By W.C. Swaney
January 1995. Bowl cut, pale skin, blue eyes, and a runny nose. A hand-me-down Mossy Oak button up and a sawed-off stock .410 to fit a 7-year-old frame. My dad and I loaded up into his red 80’s model Toyota pickup truck. It smelled like him. It had a rollbar in the bed and a Rock 101 sticker in the window. With shit-eating grins we hummed down the road to begin the Swaney family and friends annual father/son squirrel hunting tournament.
We rolled up to a dirt pull-off behind the rodeo arena a few miles down the road from where we lived. An area that my family used to own before it became an experimental forest for the university. There was a creek to my right and a water treatment plant to my left. My dad pointed down the dirt road to a tree line and we began walking. It was cold and it smelled like shit from the plant. By the time we reached the tree line my little hands felt frozen to the blued metal of the gun. My fingers were stinging but I didn’t care, we were on a mission. I remember it feeling very different from me just playing around in the woods. There was a focus on my dad’s face as he scanned the trees. A seriousness that a small boy could feel. Is my safety on? Am I holding my gun right? Am I being quiet enough? All the things he had taught me I was trying to remember as I watched his face.
CRACK! His .22 fired the first volley. CRACK! THUD, thud. A big ole squirrel bounced off the branches on the way to the ground. I ran over and picked him up and slid his warm, limp body into the rear pocket of my hunting vest. I loved animals and I thought getting to hold a wild squirrel was special. Its body heat kept me warm for a while. We plodded on a bit longer. Both loosening up as we acclimated to the weather and terrain. The smell of pine carried on the breeze, and it was intense. Everything was more intense than it usually was. The silence in the woods, the smell of dirt and pine needles, the cold on my cheeks and in my lungs. The sound of a squirrel hopping. You’d think the son of a bitch was 150 pounds. It all swirled together and lit my senses on fire.
My dad fired into a nest. CRACK! FUMP. He looked at me and said “Son, when it makes that sound, it means a squirrel is in there.” I was always fascinated by how much my daddy knew about the woods and everything that lived in it. “You wanna climb up that tree and get him outta there?” he asked. Without a second thought I hit the base of that tree at 100 mph. I climbed up about 15-20 feet, hands covered in sap, my face even with the nest. As fate would have it, a bird flew in and landed on a limb right beside me as I was looking the nest over. It had to be a dove. Every flap of the wing made a chesty noise and flushed wind all over my head. Not knowing what it was I screamed and jumped backwards out of the tree. Feet, ass, back is how I landed. Laying quite comfortably on a bed of soft pine needles, I looked up at the sky in a daze. I felt the squirrel in my vest as I lay on top of him. He wasn’t warm anymore.
My dad ran up and as he checked on me, I could see him trying not to laugh. Once he deduced that my back wasn’t broken, he started laughing. Then I started laughing. Five minutes later both our faces and stomach muscles hurt from laughing so hard. That bird scared the shit outta me. The adrenaline, the cold, the pine needles, the laughter with my father. It was a drug.
BOOM! I busted my first squirrel perched on an oak limb. Rolled him right off the back side. “Atta boy!” yelled Daddy. I ran up to it excitedly and picked him up but was a little confused by the emotion that involuntarily washed over me. My dad saw my reaction as I looked down at the squirrel in my hand and said, “It’s ok if you feel that way son; I still feel sad whenever I shoot one too.” It didn’t make me feel any better, but it allowed me to go on with the hunt. We shot a few and missed even more that day. I ran out of shells and my dad only had one round left in his .22, so we decided to head back to the truck. We had five squirrels in the bag and no hope of winning the tournament.
Despite our lack of rodents, I felt ecstatic as we walked through the woods. I’d participated in something that every man in my family has done, and now I was one of them. I was a man—or so I thought at the time.
We were about 10 feet from crossing out of the woods and into the field when my dad saw a fat squirrel running up a tree. He aimed through the scope and let his last shot ring out. The squirrel fell to the ground. As he walked over and bent down to pick it up, that sucker took off. It ran across the ground about 25 feet and then up a tree and into a hole.
Dad found a long stick and used it to flush the squirrel out. However, it didn’t come out alone. About 20 flying squirrels came out with him and we were convinced they were hell-bent on attacking us, with the one he shot leading the charge by running up my leg, biting and clawing me the whole way.
WHACK! Sky, clouds, treetops. Why was I looking up? Hearing stomping and grunting and smashing I rolled over, confused. My dad annihilated both me and that devil squirrel with the big stick he’d found. I survived. The squirrel did not. Beat up, limping, bleeding, we made our way back to the truck with our 6th squirrel. And would you believe it? We won that damn tournament. And I have a trophy to prove it.
