By KW

The legislative race is on to allow hunters to use hounds during the state lion season.

According to another AP story by my huntin’ fool of a reporter brother, Terry, (actually, I’m not sure he’s hunted since he bagged a pigeon out in the feedyard with that old .410 double we had, back in about, oh, 1959, but who’s counting?) the Senate Ag and Natural Resources Committee today voted 7-2 to approve SB75, which would allow hunters with dogs to kill 10 lions during the season.

It’s an interesting idea, that would a third of the 35-lion quota in the season to be be killed by hunters using dogs.

That would still leave most lions to be taken by the regular Joes who can’t afford or don’t want to fuss with a pack of hounds.

GF&P is still worried about trespass. Supporters think it’s strike s a fair balance for the season.

 I’m guessing it’ll have a tough time get out of the Senate, with a back of critics howling at its heels.

But …

By KW

An Associated Press reporter by the name of Terry Woster (yo, bro, whaddup in Pierre?) reports today that a legislative committee has shot down - using bismuth, I believe - a bill to limit land purchases by Game, Fish & Parks.

HB 1005 would have required lawmakers to approve GF&P land purchases of more than 20 acres.  It got blasted 13-0 in the House State Affairs Committee.

Supporters of the bill said GF&P’s continued acquisition of land had grown to totalitarian proportions  and is promoting socialism (Actually, they didn’t say that. I threw it in for effect.) and must be stopped. Opponents say public-hunting land is essential to maintaining a free society and protecting the constitution (I threw that in, too), and that landowners looking to sell should have GF&P as an option.

Heck, you guys know the arguments by now, right?

OK, rd, I know you’re mad at me because of my somewhat snotty response to your comment on Obama over Mount Blogmore way (I’m sorry, OK?), but surely you’ll want to jump in on this one.

 Unless, of course, you think GF&P is, like, doing a, like, totally awesome job with the land it has and should be, like, totally allowed to buy a lot more and everything? All that? Like? Totally?

Awesome?

 (Don’t you hate that kind  of talk? When, like, even really bright people and not even just, like, shallow California girl dolts, are suddenly, like, totally talking like - note the legitimate use of that word - idiots and, like, using that word all the time and, like, making statements that sound like - note the legitimate use of that word again - questions and stuff? Like? Totally? Awesome? OK, OK, sorry for the rant. Back to GF&P.)

Anyway, in the event that rd continues his boycott and won’t jump in, is there another voice for landowners out there?

And sportsmen, too, of course.

Why not let GF&P buy any land that a willing seller wants to sell?

So I’ll have another public place to hunt?

Like.

Totally.

Awesome.

By KW

 Ted Kooser showed up - in poem, if not in person - Saturday for the Semi-Regular Dakota Angler & Outfitter Poetry Reading, Fly Exchange and Hyperbole Contest.

And he brought the carp with him, which made all of us - but especially golden-salmon lover Caster Don - extremely happy.

If you don’t read Kooser, you should. Meanwhile, take a trip with him under the surface of winter, where old buglemouth waits to wallow in the warmer waters of spring:

CARP

On the river bottom,

the carp have blown out

all the candles.

They whisper along

over the closed, black

bibles of clams.

Water-monks these,

with mouths like those

of angels singing,

but not angelic,

so very naked now

in darkness,

their cool, hard bodies

touching, among

the tapestries of weed.

– Ted Kooser 

By KW

 We’re two-thirds of the way to the female lion sub-quota in the 2009 lion season.

The 2-year-old female taken in Lawrence County Friday was the 10th female and 19th lion overall killed this season. The cat weighed 88 pounds.

With a maximum kill on lions set this year by GF&P at 35, and a sub-quota of 15, it’s likely that the season will once again end when the female sub-quota is reached.

I’m a little surprised that so many cats are coming in,  since moving the lion hunt outside the deer and elk seasons has put substantially fewer guns in the hills. Apparently these gunners know what they’re doing - except, of course, for that pesky rule against shooting spotted cats (read “kittens”).

 Two more kittens have been shot recently - although “kitten” is a relative term when describing a cat that weighs 40 or 50 pounds.

That makes three lions from 5 months to 7 months old - all of them, presumably, in violation of the regulation against shooting spotted cats - have been bagged since the season began Jan. 1.

Are we seeing the beginning of the end of the spotted-cat prohibition? I suspect so.

Unless, of course, GF&P decides to start writing tickets.

As winter shows its mild side, Patrick Nero makes life even better - for him, anyway - as he coaxes a nice rainbow to net. (Photo by Shutterbug Wintersteen)

By Kevin Woster

With the sun out and the wind - finally - down, Patrick Nero and Keith Wintersteen took a lunch break from the arduous duties of fish management to, uh, manage a fly rod or two.

Warm day. Warm-water creek. Willing rainbow trout.

Wintersteen was supposed to get me some pictures of hot ice-fishing action, but the gale-force winds of the day before blew out the trip.

These’ll do, though, Shutterbug.

Caught on a blue-bellied stinkbug pattern - or something like that - in Wilted Willow Creek - or some place like that - this 20-inch rainbow waits to resume its fin work.

At the end of a wind-blasted Sunday, a beaver dam on the edge of the northern Black Hills is awash in sunset.

By Kevin Woster

For this, I steal from Dylan Thomas, and a line from his poem, Fern Hill:

” And the Sabbath rang slowly, in the pebbles of the holy streams.”

Indeed, it rang slowly on Sunday, as I flailed with my fly rod in a 40-mph gale, in streams that were no less holy because of the howling winds.

