by Gaila Oliver | Oct 8, 2016 | Uncategorized
Three days in a row last week the dawn broke onto “misty, moisty” weather, as some poet from my childhood put it. That’s the good news. The bad news is, it ain’t gun deer season yet.
I don’t bow hunt, because of a separated shoulder suffered in Ole Miss football a long time ago. While I have plenty of strength to pull the bowstring back, that action somehow puts a strain on the injured joint, and it will lock, which is decidedly inconvenient fifteen feet up in a tree! An old comrade of mine from the football wars has tried to convince me to get a crossbow these past few years, but I’ve put it off. That second misty moisty morning, I wished I’d listened to him.
Because it is a joy to hunt in that kind of weather. I don’t mean when it’s raining hard, or even steady, but more like being in a fog where you have to cut your windshield wipers on intermittent, if you happen to be driving in it. The woods are wet, yet the leaves move a little, though slowly, and you can ease along without making any noise. A misty, moisty morning is not a day for sitting in a stand; it’s a day for still-hunting, the which a better name might be slip-hunting, because you slip along slowly and silently enjoying seeing the game before they see you. For instance, on one morning like that, I spied a coyote slipping toward me carrying something in its jaws, and I froze beside a big tree. The canine slowed and walked behind a big tree himself, but didn’t reappear. I eased my head out just far enough to catch a glimpse of his flank, seeing that he had lain down.
Deer hunting was forgotten for the moment. I was so caught up in the dripping silence of the woods, that I began easing forward, keeping his tree between us, to see how close I could get before the coyote bolted.
Close! I arrived at the other side of his tree, peeked slowly around it, and the wild canine was gnawing a deer shoulder bone, completely unaware of my presence. Okay, he was facing away from me, so I eased my rifle up, because we war against the toothy predators here at Brownspur. They eat our cats (not always bad!) and have been known to pack up against tame dogs. Yet I hated to break the silence of the woods that misty, moisty morning.
But the coyote survived our meeting. When I peered through the scope, I realized that a 2½ power scope was not an effective sight at six feet! All I could see was hair, and as I searched the lens for an eye or ear, the varmint somehow got a premonition. I reckon I’m lucky he didn’t charge!
One of the biggest bucks I ever saw was during this type morning. I was slipping through a canebrake along an old logging road, and glanced down when one foot slipped slightly in the mud. When I looked back up, this huge buck was standing broadside less than fifty yards away – the legendary Still Tank Buck, all 18 points of him! He was looking right at me, so my only chance was to draw, but by the time my rifle was to my shoulder, he was long gone in the canebrake.
I knew he had 18 points because Mr. Jay, the King of the Island, told me. He ran cattle on the island, and used to rope bucks when he’d jump them. His quarter horse, Skyball, was an expert at that sport, and I’ll bet that at least two dozen times I’ve been a witness when a hunter would come into his cabin to report a good kill, like, “I got a 12-point between the dry lake beds today.”
Mr. Jay might reply, “Was one of his tines on the left antler kind of nubbed down?” When the hunter confirmed that, Mr. Jay would say, “Look at his left ear and see if it doesn’t have two notches in it. I roped that buck a month ago.” And the notches would be there. I bagged a big 10-point we called “The Plum Thicket Buck” one year, and when I went in his cabin to brag, sure enough, he had notched the big buck’s ear. He said the first time he’d roped a buck, Skyball had flipped it, like he did a cow, but the buck came up off the ground and charged the horse. After that, Skyball would flip the deer, then turn and run the rope around a tree, so as to snug the buck up to the other side of it. I’m sure the Still Tank Buck was notched, like Mr. Jay said that misty, moisty morning, and that he had 18 points.
by Gaila Oliver | Sep 27, 2016 | Uncategorized
COON SETTING ON THE MICROWAVE
We’ve gotten kidded a lot over the years for being a family that eats a variety of stuff, some of which isn’t considered particularly edible by city folks. A former Game & Fish Commission Chief conned me (through the printed word, which may be a crime of some sort) into eating even grilled beaver tail, though when I accused him of malice aforethought years later, he opined that I’d obviously left out the garlic in his recipe.
The biological father of The Virgin Killer declares that I regularly fed his daughter on roadkill that I picked up on the way back to Brownspur in the evenings. At least he gives me credit for picking up fresh roadkill, and not something that’s laid there all day.
While I’ve not regularly picked up roadkill, I must confess to once picking up a young buck that jumped into the side of a pickup ahead of us, which kept on going without stopping. The buck was still kicking, and why let it go to waste? We swung it into the back of our truck and were home in 15 minutes, where we dressed it out. That sort of thing may be against the law nowadays, I understand.
Several times I’ve picked up rabbits that took a glancing blow from a vehicle in front of me. Of course, if they’d been squushed, I’d not have fooled with them. They tasted fine, and didn’t have a single # 6 shot in them.
