Squirrel Memories

Squirrel season’s Saturday start (Sept. 9) stirs up some interesting memories. The earliest of these are ones with my dad.

When rabbit hunting went downhill and he closed his kennel of beagles, Dad decided to introduce me to hunting by chasing squirrels locally. We generally took two sporting arms: a .22 rifle for shots at stationary squirrels and a 20-gauge shotgun for shots at moving targets. Dad was essentially my “gunbearer,” as he tried to set me up to do all of the shooting. The first squirrel I ever shot was with the .22. I was pretty wobbly, and Dad had to steady the rifle so I could squeeze the trigger while the scope was centered on the squirrel.

Squirrels can provide tasty meals. My mother was adept at frying a pan of squirrels or preparing them for use in a squirrel pot pie. I think squirrel pot pie is much tastier than the typical ham-and-bean pot pie.

Cleaning a squirrel for the table is not an easy task, and it takes careful knife work and patience to get a squirrel ready. When I was in college and had to deliver a five-minute “how-to” speech with a visual aid, I was in big trouble. Other than an oral book report, I had never given a speech in high school and didn’t really know what to do. I decided to do my how-to speech about cleaning a squirrel and preparing it for cooking. My visual aid was a chalk drawing of a stick figure of a squirrel, which is certainly not the most attractive of props for a speech. I still have my speech evaluation sheet. The professor gave me a “B” on the speech, noting that it was probably better to have used the stick figure than using a real squirrel as a prop. She deducted some points because my speech was 20 seconds short of the five-minute minimum. But, I digress.

Later, Dad took my sister, Anne, on a squirrel hunt, and she downed two squirrels with one shot. Anne, a much better athlete than I am, was not enamored by squirrel hunting, and I think that was her only squirrel hunt.

When my son, Bob, was young, I took him squirrel hunting, using the same two-gun method that Dad had used with me. These were unofficial mentored hunts, with Bob being only 9 when I first took him. He had practiced shooting a .22 during my woodcutting work days, and he was already quite a rifleman. He downed many squirrels, some at incredible distances.