Who lets fly a woolly bugger in weather like that? No, not just the obsessed, although that surely could be argued here.

But also, and especially, people who love the holy streams.

I’d like to think I’m one of those. And I know Dan Landguth was.  His friends have made that clear in both words and tears, offered to honor his passing.

On Saturday, I  joined in a funeral Mass for Landguth - a Lead boy who grew to be president and CEO of Black Hills Corp but never lost his prayerful connection to home and its holy streams. And on Sunday, with rod in hand,  I tried in a small way to pay my respects to his life.

I got much more than I gave.

It took all day and half a dozen woolly buggers - some snatched by brush, others seemingly inhaled by the wind - but I had three brown trout on and brought two of them to hand.

More than that, I had six or seven hours of open-water fishing - wind blasted or not - smack in the heart of winter.

And there was more:

A beaver lounged nearby; a muskrat submarined away with sucker speed; mallards flushed from hidden hideouts; geese called down the valley; kingfishers screeched on take-off; and hawks wheeled far up in the blue.

All things that Landguth knew well and loved deeply.

And at the end of the day, there was the sunset.

Simply glorious.

On a ridge overlooking moving water where trout and memories flow, I sensed the presence of my friend, Tony Dean, gone three months now. I also felt a comforting certainty that his essence has been joined by another of his like, in a place beyond all understanding.

Good men lost, but not forgotten.

Not as long as there are holy streams, and those who love them.

 

By KW

Inspired by the recent literary turn during our Saturday morning gathering at Dakota Angler & Outfitter, the staff here at Take It Outside (which consists of me and my multiple personalities) has decided to offer, on an entirely random basis, keeper-sized snippets of prose from Norman Maclean’s classic, A River Runs Through it.

And to begin, there’s no place quite like the beginning:

 ”In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others. He told us about Christ’s disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman.”

Journal reporter Mary Garrigan takes the high road on the Mickelson Trail as she escapes her husband’s incessant fish spying along Rapid Creek near Rochford.

By KW

Somewhere, I have a pair of cross-country skis. Pretty good ones, too.

I don’t use them much. They make me feel hemmed in by process, rather than free to explore.

I prefer snowshoes, or a nice pair of waterproof boots, either of which takes you where skis never can.

The places I really like to go - up in the trees, down in the rocks, over in the brush against the cliffs.

And, especially, down along the creek, to peer into open runs and deep, dark pools, trying to decipher the coded mysteries of winter trout.

There are times, then, when Mary and I go our separate ways in the outdoors, if only for relatively brief interludes of individual solitude.

She likes to glide over the snow. I like to thrash around in it.

We were marching to the beat of our respective outdoor drummers - she in her high-ground glide and I slipping around down by the creek - when I snapped this photo.

Beautiful, huh? I sure think so.

And the landscape isn’t bad, either.

During the inaugural Dakota Angler Saturday Morning Poetry Reading, Fly Exchange & Hyperbole Contest, Caster Don proves that he’s as handy with a rhyme as he is with a Sage.

By KW

As if the Saturday morning sessions - with their fish talk, fly swaps and tall-tale competitions - at Dakota Angler & Outfitter in downtown Rapid City weren’t good enough already, we decided to take it up a notch.

We added literature.

It began with readings from Hemingway and Maclean and Donne, and drifted quietly from there into Loup River love poems by William Kloefkorn.

Soon after, our friendly little band of liars and coffee swillers moved on to impromptu bits of English Renaissance theatre - nice job, Stabile - and original poetic works, one of which we share here on Take It Outside, thanks to Caster Don Polovich, a lover of rod and rhyme:

 Golden Salmon

I was down on Angostura where the Cheyenne meets the lake

floating along a weed line lookin’ for salmon on the take

I’d already caught some crappie and a feisty bass or two

 but it was a big old golden salmon that I wanted to pursue.

The morning it was ovecast, a chance of rain and yet

 it didn’t bother me at all - with my slicker on - and the fish were already wet

I was just about to change the fly when a splash and ripple caught my eye.

I watched and then they rose again, and then they rose again, them salmon they weren’t foolin

The feed was on and set them fish to schoolin’

I cast a fly into the mix, the one that struck did several tricks.

I tried the weeds and then the brush, and then the open water in a rush

The reel it sang as the line went out, the salmon’s power wasn’t lacking

It wasn’t long before the line was gone and well into the backing.

After 30 yards or so I began to reeling

The battle was on twix him and me. It was a grateful feeling.

The backin on and the line half in, that salmon wanted to run again.

This time the run was a little weak as the hook held firmly in its cheek.

Twenty minutes that fish did fret, before I held it in the net

If you want to chase this mighty fish here is a solid warning. You could pursue late in the day, but it’s best in early morning.

Oh, let me add before I go, to find a hook that’s sharp

That big old golden salmon is nothing but a big brown carp.

– Caster Don

John Kanta and his 10-year-old son, Dayten, celebrate in the sun after dad bagged a nice antelope during the antlerless season on a Butte County walk-in area Sunday.

 By KW

Talk about trophies. Try this one: A father and son on foot in a sweeping, West River landscape on a sunny January day, hunting antelope.

Horns? Who need horns? Not Dayten Kanta and his dad, John, who also happens to be the regional game manager for GF&P in Rapid City.

Earlier this year John bagged a nice antelope buck. To complete the autumn cycle, he came back with his son to fill an antlerless tag.

Which was the bigger trophy? I’d say the pronghorn taken during the father-son hunt.

I’m pretty sure John agrees.