Mike Johnson made it home for Thanksgiving after all.
The 26-year-old Army sergeant from Whitefish was wounded in both legs and his left wrist, but he was one of the lucky ones after a Nov. 9 ambush in Afghanistan, the Whitefish Pilot reports.
“That's really hard on him,” said Johnson's father, David. “He'll tell you he was just doing his job, but to us, Mike's a hero.”
Johnson had volunteered to go on the patrol with a squad that was three soldiers short. He was just getting ready to head to Montana for an 18-day leave that was to include a hunting trip with his father.
David and Shirley Johnson got a call the morning following the attack saying he was recovering at a hospital in Germany.
“We were told Mike was trying to set up a perimeter after they were ambushed, but it was chaos,” David Johnson said. “He was grabbing people and throwing them to the ground, trying to get them under cover, until he slid down a mountainside and was stuck in a crevice.”
Now on a 30-day convalescent leave, Johnson flew into Kalispell two Sundays ago. His wife, Patti, and their two children joined him in the family reunion.
Bear of a bandit snatches couple's freshly killed elk
“The one that got away” is usually reserved for fish stories, but Ben and Deanna Knipe of Polson have been forced to apply it to their elk hunting trip.
And the elk didn't “get away” until many hours after it had been killed.
Under the purposefully tabloid-esque headline “A griz swiped my elk!” in the Lake County Leader, the Knipes related their tale to Zach Urness of the Leader staff.
The husband and wife had been hunting in southwest Montana all day, bagged an elk, packed it out of the woods and loaded it in the bed of their pickup.
Pulling a camp trailer behind them, they headed to the Swan Valley in the hopes of filling a deer tag the next day.
But 20 minutes after hitting the hay at a campground near Lion Creek, a racket erupted from outside.
“I went running outside with a pistol and a flashlight and I could hear him making a bunch of noise plowing among the trees,” Ben told the Leader. “I fired a few shots to scare him off, and then he really took off into the woods.”
It wasn't until the next morning, when he started tracking the bear, that Knipe came across the huge paw prints in the mud indicating that the bear that raided their pickup for a midnight snack was a grizzly. Knowing a grizzly isn't going to give up its food without a fight, Knipe immediately called off the search and contacted Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks.
A game warden replaced the elk tag that had been attached to the kill and carted off into the woods, and Knipe indicated he would try to fill it again before the season ends, but with one major difference.
“I am taking her directly home,” he told the Leader.
Turkeys bought for dinner become part of the family
Beverly Luedtke's Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner plans fell apart between Easter and now.
The Ronan woman purchased two live turkeys last Easter with the idea of serving them to her family during the current holiday season, but a funny thing happened on the way to the dinner table, according to the Valley Journal.
The turkeys became part of the family.
“I was saying, ‘Oh, we'll have one for Thanksgiving and one for Christmas,' but everyone in the family was saying, ‘I'm not eating one of those things,' ” Luedtke told Kasa Zpifel of the Journal.
First, Luedtke's grandchildren named the birds: “Turk” and “E.”
Then, everyone fell in love with Turk, who “is so fat, he can barely walk,” Luedtke says. “If he walks very far he starts having breathing problems, so he just waddles or flies wherever he goes.”
E, on the other hand, likes to hang out at Luedtke's business, Bev's Bloomers, and greet customers by puffing out his chest and displaying his plumage.
But he can get a bit aggressive toward men.
“Sometimes he'll chase people,” Luedtke told the Journal. “But if they stop and square off, he'll just puff up and start prancing around like, ‘Look at me, aren't I beautiful?' ”
Luedtke theorizes that her vain tom longs for a girlfriend.
“I think he's lonely and maybe that's part of the reason why he chases the men in my family around,” she says. “He wants us women all to himself.”
He also took to chasing her six grandchildren, and Luedtke wasn't sure if E wanted to attack them or just thought they might be female turkeys. That led to the grandchildren, who lobbied hard to save Turk from the turkey platter, saying they wouldn't be heartbroken if E ended up there.
But the adults have gotten such a kick out of E that not only was he spared from the butcher's knife, Luedtke is talking about buying another turkey - this one a girlfriend for E.
Alberton students enjoy eating fruits of labor
There was chili meat from Missoula, onions from the Bitterroot Valley and potatoes from Manhattan (the Montana one.)
But the students of Alberton School made their own salsa, out of tomatoes they grew in the local community garden. And they chowed down on apples picked in Norm Brovold's orchard.
The recent homegrown school lunch was the latest activity of Alberton's first fling with the Farm-to-School program, the Mineral Independent reports. And organizers say it's had all kinds of benefits already.
“The kids who made salsa were so proud, they took it home and served it to their parents with chips,” said program volunteer Kavita Bay.
Brovold was at the lunch and said he got a lot of satisfaction to see how much the kids enjoyed eating their own work.
“Lord willing, they'll do it again next year,” he said.
Bay said by getting to know the local farmers, the students better realize how their food choices affect them.
Connie Dove, the cook manager at the school, said it's actually less expensive to buy local apples, though some of the other items cost “a little more.”
“But it's a real great idea,” Dove added. “It's good for the community and it's good for the kids to know where the food comes from. It's nice to keep our food dollars in the local community.”
Weeklies Reader is compiled by reporters Vince Devlin and Kim Briggeman.
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