Beside the beauty there is some scary stuff in the great outdoors

Beside the beauty there is some scary stuff in the great outdoors

Larry J. LeBlanc © 2011

I have to tell you that being able to get out into the great outdoors and communing with nature is one of the major activities that helps keep me anywhere near sane. I enjoy the challenges of hunting and fishing, or fine-tuning a load for one of my guns. I relish the delicate flavor of fresh crappie or slices of venison back strap that melt in your mouth. I am also an avid fan of doing nothing, as long as it is in the great outdoors.

Whether I am in West Texas among the hills, East Texas in the woods or in the Panhandle with my mouth agape at the expansive beauty I can be perfectly happy sitting and soaking up the feels, smells and sounds of Mother Nature and call that a good day.

Over the years it has been proven to me that while out in nature a person must adapt to the ways of Mother Nature or pay the consequences. Beside being beautiful nature can be brutal, dangerous and unforgiving if one does not pay attention to what is going on and remains aware of some of the potential dangers of the natural world.

I would like to pass a few of the more scary moments on to you that some of my friends and I have run into over the years. Let me start with an event told to me by fishing guide Bill Mills about a turkey hunting trip and getting too focused on the prey.

Mills was hunting turkey once in south Louisiana. It was a swampy place with lots of trees and wet areas. Having heard the turkeys he was creeping up on their location which was on across a raised railroad bed from where he crept.

Slowly he crawled up the rail bed on all fours and peaked over the top to try and locate a target. As he was perched on all fours surveying his surroundings he felt something slapping his right leg just above his knee. Looking down he found that he had pinned the head of a cottonmouth water moccasin into the mud with his knee and the slapping was the tail of the snake thrashing around. He promptly rolled off of the snake, scared the turkeys away and if my memory serves me correctly he also mentioned something about needing to return to camp to change his pants.

My father and I were seining for minnows in a marsh ditch once, when I was in my mid teens, trying to get some bait to go fishing. The seine was a fine meshed net about 25 feet long and four to five feet wide with a stick on both short ends to allow us to drag the seine vertically in the water and then pick it up horizontally with our bait securely trapped in the sagging middle. We would gather the bait up and put it in a minnow bucket until we had all we wanted and then go fishing.

On one particular day we were seining for minnows and when we picked up the net to our surprise there was a cottonmouth water moccasin in the net. It started crawling my way so I picked my end up higher and it started sliding toward my father’s side. He in turn lifted his end and the snake headed back toward me. We continued this teeter tooter action with the snake until it finally fell off of the side of the net and back into the ditch. Knowing the sour disposition of a cottonmouth we decided to beat a rapid retreat to another location to try our hand at gathering minnows and not further irritate that local resident.

Fishing guide Bob Murphy tells of the time he was in Yellowstone with another man and they ran out of gas in the park. They flipped a coin to see who was going to walk to the nearest pump to get some gas and Murphy won, or lost, depending on your point of view. Whichever, he started walking with the gas can. He located some gasoline and was returning to the truck when he rounded a corner and there was a line of tourist in automobiles throwing food out of their cars for a gathering of bears. The bears saw Bob and started toward him either thinking he had or was food. A man in a truck, seeing the predicament Murphy was in, raced to his aid and Murphy jumped in and they went back to the out of gas truck.

That last story is just one more example of the stupidity of mankind who does not heed the regulations adopted for good reason for the wilderness areas by the authorities. These are the people who cause bears to raid campsites and become a threat by destroying the natural shyness of man by labeling us as a food source.

Another short tale was related by fishing guide Butch Terpe. He was once deer hunting in South Texas, darkness fell and he had to walk back to the camp. He soon began to get the feeling he was being watched. Then he heard the whisper of movement and slight sighs coming from both sides of him as he walked down the syndero. As the moon came out he saw the noise he was hearing was coming from a very large number of Javalina that was accompanying him just inside of the brush on each side of the trail. He arrived back at camp and they scattered, but he was jumpy after that for quite a while.

So friends, remember that when we are out enjoying the beauties of nature keep alert because things can turn sour very rapidly.

Photography by Larry J. LeBlanc

Photo number - PC180003B

Caption – This coral snake is pretty, but not to be messed with