Squirrel Interupted

“We must get squirrel.”  - Natasha Fatale

Sometimes a squirrel can complicate things.

On Saturday we were at my parent’s farm, on the rare occasion of them not being around. We had been cutting wood, and were planning on doing some fishing. Ann went to town to grab something for lunch, and the boys and I were going to gather some bait. But I heard an incessant chattering that I couldn’t resist to investigate. I checked around the back on the house, and there was a fox squirrel in a walnut tree raising a ruckus. I knew we were out of venison, and there was one squirrel recipe and two squirrel cooking suggestions in the book that we would want to pursue. I currently had four squirrels in the freezer, so adding another to the mix would be a good thing.

I ran inside the house. I discovered the one thing in my parents’ home that follows a basic safety recommendation: don’t store guns and ammunition together. Although I’m pretty sure it was unintentional, I found guns and ammo all over the house in various places, but had a hard time finding any that matched.

I selected a Smith and Wesson 2206, a .22 caliber semi-automatic pistol, and a search of a few random drawers on the porch produced a couple .22 shells out of the bottom of each. This would do.

I went back outside. The squirrel went to the top of the tree, but it wasn’t hollow, didn’t have a nest in it, and there wasn’t another tree within jumping distance, so I had it. It took a couple of shots, but well within my limited ammo allotment I dropped him. Unfortunately he didn’t drop all the way to the ground, he got caught in a crotch of the tree on the way down.

I considered shooting him out, but didn’t think I could do it without potentially wasting a lot of meat. So I went to the garage and found an extendable pruning saw on a long plastic pole. Long, but not long enough. I climbed up on the fence under the tree. Shaky, and still well short of the mark. I went back to the garage and retrieved a step ladder. Even from the top step I was still too short.

At this point I consider getting out the tractor with the loader, and having Ann lift me up into the tree with the bucket, but employing a 100-horsepower 4x4 cab tractor seemed like a rather excessive measure to take in retrieving a squirrel. So I folded up the step ladder, placed it directly against the tree, had Ann hold the ladder, and I stood on the top-plastic part that is labeled “This is not a step.” From there I stretched out, with the pole pruner fully extended, and was able to eventually nudge the dead squirrel out of the tree.   Mission accomplished, although I had burned most of fishing time retrieving the squirrel from the tree.

Any of you who know my father, or any other 82-year-old farmer, might have been surprised to read that he has a Smith and Wesson semi-auto pistol, and if you haven’t known me for more than 20 years, you might be surprised to read that a handgun was my first choice for going after a squirrel to begin with.  I’ll explain both those things in a later post.