October hopefully brings about some cooler temps, crispy leaves on the ground and time for some squirrel hunting. Dove and squirrel – those are my two favorite hunting seasons. Rabbit runs third, maybe, and then deer.
I’d like to add turkey hunting to the mix but I’m afraid I’ll have to sit still for a long time and that never was my forte. With squirrel hunting it was always about moving and keeping your eyes up high and finding those critters. Oh, and plenty of shooting. With dove there was always plenty of shooting and a purple shoulder the next day. Rabbit hunting is always fun but dang, they are hard to follow and bring down. But again, lots of shooting, mostly because of bad aiming.
Now don’t get me wrong, that rush of seeing a buck running at full speed with majestic leaps and bounds is an incredible rush and again, plenty of challenge in trying to shoot where the deer will be when the bullets I’m slinging arrive at the same time. I grew up in the ‘70s when the big buck program wasn’t quite yet a thing and the deer population was a miniscule percentage of today’s herd. Throwing slugs out of a single shot 20-gauge when the deer was at least 100 yards away, I didn’t have the best odds of being called a sharpshooter back at Cordy Brake.
I don’t get to hunt like I did back in the day and fishing gets the free time I do get to carve for myself on the rare occasion. But the memories of hunting will always drive me to a better place and time, when life was slower without iPhones and streaming, and Sonic was the place to turn around.
These days I think more and more about the hunting experiences with my brothers and dad and the folks at deer camp. At times I think I was adopted when I think about my father, who with his bolt action 30-06 and hand-loaded bullets, would jump out of his Chevy truck and get a shot off at a distance that normal humans could only dream of. Deer that seemed a mile away brought down with usually one shot, sometimes two. And if he couldn’t get a good right-handed option, he quickly switched to his left with ease and brought down a prize buck at the edge of the woods of a field it would take us a while to traverse.
He'd do the same with fishing, filling a cooler with bream before I could get one or two off my hook or get unsnagged from a log. I’d like to think I’m a little better at fishing these days from all the hours of sitting in his boat and watching and being a part of his fishing trip. I wonder if he told stories at the Co-Op about me getting snagged or slinging slugs at a target I’d never hit in a million tries.
I’m sure he did and hopefully he smiled while telling it as maybe it entertained and perhaps made him a bit proud somehow. If I could go back and do it all again, I would and maybe not change a thing except watch him more closely, listen a bit more intently and smile more because of it all. I think it’s time to get some squirrel hunting in.
