a mound at the edge of the grass. I kicked it, and just about then a squirrel barked, so I froze, looking for it. Before I got to a shooting position, my leg was on fire! That was my first introduction to fire ants, and 25 years later, they’re all over!
My father also never saw a coyote east of the River, though we had seen both coyotes and wolves on the islands for years. Now, it’s not uncommon to hear three packs on a clear night in the fall, and we can’t keep yard cats, nor let beagles run loose. Back then, we had a real problem with wild dogs, and had to kill over 100 of them after B.C. was mauled by a pack. After we thinned out the wild dogs, was when we began to see a few coyotes, or even an obvious dog-coyote cross (some of those were awful-looking!). Maybe the wild dogs kept the coyote population in check. Nowadays, we hardly ever see wild dogs, so I reckon the coyotes kill them off, now that they outnumber them.
When I was a kid, we used to go over to the Island in the River, and ride around shooting armadillos. The King of the Island ran horses and cattle, and claimed that the livestock would break legs stepping in armadillo holes, so he encouraged their extinction. Not to be. Now the “Armored Possums” are across the Mighty Muddy, and Betsy regularly fights them for digging up her flower beds. Yet I never saw one east of the River until I was grown, and now they have replaced possums as the Number One Roadkill.
Catfish pond farming has engendered the appearance and proliferation of many aquatic species, especially birds. I never saw a kingfisher until I was grown, except when fishing in the coastal marshes of Mississippi and Louisiana. Now one comes by the Swimming Hole on a regular basis. A hurricane blew a bunch of seagulls this far north 15 or 20 years ago, and they have stayed, though I don’t know the correct term for a seagull this far away from the sea. Cormorants were at one time classed as an endangered species, I understand, but now they are pests for catfish farmers, literally eating up profits.
Nutria migrated up the streams from the coast, and now you can hear the mewing of those big water rats any night in the Mammy Grudge or the swamp woods. I had seen alligators here at Brownspur when I was young, and while they still aren’t common, we see them, or their trails in the swamp, now and then. I’ve heard they were released here in the Delta to try to keep down the beaver population, after the same folks released beavers back into this country in the fifties.
Times change, people change, and the wildlife changes.
Wonder if chipmunks are good to eat? Especially if you fatten them up on pecans!
by Gaila Oliver | Jul 17, 2017 | Bird Watching, Dogs, Hunting, Lyme Disease, Robert Hitt Neill, Shooting, sportsmen, Uncategorized, Wild Turkey Hunting, wildlife
It was summertime, and I was driving through town with my truck window down, when a lady from church hailed me. I pulled over, and she sashayed up to the truck. “You know, you’re always writing about Lyme Disease? Well, I’ve found out how to keep the ticks off. You need to tell all the hunters about this!”
I’m always ready to admit my ignorance and acquire new knowledge, so I pulled out my pen and a notebook. “Shoot!” I said.
“My husband and I were over at the lake this weekend cleaning up the yard, and when he showered that night, he hollered for me to come in there. He was covered up with ticks! We picked over a hundred off of him, then I took my shower and we checked me for ticks, but there were only a few on me. Know what the difference was?” she demanded.
Now, I have noticed lots of differences between men and women, which don’t even include showers. Mental pictures were bouncing around in my head, but I suppressed them and replied innocently, “No, Ma’am. Why?”
She hiked her skirt a few inches. “Panty hose!” she crowed triumphantly. “I had on panty hose, and he didn’t. Obviously, ticks can’t get a grip on them and sure can’t get up under them. You tell those hunters to wear panty hose, at least until it frosts!”
Now, I generally try to stay away from empirical statements like that, but she said to tell the rest of y’all. No, I ain’t tried it myownself. It’s a little late for me to prevent Lyme.
Over 30 years ago, I apparently got bitten by a tick, or maybe cleaned a game animal that was infected with Lyme Disease, and got it into my blood that way. At any rate, I contracted Lyme Disease, and it went after me arthritically, if that’s a word.
