Now, you may think it impossible to enjoy fancy cooking on the banks of the river, but don’t knock it if you haven’t tried it. For an appetizer, try the famous Blackbird on a Stick, roasted over an open fire. It will have your taste buds jumping for joy.

After that, I suggest for the entrée a chicken stew made with water from Dement Creek and cooked in an open pot with a few gnats and other insects that might have fallen into the pot. They just add to the delicious flavor.

In order to make good chicken stew, it is necessary to borrow the bird from a neighbor’s yard. The trick is to get a handful of gravel, call the chickens and drop the gravel down by your feet. When the chickens come a’running and pecking around your feet, just grab one and head for the river.

Always leave an IOU.

We always left our footprints.

Rog and Mary Lovell raised the best and fattest chickens in the community. It was a pleasure to sit down on a log and eat a bowl of stew when the chicken came from their barnyard. A good side dish is a roasted ear of corn cooked around the open fire. We borrowed the corn from whoever had some that was ripened for eating.

Catfish was also a tasty treat, especially if it came off Uncle Jim Rose’s trotline. When we couldn’t get a catfish, then a carp did just fine. We also had Elk River caviar. That was catfish or carp eggs fired to a golden brown. Those fancy, high society folks up north still think fish eggs are to be eaten raw.

Whenever we fried frog legs, they kept jumping out of the skillet into the fire. We had to rescue them from the ashes and put them back into the skillet. A little pot ash might be good for the body.

Uncle Jim Rose was known for raising the best watermelons in the community. There was nothing any better than a ripe melon after the dew had fallen on it late at night. We River Rats were his No. 1 taste testers. We may have started our jobs a little early at times, but a half-ripe watermelon was not too bad late at night when you were hungry.

Uncle Jim always selected one of his melons as a seed watermelon, saving the seeds for the next year’s planting. If we River Rats ever took his seed melon by mistake, he got madder than an old setting hen. We tried to assure him that we would never take his seed melon.

Richard and William McElyea and I were the three River Rats. Our girlfriends, who we fed all this good food to, began to get some big ideas about the three of us. I believe they wanted some permanent cooks.

Had we messed around and screwed up? Matrimony was a scary word to three boys who had never given it much thought. Perhaps it was time to feed them some bad tasting chicken stew and raw fish.

Winter weather never stopped us from being on the river. Many times, we had roasted rabbit over an open fire. It was so cold at times that we put a lot of wood on the fire, rolled up in our one quilt and went to sleep. We’d wake up about three hours later just about frozen, so we would repeat the same thing over again.

We thought we had it made. We lived a life that most had never dreamed about. Besides, who would want to be home in a nice warm bed sleeping the whole night through — only a sane person? Just call us River Rats idiots of the highest caliber.

— Dale Lone Elk Casteel lives in the Coxey community, attended Clements High School and was preparing for his senior year when mobilized into active service in the Army in August 1950. When his class graduated, he was in Korea. He wrote his first story and book at age 70.