Steve Knight

YARD - The thunder rumbled incessantly on the other side of the Trinity River, a harbinger of the rain trailing by only a few hours.

On this afternoon, the only moisture flowing was the sweat that drenched us from head to toe.

Officially it was fall, but by the way the leaves were holding to the trees, it still had a summer feel. The humidity, well, it never seems to dissipate in the river bottom and it may never feel balmier than on an early fall squirrel hunt.

Mike Leggett and I eased down the tree-lined road looking for cat squirrels, the choice of finicky hunters. Whether it was the heat, the pending storm or what, the squirrel woods were oddly quiet, and the few squirrels spotted were wild.

Squirrel hunters are a dying breed in East Texas. A half century ago the region was dotted with squirrel camps. There weren't any deer to speak of so hunters gathered each fall to hunt squirrels.

"I saw my first deer the summer before my 12th birthday," said Leggett, the almost 60-year-old.

Leggett grew up in Panola County. His father was a small-town Baptist preacher and the family always supplemented its food supply with wild game. Squirrel was big on the list.

"If you had a young one, you would fry it," Leggett said. "My mother mostly did them in a pressure cooker. She would brown them in an iron skillet, salt and pepper them. Then she would cut them up and put them in a pressure cooker, a layer of squirrels and then a layer of onions, a layer of squirrels and then a layer of onions. Cook them for 20 minutes and they would all be tender. She made gravy from the skillet and we had mashed potatoes, biscuits and green beans she had put up in the summer. We had that the first Sunday of each October."

The East Texas squirrel season still opens Oct. 1 and runs through Feb. 3, it is just that hardly anyone notices anymore.

After that first afternoon hunt, the sky exploded in lightning nonstop for hours. The thunder turned to rain, more than four inches, and hail that stripped the leaves from the trees across the BigWoods ranch. An accompanying wind snapped diseased trees like toothpicks across the landscape.

By morning, however, it was gone and the woods were open to hunting once again. As hard as it was to spot the squirrels 16 hours earlier, it was that easy now. Every move they made shook the waterlogged tree limbs like an alarm.

Down the same lane as the afternoon before, we watched them gently leap from tree to tree. They would snatch a single acorn then scamper back to eat it or store it for another day.

Like four-legged acrobats, the cat squirrels could go from a tree limb right above your head to one 30 yards away in the time it takes to raise a .22-caliber rifle to your shoulder. Hopping from limb to limb and gliding from one tree to the next, they wasted no time disappearing.

Besides providing food, squirrel hunting taught woodsmanship, something that is missing in an era when hunting consists of driving from the house to a blind on an ATV or a four-wheel drive truck.

A hunter learns to patiently and quietly work his way step by step, all the time listening for the sounds of the woods -particularly the sound of a barking squirrel in the distance or maybe one preparing an acorn snack.

That's how Leggett and I found them that morning. It was a barking squirrel that tipped us off to a tree where four were racing back and forth for breakfast.

Then the wait is on. With a rifle resting on a tree trunk all a hunter can do is hope the squirrel will pause momentarily, on the right side of the tree.

It wasn't a tremendous hunt by normal standards. Only three squirrels went into the bag out of an individual limit of 10.

All old squirrels, chances are they will find their way into a pressure cooker at Leggett's house, along with a little gravy, some mashed potatoes, biscuits, vegetables and a few more memories.

Contact Outdoor Editor Steve Knight at 903-596-6277 or by e-mail at outdoor@tylerpaper.com

Steve Knight
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