Whatever, I got it, and it went to the bone — and joints! With at least 24 broken bones and a dozen other joint injuries, I was an ideal host for Lyme arthritis. Since it was normal for me to hurt, especially in the wintertime, no one thought anything about it getting worse. I didn’t even go to see the doctor, not for the arthritis, anyway. When I did mention it, while in the office for something else, his reply was to be expected — indeed, my own mother had said the same thing: “Son, you just played too much football; you’ve got terminal arthritis: it ain’t gonna kill you, but you’re gonna die with it!” By the tenth year, I was taking a couple dozen painkillers — aspirin, Ibuprofen, Tylenol, BC Powder, whatever — a day during the wintertime, when cold weather made the pain and stiffness worse.
Then I was assigned an article on Lyme Disease by a national magazine, which I turned down, initially. I told the editor, “I don’t do that kind of writing; you call Neill, you get humor!”
“Fine,” he agreed. “Write us a humorous article on Lyme Disease, and we’ll pay you a thousand bucks for it.”
“I can do that!” I exclaimed, and went to researching.
It was like one of the old cartoons, where someone snaps on a light bulb. After two days of research, I suddenly realized, “Dad blame! I’ve got all these symptoms!” I got out of the computer as quickly as possible, jumped in the truck, and headed for the hospital. Bear in mind that this was in 1989. I walked up to a nurse and demanded, “Take some blood from me and test it for Lyme Disease!”
“What’s that?” was the response.
No one had really heard of it down here. It was supposed to be a Northeastern thing. The sickness was first misdiagnosed as an outbreak of juvenile arthritis in and around the city of Old Lyme, Connecticut, back in the early to mid seventies. Further testing revealed that the disease was being caused by a spirochete bacteria, which actually invades the human cell, making it extremely hard to knock out. While one of the main vectors for Lyme is the deer tick, the bacteria has been found in all types of ticks, and most blood-sucking insects, like mosquitoes, horseflies, fleas, and lice. These other hosts, however, can only transmit the organism by going almost directly from one victim to another host, whereas ticks can keep it in their systems for weeks. An outbreak of Lyme in Philadelphia was traced back to fleas from the highly Lyme-infected rat population in that city. Killing the rats cured the Lyme epidemic.
One can also contract Lyme from the blood of an infected animal, and research has shown that an animal is six times more likely to have Lyme than a human. The symptoms are the same: fatigue, depression, arthritis. Interestingly enough for a dog man, it’s hard to tell when a cat has Lyme, because “cats are so lethargic anyway,” as one vet put it.
I spent six weeks gathering information on Lyme Disease, but was unable to find a doctor who professed to know enough about it to treat it. In desperation, I finally called the Lyme Borreliosis Foundation in Connecticut and asked for the closest doctor to Brownspur that they knew would recognize, diagnose, and treat Lyme Disease. There was a Dr. George McCullars in Mobile, and I said, “Fine, that’s close enough,” and headed South. Indeed, I did have Lyme, one of the highest positives he’d ever seen, and he started me on long-term antibiotics. I took 200 mg a day of Doxycycline beginning in late June, and didn’t come completely off of it until April, but it knocked it out, though the organism will always be in my blood (and I’m not supposed to give blood any more). Almost a year later, he told me in wonder, “You’re the only tertiary Lyme patient I know who has apparently been cured.” I will always have the sleep disorder, and short-term memory loss (which they now believe is connected), but I haven’t had an aspirin for arthritis pain in years! Oh, I still have places that hurt, especially where the pins are, but not all over, all the time, like before!
Let me insert right here, that if you are placed on long-term antibiotics, you will probably experience intestinal difficulties. See, the antibiotics kill all the bacteria in your system, and there’s some good-guy bacteria in your intestines that belongs to stay there. If you will drink buttermilk or eat active-culture yogurt, it will reculture those good-guy bacteria, and you’ll be a lot more comfortable. Another tip, for victims with the sleep disorder: I take a couple of benedryl when I go to bed at night. Knocks the edge off just enough for me to get some decent rest. The memory loss can be helped, too. Once after an article on Lyme, I received calls from three ladies, one in Michigan, one in Oklahoma, and one in Florida. All three recommended something called Lecethin for the memory loss I had mentioned. The very next day I was walking into a store in Greenville, and a lady stopped me. “Aren’t you that Neill boy, that writes?” she asked. I admitted that. “Well, I read that article on Lyme Disease, and if you’ll take Lecethin, it’ll help that memory problem.” I told her she was the fourth lady in a week to tell me that, but I didn’t know how to even spell it. She got out a pencil and paper, then said, “Wait. I’ve enjoyed your books and articles for years. If you’ll let me, I’ll go back in here with you, and buy you your first bottle!” She did, and I highly recommend it, after fifteen years on it.