When I was a kid, and it snowed out here at Brownspur, we boys would arm ourselves, snag a pocketful of matches, along with a little salt and pepper, and walk the ditchbanks. When lunchtime hit, or even snacktime, we’d build a fire and cook some of whatever we’d bagged. I’ve eaten from a pointed stick grilled over a fire: blackbirds, robins, fieldlarks (which are a lot like dark meat quail), as well as the more palatable doves, quail, snipe, and woodcock. A lot of people don’t know that both hawk and owl are white meat, like chicken. Of course, we’d take home for more civilized preparation the big game: rabbits, squirrels, coons, possums, and ducks.
On excursions into the coastal marshes with Cousin Barrow and Uncle Tullier (“Too-yay”), we’d boil up crabs right on the boat, and the best oysters I ever hope to taste came fresh from Monkey Bayou, swished in the water by the skiff to get the mud off, then pitched up on the fantail for mate Buddy Manual to open with a heavy jackknife. We scooped them right out of the shell, the briny water dripping off our fingers as we gobbled them without any sauce, even catsup. Most we had to bite in two. But you know what? I’d bet that the first guy to eat an oyster was either doggone hungry, or else took a double-dog dare! Same with clams, and boiled okra. Some good stuff doesn’t LOOK good!
We love crawdads, and while Betsy doesn’t care much for it, I go for fried or grilled rattlesnake. Fried beaver tastes a lot like duck, ‘scusing the tail. Stay with the dark meat. Snapping turtle is rich dark meat, and makes great soup, too. Soft-shell turtles, however, are white meat, and taste a lot like froglegs. We used to find turtle eggs and boil them for a while (they never get hard), then pinch the top out of the leathery shell, salt the contents, and squeeze the insides into our mouths. They were good.
I’ve dined on snails, shark, “lamb fries,” mountain oysters, pig’s feet, and chit’lin’s, though if I had my druthers, I’d druther not be within smelling range of the latter when they’re cooking. I’ve had ox tail soup and chicken foot soup, and a lot of stews, purloos, and gumbos that I didn’t EVEN want to know what was mixed in, but it sure tasted good!
Once, when I was real young, and on one of those expeditions, I fried up and ate a buzzard egg – and it would take another double dog dare to make me do that again!
Okay, we’ve established that this family has appetites for varied feasts. Personally, I don’t eat olives or onions, but that goes back to football, and you may not want to hear those stories while your own appetite has just been whetted by the above. Everything else (‘scusing beaver tail, of course) is at least eligible for consideration as table fare.
Okay, now: I want you to imagine that you’ve been a friend of this family for over five years, a regular visitor in the home, and at the table. Imagine that you had courted one of the children of this family, successfully, and have finally married into the family.
So maybe you can understand why son-in-law John glanced behind him the other night, as we were sitting down at the table for supper, and he heard a “Ding.” He remarked, “You know you’re at Brownspur, when your microwave has a Coon Setting!”
No, it doesn’t, really. The “Cook” has a light out on the last letter. Just looks like “Coon.” But it WAS a natural assumption, perhaps! I wonder…. Naw, probably not.
by Gaila Oliver | Sep 23, 2016 | Uncategorized
AUTUMN APPRECIATION
A longtime colleague of mine is fixing to leave the Delta for a city somewhat Up Nawth of here, and we were driving a back road the other day when she took a deep breath and declared, “I’m going to miss the smells of the Delta so much – I love the smoky smell of a Delta Fall!”
There it is: the land where we live, during this time of the year when farmers are burning off rice fields, or someone is burning a pile of leaves, or a county crew is burning off a ditchbank. Of course, she didn’t mean the thick, choking cloud of smoke like when you’re close to the fire, but just the vague smoky smell that’s always in the air this time of year. I had to agree with her, though I amended her version to include a whiff of burnt gunpowder, slightly tinged with gun oil, and threw in a touch of ripe muscadine odor.
She was feeling nostalgic, and allowed my amendments. I shared that one of my favorite autumn smells was the perfume of ripe cotton, when the fields are mostly white, but before they are defoliated. I no longer farm (and praise the Lord that I ain’t got a dog in that hunt this year!) but that smell lingers with me each fall to remind me of the good ole days when farming was still fun.
Driving back home this afternoon, after a couple of cool spells the past two weeks, I could see autumn coming. Autumn and turkey season are the times of the year when I am most sympathetic with son Adam, who is color-blind. He cannot see the early signs of autumn here in the Delta: the bright red of the sumac and poison oak leaves, the dark red rust of the cypresses, the warm orange of the sassafras leaves (which may be ground and used as gumbo file’), the startling yellow of the persimmon leaves as the fruit ripens and drops, nor the purple shades of the sweetgums.
Actually, it’s hard to categorize sweetgum leaves: the majority of them might be purple, but they come in all shades from red and yellow to orange and pink. Trying to blood-trail a wounded buck through a stand of sweetgums is well-nigh impossible – unless it is night and your son is color-blind! Most folks don’t know that color-blind people pick up the sheen of wet blood drops in the dusk better than normal-seeing people. At least, until the dew rises.
