SQUIRREL HUNTING

Before I was in elementary school my mother would substitute teach on rare occasions and I would require a babysitter. I recall several times a good friend of ours from church, Nell Sager would keep me at their farm. I don’t remember a lot about the days there but I do remember that she let me play with the collection of die cast tractors and farm implements that belonged to her son, John. I am sure he came home from school and wondered how his tractors got spread out across the living room floor. Little did I know at the time that John would one day become my brother-in-law. I suppose that the tractors and machinery that I viewed as just toys were more than that to him, as he would one day receive a PhD in Agricultural Engineering from Penn State.

Years later when John was dating my sister, Barbara, he suggested that a small wood lot on the Sager farm held plenty of squirrels if I was looking for a place to hunt. He said he had often had success there in his youth. He didn’t have to say anymore. The next opportunity I got I was out there on a sunny fall Saturday. I had three choices of weaponry – a shotgun, a .22 rifle or a .22 pistol. The shotgun would provide for the least challenge and the best chance for success. The rifle would provide more of a challenge but I wasn’t too concerned about actually bringing home dead squirrels. I was just interested in getting in some shooting. If I took the pistol I’d be traveling more lightly and almost guaranteeing I wouldn’t have to clean any game that day. So that’s what I did.

On most days squirrels are more active in the mornings and evenings. I figured I would get out to the woodlot early to have the best chance of seeing some. I parked by the Sager’s milk house. Theirs was a dairy farm and we used to get our milk there in large glass gallon jars. It was pasteurized but not homogenized so the thick cream rose to the top. I remember Dad used to scoop this cream out for his coffee. But I digress, back to the squirrels. It was a short walk across a recently-cut cornfield to the woodlot. This was probably about two acres of 80 to 100 year-old oaks in the middle of all the cultivated fields. I guessed that the original farmers had left these trees for firewood or perhaps even structural lumber in the past. It reminded of how simple and self-sufficient life used to be in this rural area.

There were lots of stumps to sit on so I found one with a comfortable height and sat down. It was a perfect fall day with sunny skies, low humidity, and a temperature in the low 60s. I pulled out my pipe and settled in for peaceful morning. It didn’t take long before I noticed movement on the floor of the woodlot. It seemed there were birds everywhere. They were fueling up on seeds for an eventual flight south. The squirrels on the other hand would be staying put for the winter. It wasn’t long before they came out of hiding to gather nuts for their larder. I noticed that many were just exiting a nest in the very top of a large oak that looked like a big ball of leaves. I reminded myself that I was going to have to be very careful with the direction of my shots. Even from a pistol, a .22 bullet can travel a long way. I would have to have a solid backstop for any shot I took. My brother (who knew everything about everything) had told me about how the pioneers used to “bark” squirrels. This was a procedure whereby the hunter would shoot a ball from his muzzleloader into the tree immediately adjacent to the squirrel. The squirrel would either die or be knocked unconscious from the flying bark dislodged by the ball. After harvesting the animal the hunter would then use his knife to pry the ball out of the tree for future use. I considered that if I got a close enough shot I might just try this technique. Who was I kidding?

As activity in the squirrel community picked up I began to get more interested in what they were up to than getting a good shot (or a good bark). I noted that most of them were red squirrels. I saw one gray and one fox squirrel as well. Most of the activity was too far away for a shot but close enough to observe what was going on. It was a good year for acorns and the squirrels were really getting busy gathering them. It seemed there were two distinct groups with “headquarters” in two different large oak trees. As I watched I didn’t see any “slackers”. Everyone was involved in the effort. This was not a “union shop”. They would dart around in the leaves, sometimes “tunneling” under a thick pile, I suppose until they had their jaws full of acorns. Then they would dart back up the tree, normally circling around it to the opposite side from my vantage point. I’m not sure if they sensed my presence but they seemed to give me a wide birth. After they had “made their deposit” in the storage area they were back down to the forest floor again. Once in awhile they would take a short break for what appeared to be “play time” – two or three would begin to chase each other around in the piles of leaves. They resembled little kids but I suppose it was more like office workers taking a mid-morning break with banter around the water cooler. The more I watched the less interested I became in killing one of these furry little workers.

As I thought about the squirrels and their corporate effort, I began to consider the Sager farm and what it must have been like at the turn of the century. Everyone worked hard on the farm these days but they had all the modern conveniences and could run to town to buy what they didn’t grow. Not so even fifty years before. Then I began to think of the nearby Amish community and how life there hadn’t changed all that much in the last hundred years. Like the squirrels the Amish were like a large family, working together and taking care of one another for the good of the whole. I suppose they may have had some slackers but I had never seen any in my observations. If they didn’t work I guess they didn’t eat. How unlike our current culture!

After a morning of watching the squirrels lay in their winter food supply I got hungry and decided to head home. When I walked in the door from my “hunt” Mom, as she always did, asked if I got anything. My response was, “Yeah, I got an education.”