The Red Flannel Rag

love of hunting down to me and my brother, Larry. Every year by the middle of

October, Larry has at least eighty squirrels killed, skinned, cleaned and in the freezer as

part of his winter meat.

Dad let me go squirrel hunting with him when I was twelve. The squirrel hunting

season was a week or two away. We walked across the hill back into Dean’s orchard.

We knew the land was posted. Dad hunted with a single-shot twenty-two rifle. We

spotted a squirrel on a limb eating a hickory nut. I begged him to let me shoot first.

“You’ll never hit him,” he whispered, but he handed me the gun. I leveled the sights on

the squirrel’s ear and pulled the trigger. Down he c ame, deader than a door nail. Dad

said, “Well now, ain’t you somethin’. That was just a lucky shot.”

We walked over to get the squirrel. He had fallen at the base of the tree. As we

picked him up, I glanced up on the tree trunk and there was a wooden sign with these

words plainly carved on it: “No Hunting.” A year or two ago, my brother Warnie and I

were hunting morels in Dean’s orchard in the early spring. I was telling him that I had

killed my first squirrel in that orchard. As we walked over toward the spot, I saw the

“No Hunting” sign still nailed to the tree. It is now in my collection of childhood

memorabilia.

When we got home with a bunch of squirrels, we knew there would soon be a

delicious feast. We ate every piece of the squirrel including the brains. Only two of us

could stand the thoughts of eating the brains. Larry and I would clean the heads and

boil them in a pot of salty water. When they were done, we took the little heads out of

the pot, cracked open the skulls and scooped out the brain. It was a delicious treat.

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