I wrote a syndicated weekly column for 25 years, and since 1990 worked in at least a couple of columns a year on Lyme Disease in papers, plus numerous magazine articles. I’ve gotten calls from as far away as Michigan and New York about Lyme. Several years ago, a pharmaceutical company offered to underwrite a book on Lyme, and I got about a third of the way through with it, when the company had some financial difficulties and dropped the project. I’ve given seminars to doctors in hospitals on Lyme, for as much as $1500. When I was president of the Southern outdoor writers, I arranged the testing of our members and wives by the Centers for Disease Control, as a control group of Southern outdoors men and women. They predicted we’d be only 5 to 7% positive, “and those will be the guys who have hunted and fished in the northeast,” but we were 28% positive by one test, and nearly 42% by another! Seven of the past eight presidents tested positive and were symptomatic for Lyme Disease! That’s really the first time they began to consider that Lyme was not just a yankee ailment.
Out here at Brownspur, where there are only five families, we’ve had five diagnosed and treated cases of Lyme. Two were caught early, and treated correctly with heavy antibiotics, and they got completely over it. The other three of us have lingering problems, mine being the least damaging. Only one of those cases apparently came from a Brownspur tick. Three of the victims knew they were bitten by ticks from other regions, like east Mississippi, north Arkansas, and north Tennessee.
In other words, I know what I’m talking about on the subject, though I’m not a doctor.
It is my considered opinion that some insurance companies, HMOs, and medical organizations have decided to cure modern Lyme Disease by changing the parameters. In their defense, it is hard to diagnose, even harder to cure, and requires long-term expensive treatment. Its symptoms mimic fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease), lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, even the early symptoms of multiple sclerosis. Medical experts warn against using long-term antibiotics, which are essential to successful treatment, because that may build up resistant strains of bacteria. I understand that.
But I also understand the disease. I know many victims who have gotten frustrated trying to get help for Lyme, and have just picked up and gone to Connecticut for treatment and advice, where the modern version of the disease was first diagnosed. And if the victim is a youngster, I have gotten to the point of recommending that myself. If caught early (when the tell-tale “bullseye” rash has shown up) it can usually be cured by a month’s worth of antibiotics, but if the patient has had it for several months, or even years, then it’s going to take months of antibiotic treatment to get remission. So what if that builds up resistant strains of bacteria? If the victim is in constant pain and cannot live a normal life, then should not one cure the pain, even at the risk of creating another possible problem?
Again, I am not a doctor! But I’m an educated victim, because I had to be to get mine under control. In one recent year, no fewer than six doctors from three states have called me for Lyme facts (two for their own symptoms, and one for his grandson’s!), and several have sent patients to me for the purpose of rash identification.
Obviously, the best advice is to take precautions against contracting Lyme. Avoid areas of tick infestations. Spray a good repellent on your britches legs and socks, around your belt, on your collar, and on your wrists and sleeves. Wear rubber gloves when cleaning game. Watch your pets for signs of lethargy or arthritis. Check for ticks when you come in from the fields, and be sure your family does the same. Notice any unexplained rashes, especially rashes that appear to red and circular in nature. Only about a third of Lyme victims apparently have the telltale “bullseye” rash, but if antibiotic treatment is administered immediately after that rash is noticed, then complete recovery is very likely. Be alert for cold and flu symptoms that hang on longer than they ought to, for stiff neck (the unBiblical kind), arthritis, chronic headaches, extreme fatigue, blurred vision, memory loss, and sleeplessness.
And I highly recommend husband and wife showering together. Look closely for obvious ticks, but also for the smaller variety, described as “freckles that move.” Take your time. One can’t be too careful for Lyme Disease!
