Squirrels..Part 2

When I was a boy we had a fellow back home in the hills that had two big teeth that stuck out in front. His big front teeth didn’t bother him much as he did just fine with the local ladies on account of his outgoing personality and gentle ways offset the fact that he was a little on the homely side. The fellows at the pool hall said they thought he developed those front teeth from eating so many squirrels when he was a kid.

That scared me a little because I figured no one ate more squirrels than I did. I’d tie my shotgun to the handlebars of my bicycle and head for the Tweed Bottoms on the Piney every chance I got, to hunt squirrels. And Dad and I would float the river and shoot a limit of squirrels about every time we hunted ducks.

It had been that way for most of the country folks well back before I was born. There were no deer or turkey in the thirties and forties, when my dad was a kid. They survived on what was plentiful, rabbits and quail, fish and bullfrogs, and squirrels.

You can read about squirrels from Byron Dalrymple’s book, “North American Game Animals”. Dalrymple was an old-time outdoor writer who no doubt was a true outdoorsman like me. In his book, he passes on this fascinating information about squirrels….

………. “In the mid 1700’s crop damage from squirrels in Pennsylvania was so severe that a three-pence bounty was instigated for each scalp that had two ears. The human population was small there, but 600,000 squirrel scalps were turned in over a short time. In the early 1800’s every white male in Ohio was required to pay an annual tax of three dollars—a substantial sum in those days—or turn in 100 squirrel scalps per year in place of the money.”

I had a friend once who hunted squirrels for money. Well, of course he ate them too, and claimed much of his outstanding health was due to eating so many squirrels over the years. But he also sent all the tails to the Mepps lure company in Wisconsin which paid from 15 to 20 cents for each tail, using them in the making of some of their flies and fishing lures back then. Those tails paid for his ammunition.

Over the years, this writer has had too many pet squirrels to count. Many young squirrels are born in February, when country people were still cutting firewood, so my cousins and I made pets out of fox and gray squirrels both which were easy to bottle feed and raise. The grays made outstanding pets; the fox squirrels get a little grouchy, particularly the males, as they mature. Here on Lightnin’ Ridge I have had several pet gray squirrels. One lived in a minnow bucket on my back porch for much of a year.

In the pool hall when I was a kid, I heard Ol’ Bill Stalder say once that he could tell if a man grew up poor or not. If he had, Bill told me, he knew how to skin a squirrel. Otherwise he likely had grown up rich and wasn’t worth much. There are two good ways to skin a squirrel of course, and if you are a country kid who grew up hunting with your dad or grandfather, you know how to do it both ways. So there isn’t any use in me telling you how to do either one here, because I never knew anyone who didn’t know how to skin a squirrel who cared to learn.

I often see fox squirrels especially, in the middle of a paved road, chewing on the road. I can’t figure out why they do that, because it gets so many of them harvested by car tires. I am assuming they are attracted to the salt or something like it, in the pavement, but I am not sure. One thing about them, since they are a rodent, their teeth grow all the time, and they must wear them down by gnawing on nuts, and on deer antlers and bone. The teeth grow in a circle and I once saw a squirrel which had one tooth growing so crooked he couldn’t wear it down by normal gnawing, that is, gnawing normally like a nut-gnawer normally would. It had grown in a circle and back into his skull just beneath his eye, and that killed him. That’s kind of an awful thing to imagine. If I had been him, before those teeth penetrated my skull I would have run out in front of a farm truck or went and thumbed my nose at a fox. I think assisted suicide is okay in the animal world!