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.

Do that often enough, and deer hunting will become easy.

Indeed, squirrel hunting is splendid practice for hunting whitetails. Whether you ease through the thickets, rising sun to your back, or sit, motionless, inside the silhouette of a shadowed bole, the skills you use to disappear and to see animals skilled at disappearing are the same as those most useful in deer season. Then too, the mast that supports squirrels also attracts deer. You might well find a buck near the spot where you saw squirrels cutting acorns.

Not that squirrels eat nuts alone. Like deer, they're fond of corn. The first squirrel I skewered with an arrow fell on the fringe of a grain field. My first rifle kill came at dusk, the animal scampering too late up an oak limb overhanging a corn crib.

Squirrels reward patience. Compared to big game that commonly moves when dawn is still just a promise, squirrels do not rise early. They're reluctant to leave nests on cold mornings until the sun warms a limb, and they rely a great deal on vision to detect danger and find food. That doesn't mean you can sleep in. To become invisible, you must arrive close on the heels of night, sans flashlight, moving slowly so you stay quiet. Go to a tree that will hide you, in whose shelter you can shed your humanity. Or move to a part of the woods that puts the sun to your back when at dawn you start ghosting between the oaks, beeches and hickories. As when deer hunting, give the woods time to settle, to forget that an intruder has broken a twig. An hour being still is a difficult assignment for most of us, which is why we need to practice it more often. Perfecting the drill during squirrel hunts prepares you for whitetail season.

Patience also helps you find fertile woodlots. Not long ago I hunted in a Midwest bottomland with tall pecan trees shading an open understory. "There are hundreds of squirrels here," insisted my host. "Fox and gray both. Bring lots of ammo." I found few squirrels. With my Smith & Wesson .22 revolver, I bagged one and missed two. "Not a banner day," said I. "Still, great fun." I meant it. Squirrel hunting is always great fun. My host was dismayed, however. "We've never seen it so quiet." He shook his head. "Maybe it was the weather." Skies had been overcast, temperatures uniformly mild. Squirrels are most active in sharp air, and sun seems a catalyst. "If you could come back in a week..."

I couldn't. As it turned out, I should have. A group of riflemen in that block bagged eighty squirrels; the trees had come alive when night temperatures dropped and the sun shone at dawn. Had I relied on my only day in those pecans to assess their value as squirrel habitat, I'd have certainly come to the wrong conclusion.

The same caveat holds when you're able to hunt only early or only late. While I've found the best squirrel hunting happens in the morning, late afternoon can be productive--especially just before a storm. I've had limited success at dusk. By the time deer are most active, squirrels are where owls can't reach.

In the South, hunters commonly use dogs to find squirrels. Dogs (and partners) can also keep the squirrels motionless on a limb or tree trunk while the marksman works into position for a shot. Southerners also favor shotguns more so than hunters in the Upper Midwest--and with some justification. Long seasons that start when foliage is still thick in places that are never as open as late-fall woodlots in the North give riflemen little opportunity. Gray squirrels are typically flightier than northern fox squirrels, too.

Still, I'd as soon hunt with a rimfire rifle or a handgun, shooting hollowpoint or polymer-tipped bullets at the head or crease behind the shoulder. I've used a variety of .22s for squirrels and enjoyed them all, especially old ones that hide history in scarred walnut and silvered barrels. My leanest days have come when I carried handguns, but squirrel hunting is not a game for score. It is best done with modest hardware.