One Nation, Under God
One Nation, Under God
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Bird season opened last weekend and I was hesitant to take Jem hunting. Now 12 years old and limping like Chester on Gunsmoke, the old springer looked like a dog that should be retired from the field. I doubted he’d be able to keep up with me, let alone the other dogs, but it was his birthday and there was no leaving him at home. I should have known better. He’s always had a big motor, and a hitch in his git-along was little hindrance. I still couldn’t keep up. While Ace and Ruth worked back and...
I’m often misunderstood. It’s no one’s fault but my own. Many of my columns are written with tongue firmly embedded in cheek. I can be a bit cynical and have even been known to exhibit a sarcastic bent. Occasionally readers take me too seriously. Last week’s column on my failure to draw an antelope tag is the most recent example. A reader responded that he, too, had failed to draw a tag, the result, perhaps, of being on the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks black list. He went on to...
I’m going to upgrade my printer. Get me one of them newfangled ones that prints guns. But I’m not much interested in printing out one of those ugly little single shot pistols that have been pictured all over the news. No, I want a fine double gun like the white hunters in Africa carry on safari or at least a WWII-era, Belgium-made Browning. I always thought those were cool, but never figured I could afford one. Although judges have blocked efforts to post blueprints for firearms online, mor...
It often happens that when you solve one problem you create another. Cities and towns all across Montana are struggling to deal with a growing urban deer population. The issue was brought up last week at a city council meeting in Malta when a resident complained deer had moved into her mother’s carport, and were eating the flowers in her yard. “Something needs to be done,” mayor John Demarais said. “I just don’t know what.” People in town have even begun shooting the deer with paintball g...
I woke up this morning scratching a mosquito bite on my ankle. The last thing I remember before falling asleep was the sound of the fogger on the city truck driving by the house. I usually get up and shut the windows when I hear the truck approaching, but last night I was just too tired. And a little Malathion never hurt anybody did it? When I was a kid in Indiana we used to chase the spray truck through the neighborhood on our bicycles, disappearing into the dense white cloud when we neared...
When I cased the shotgun on New Year’s Day the opening of hunting season was eight months away. It seemed like a very long time to wait. It always does. But this year especially, the wait seemed interminable. Winter lasted longer than usual, delaying the start of fishing season by a good month. I love to fish. It helps kill time until I can hunt again. This year, however, the winter was so bad, that the fish winter-killed in many of my favorite ponds. For a while, I turned to yard work and g...
I started catching bass on a fly rod when I was a kid. Dad taught me how to cast. Growing up in southern Indiana I didn’t know too many other fly fishermen, but it was just how we fished. Eventually I moved out West where everybody, it seemed, used a fly rod, and I traded bass for trout. For years, I didn’t fish for anything else. I caught cutthroats in Yellowstone Park, brookies in the Beartooths, and pulled rainbows and browns from the Yellowstone River. Moving from the mountains to the pra...
I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for small animals. Especially rabbits. So it was with conflicted emotions that I dispatched six young bunnies last week. I didn’t want to be that guy, but couldn’t see any other option. Ruthie, my year-old springer spaniel, had shown up at the back door with a tiny cottontail in her mouth. I said “drop,” and she deposited the little rabbit at my feet. It appeared unharmed, but was covered with dirt. Ruth has a soft mouth, the result, not of training,...
Yellowstone National Park has always been a scary place. Grizzly bears, boiling hot springs, and raging rivers have taken their toll over the years, but this spring its bison and elk that are sending folks to the hospital. In two separate incidents recently, cow elk roughed up a couple of women at Mammoth, and a bison gored a woman at the Lower Geyser Basin. Another woman was injured in early May when she was butted by a bison. It’s nothing new. Run-ins with bison have become so common that visi...
While out walking the dogs last week at the lake I encountered a trio of young folks shore fishing and asked if they were having any luck. “We only caught a couple of hammer handles,” one of the women told me, “but we killed a big bull snake.” “Why?” I asked. “Because they eat goose eggs,” she replied. I’ve heard a lot of excuses for killing bull snakes, but that was a new one. It always bothers me to hear of people killing nonvenomous snakes, especially those that prey on rodents, and have...
The deadline to apply for an antelope tag is only a couple of days away. I always wait until the very last minute. It brings me luck. Or at least I tell myself it does. My wife says I simply put things off because I’m a procrastinator. She may be right. I didn’t draw a tag last year. I also put off buying a new bilge pump for the boat this spring and nearly paid dearly for it. The weather forecast called for strong thunderstorms and damaging hail last weekend, but instead of pulling the boa...
I saw on the news this morning that folks in Helena are upset with how the city responded to the recent flooding there. People are fed up with the high water and want someone to remedy the problem. I don’t ask so much of my elected officials and government agencies. I usually prefer they simply leave me alone. Only in the direst of straits do I seek help. Unfortunately, that’s where I now find myself. So I turned to my favorite government entity -- The Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and...
My mother didn’t hunt or fish, but she encouraged me in my outdoor pursuits nonetheless. When I bought a canoe with money from my paper route she helped me put a roof rack on our Chevy Nova so we could get it home. She also helped me buy my first pistol, a Ruger .22-caliber semiautomatic, when I was still too young to make the transaction on my own. Before I was old enough to drive, she would shuttle me and my friends out to a little lake in the country, drop us off, and we’d camp and car...