Betsy and I sat out on the screen porch after supper with a glass of wine from the aforementioned muscadines. As the dusk darkened to night, the little screech owls cranked up behind the house, calling to each other with their quavering cries. Really hot weather seems to shut them up, but when autumn arrives, they sure love to talk to each other, and we love to hear them. We’ve raised several screech owls to maturity, and they make the finest pets a family could ever hope for. We like to think – and we’re probably correct – that the ones calling out here at Brownspur tonight are the progeny of Hoot, Gordo, Don Quixote, or Monfred, the Red Baron.
Then a bigger owl started hooting at the back of the yard, next to the Mammy Grudge (the canal that runs through Brownspur). It was either a barred owl or a great horned owl, and it was rather low-key about hooting until another answered it from over toward Rick’s Woods. The two owls woke up the family of red wolves that den up somewhere over that direction. We were glad to hear them again; they had been silent for a few months. Come to think of it, we hadn’t heard a pack of coyotes all summer either, but since it got a little cooler, these has been a pack come fairly close every few nights.
Early that next morning, when I went outside to empty yesterday’s coffee grounds, I had to stare in awe at the bright sky. There was a half moon, but it was sure bright, and Orion the Hunter was perched right over the big cottonwood tree on the ditchbank. The stars don’t seem this bright in the summer or winter, for some reason. The moon had a golden ring about it, and I spouted off the verses from “The Wreck Of The Hesperus”: “Then up spake an old sailor, had sailed to the Spanish Main, ‘I prithee, put into yonder port, for I fear a hurricane: last night the moon had a golden ring, and tonight no moon we see!’ The skipper he blew a whiff from his pipe, and a scornful laugh laughed he.”
I inhaled a deep breath of the vaguely smoky air, squinted at the bright yellow leaves on the persimmon tree shining in the moonlight, and went to make Slung Coffee.
by admin | Sep 18, 2016 | Uncategorized
This did not happen to me, but I was there in the field, and got permission to turn it unto what Betsy calls “Column Fodder” from the landowner, okay?
In all my born days, I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed someone having to be ambulanced out of a dove field. Don’t be asking me about deer hunts or quail shoots or duck blinds, now. But this was in a dove field, Opening Day weekend, when the temperature is around 100, and us old folks recruit a youngster to retrieve our doves that we fail to make fall in our laps. I had one of those, my nephew Will, and I was appreciating the boy with a new eye for his talents, to the point at which I started shooting at the same dove he was, so he could legitimately go get “our” doves on a regular basis. Oh, I went and got some myownself, especially the ones that landed close to the water supply.
Anyhoo, this was a typical large sunflower & soybean field, with enough hunters to keep the birds from alighting in the middle. But just in case, we had a guy who was shooting high brass shells in his 12 gauge shotgun stationed to occasionally rake the field and scare up any feeding doves. Necessarily, these shots were low, but he was careful not to get close to anyone.
However, just the concussion of a high brass 12 gauge shotgun going off in one’s direction will often make your eardrums pop a little, and there’s a little “Oomph” in the sound that makes one take an extra breath.
Now, one of our hunters had recently had heart surgery, and the surgeons had implanted something that is called a Defibrillator and I ain’t atall sure of the spelling there. It apparently makes one’s heart beat on a regular rhythm instead of jumping around like in a wild turkey blind when two different gobblers are answering you. Our Well Man, Billy Schultz, obviously has something similar, but he claims “They gave my wife the remote control, doggonnit!”
But our Labor Day Hero had a worse experience: he had moved a little closer to the edge of the sunflowers, and when our dove-runner-upper turned aloose a couple of rounds from that high brass twelve, he suddenly clutched his chest and bellowed, “Hey, that guy (okay, family content, right?) shot me!’ He sat on his stool and began to pull out his shirttail to see how many pellets had actually penetrated his chest. With all the 1) chest hair to search through, and 2) the doves flying, his sons judged him to be fine, just peppered a little, and turned their attention back to the important stuff – shooting.
But a little while later when it slowed down, the high brass shooter turned another volley aloose to make some birds move. “Arrrgghhh! He shot me again,” cried our Hero, and almost fell off his stool. This time, revenge rather than actual injury was the focus of our Labor Day Hero. “I’m gonna shoot him back!” he roared to his sons, who were once again searching through the bushes on the supposedly wounded chest to check for penetration and blood. None showed, and the doves began flying again, so the boys went back to shooting, the younger one responding to his father’s threats with, “Aw, Daddy, you ain’t got nothin’ but low brass shells, so you might as well forget about shootin’ back at ‘im!”
Yet the third time was the charm, and knocked our Hero slap off his stool, collapsing him into the sunflowers, gasping for breath. That got everyone’s attention, and the sons left to hustle their Daddy to the hospital 12 miles away, calling Momma on the way, to meet them.
Listen: this is important, especially if they decide to insert one of those Defibrillators in YOUR chest. They apparently warn you about standing next to microwaves, or drums at a concert, or your wife’s hair dryer. One of the things often NOT listed is that some shotguns, shooting high brass shells, can produce a concussion that will ignite a charge in your chest, even if the shooter isn’t close enough to hit you! Another argument for using low brass shells in a dove field!
(Blogged by Robert Hitt Neill)
