Thanks for the support guys (I knew I'd get it here
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The quitting is as tough as anything I've done and it's going well so far... and that's a big surprise to me!
The benefits of course are increased lung function, which means better stamina in the woods and mountains, as well as improved blood flow to various body parts... like my brain. Maybe that will help my shooting.
Here's the first installment of the story.
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I guess if we live long enough we end up with some favorite memories. Funny how most of those memories have nothing at all to do with work!
One of my very favorites (I’ve got a pile of them) took place more years ago than I care to remember now.
I lived in the mountains of western Wyoming then and spent every spare minute I had in pursuit of some critter or the other.
Small game especially grabbed my attention when I lived out there. Heck, I had grown up in a small game hunting family. They had to be if they wanted to hunt at all. When most of my uncles and my Dad were in their formidable years there was very little large game to be hunted in the mid west. There wasn’t a lot of large game in my home state when I was growing up either.
Fortunately we had lots of rabbits in those days.
Being from the city also complicated the situation for me when I was young. There were a few situations I could take advantage of. Railroad tracks always had brushy areas I could bust through for cottontails and the local golf course had plenty of bunnies and fox squirrels in the rough areas.... I just had to avoid the greens keeper.
I escaped, whenever I could, into the pages of my favorite books.
Saxton Pope spoke glowingly of small game hunting and mentioned ground squirrels as a favorite.
Howard Hill devoted a couple of chapters of his book “Hunting the Hard Way” to hunting small game with one about ground squirrels in particular.
I just knew that some day I would have to experience ground squirrel hunting.
My first opportunity came when I was nineteen. I’d taken a summer job in Wyoming, working for the U.S. Forest Service.
I built trails in the national forest and ground squirrels were literally everywhere.
I spent many evenings alone, stalking the glades and forest edges for the prolific Franklin’s ground squirrel.
It put a hook in me for hunting them that lasts to this very day.
Years later I would move back to the mountains and continue my love affair with hunting ground squirrels.
Though I hunted them almost daily during the season when they were above ground and shot literally thousands of the little varmints, the story I’m about to relate is one of my favorite memories.
I had been off fishing with my best friend on a lovely spring day in western Wyoming. The fishing had been good and we had a mess of trout in the cooler which would provide a tasty supper that evening.
We were on our way home and had rounded a bend in the road which bordered ranch lands.
Looking out across a meadow there, we were stunned at what we saw. Ground squirrels were literally running everywhere.
Larry was a small game hunting fanatic like myself and had lived in the area even longer than I had and he had never seen anything like it.
The meadow grasses were cropped short by the hordes of gnashing incisors and it seemed like every five or ten feet there stood or ran or peeked out of a hole, a squirrel.
It so happened that Larry knew the rancher who owned the property. We were soon standing in front of him asking permission to go shoot ground squirrels.
Gaining permission wasn’t really much of a challenge. Like most other area ranchers, this one was anxious to be rid of ALL of the little squeakers. They not only ate a lot of grass, but they dug holes everywhere. Mostly the holes were little escape burrows no bigger than a shot glass in diameter, but each family group had a main burrow entrance that could be the size of a serving platter or larger and deep enough to trip and break the leg of valuable live stock.
We were soon out in the meadow with bows in hand. Larry’s favorite was an early Bear compound that pulled 70 pounds and only let off 30 percent.
My bow was at the other end of the spectrum. It was a Howard Hill Big Five, with bubinga riser and bamboo limbs that took 82 pounds of force to bring to full draw.
That bow was new to me and you might say I was still learning to shoot “ longbow style”.
We were both shooting cedar arrows with plain steel blunts up front.
Since we’d had a full day of fishing already and our wives would be waiting impatiently for us at home we could only spare an hour or two for the squirrels.
We crossed the fence into the first pasture and stayed close together, trading off shot opportunities as they popped up.
It wasn’t like anything either of us had ever experienced before. There was hardly any stalking involved in our approaches. The squirrels weren’t all that wary and in most cases we could walk within twenty yards of a squirrel before it got edgy and dove for cover.
That suited us to a T. We were both tired from a long day and weren’t THAT into it.
We found that the first pasture was bounded on one side by a row of willows and marsh land behind that, out buildings and corrals formed the other boundary. The far end had more willows and when we had shot our way to that point we found another pasture beyond. It had as many or more squirrels than the first.
After a couple of hours we headed back to the truck. The shooting had been unbelievable. We had each killed 45-50 squirrels and had shot a couple of doubles to boot.
We discussed the situation and decided we’d come back the next weekend with lots of arrows and the goal of shooting 100 squirrels apiece.
Topic: The great ground squirrel massacree!! (Read 8401 times)