A few nights ago I fell asleep to the sound of rain on the roof. At least I think I did. It’s become such a rare occurrence that I can’t be sure. Maybe it was a dream. I remember rain hammering on the roof a few years back, but it didn’t happen last summer. Once the snow disappeared in April, the country simply dried out. There was no green-up, no wet season, no rain. I worry this spring is shaping up in similar fashion. So maybe I was hearing things. But the sound of rain, like the sound of a...
I thought I was immune, but apparently, I still need help. I no longer paid much attention to those lists of The Prettiest Mountain Towns in America, or The Safest Places to find your Post-apocalypse Dream Home or even The Most Dog-friendly Towns in America. It was all just click bait and I bit because there was usually a Montana town on the list, and I’m a sucker for Montana towns. Eventually, however, the lists became so generic that nearly every town in the state was included somewhere. Bozem...
I finally came back down to Earth this week. For the past four months, I’ve been walking on a couple feet of packed snow. Not everywhere, but certainly everywhere in my yard. Unless I wanted to wallow through three feet or so of unpacked snow, I stayed on the trails. The dogs made them. I improved them. And until the snow set up about a month ago, our travels in the yard were confined to them. It sure wasn’t my first rodeo. I learned years earlier to stay on the trails when there was snow on...
It’s always good to get home, even if there’s still snow on the ground. For the last few weeks, Barb and I were cruising through Europe on a riverboat. It was such a grand trip that I didn’t start missing Montana for three or four days. In this era of full disclosure, I must admit the boat was actually a luxury longship designed for river travel, a far cry from my first drift boat, a beautiful wooden craft made by Montana Riverboats. And it was certainly no pull-up-on-a-sandb...
Rivers run through me. I was born and raised in a city that sits on a bend of the Ohio. I fished the Wabash when I was a kid, and watched my father help pull a net full of catfish from the Embarras in Illinois when I was too small to help. I fished the St. Johns, Lopez and the Loxahatchee in Florida. I floated the Suwanee, Santa Fe and the Ichitucknee in the same state. When I moved west I fell in love with the Yellowstone. From its humble beginnings high in the mountains above Yellowstone Lake...
I knew it was bad when folks around here quit saying we could use the moisture. Following last year’s wicked drought, I swore I’d never again complain about too much rain or snow. There was a time – not so long ago—that I thought it would never end. Up until the middle of December, the weather remained warm and dry. There had even been a wildfire south of Malta on Thanksgiving. Then the switch flipped. It got cold and started to snow. Since the first of the year there have only been a couple of...
When I arrived in Montana I knew nary a soul here. It didn’t matter. I was searching for adventure, not familiarity. I reveled in the wild country and open spaces, the vastness of it all. Nearly 48 years later I’m still in awe, although I must admit it’s a lot more familiar than it used to be. I know what’s on the other side of the mountains now. I have friends and acquaintances from the Flathead to Baker, and a growing number of young folk refer to me as Grandpa. The arrival of twins Mason a...
My wife and I live with a pack of dogs -- one a pup, one in his prime, one a few years past his prime, and an old girl whose expiration date is long past due. As much as I love dogs I never expected to have four of them at the same time. Three, sure, but not four. Four is encroaching upon weird cat lady territory. It’s not happenstance, but instead part of a great plan. When each dog reached its prime, I’d get another puppy. Spacing them four or five years apart would assure I’d always have...
In a clear indication that climate change is upon us, April is no longer the cruelest month. T.S. Eliot was wrong. It’s March. By April I’ll be fishing open water again. The snow will melt, and the boys of summer will begin play. It won’t be shorts and flip-flops weather, but neither will it be insulated coveralls and Scotch caps weather. The old saying that March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb better applies these days to April. March typically comes in like a lion and retre...
I’m a gun guy. Always have been. It’s how I was raised. We even had a couple of military weapons in the house when I was a kid – a Civil War era Tower musket, and an Arisaka rifle Dad brought back from the Philippines at the end of WWII. They were a far cry from modern military firearms, but even as a kid I understood their purpose. They were part of a modest collection of firearms my father had picked up over the years. All the rest were either shotguns or .22s we used for hunting and targe...
I can finally watch the Olympics in peace. There was a time, however, when I saw the winter games as a challenge. My first winter in Montana was 1976. I was living in Cooke City, didn’t have much money, and didn’t have any work. But I did have a television set that picked up two channels, and one of them carried the Winter Olympics from Innsbruck, Austria. I also had a pair of skis and a mountain out my back door. My friend Steve and I had built a short downhill course on the slope above the...
I’m trying to embrace winter. Relish it. Greet each frosty morning with a smile. It’s difficult. At 20 below I don’t even want to go outside, let alone frolic in the snow. I went ice fishing last week with a friend who truly enjoys this time of year. He showed up at the cabin with two snow machines, a power auger, and enough minnows and smelt to open a bait shop. A Minnesota native of Scandinavian descent, Mike is hard-wired for the cold. He doesn’t seem to notice when the mercury takes a dive....
