Squirrel School

The barn, still dark where the bare bulbs fell short, had the sweet smell of clover and warm milk. The soft, rhythmic shuffle of a Surge vacuum pump played background to scratchy country on the radio. The man moved from one barrel-ribbed Holstein to the next, adjusting the cups, pulling the pails, striding into the shadows of the block room in back to dump the milk.

"Ready to hunt?" He swung a strap over the next cow.

"Yessir."

"Go ahead, then. You'll do well in the beeches east of the hill. Squirrels like early sun."

"Yessir." I turned to go.

"You don't want to sound like what you are," the farmer continued. "Step slow. Sit long. When you sit, don't move anything 'cept your eyes."

It had sounded easy, but it wasn't. By the time I'd reached the trunk of a beech straight enough for a bow sprit, the eastern sky had gone incendiary. I slid my back down the bark and carefully picked leaves from around my feet until I could shift position from time to time without making noise. Then I tried hard to follow his last shard of advice:

"Peel off everything that you'd look for if you wanted to see people. Not your clothes, son. Your habits."

It was, he said, like shedding a skin. You couldn't become a good hunter unless you became what the squirrels didn't expect you to be.

"To hunt, you gotta get humble and be something you ain't. Think of what you'd be and what you'd do if you weren't out to kill something."

I listened because I was desperate for any advice that would bring me shooting.

That morning, with the farmer's Remington pump, I didn't shoot a squirrel. However, several dawns later a fox squirrel the size of a raccoon was suddenly perched above me, cutting an acorn. The rifle's wicked crack surprised me almost as much as the thud of the animal hitting the ground. I hadn't pulled the trigger, had I? Good gravy, I hadn't moved!

Hunting squirrels is an exercise in self-denial. Unless you retreat to the woods only to unwind or squeeze therapeutic benefit from the solitude, you must shed more than your cares at forest's hem. As the farmer so aptly observed, losing your humanity gives you a degree of inconsequence necessary if you're to become a successful predator. It also helps you see sharply those things that matter to squirrels.

What matters to squirrels? Everything. Small enough to qualify for the base of the woodland food pyramid, squirrels are prey for anything with a hooked beak or pointed teeth. Squirrels that don't notice the details soon vanish. Hunting squirrels, your first job is to rid yourself of details that might draw a squirrel's attention. Your next is to notice details that might draw a squirrel's attention.

In an Oklahoma woodlot last fall, I paused in my still-hunting to glass the top of a gnarled hickory that had several cavities. My Zeiss binocular showed me the glint of an eye. Nonchalantly, I moved away from the tree and into cover that would shade my eye and conceal the movement of my pistol. Careful aim and a steady crush of the trigger could not, alas, ensure a hit. While the bullet missed, the hunt had all the elements of success. I'd found where a squirrel lived and spotted its eye and fired before it understood the threat.