HUNTERS SELDOM ASK each other how they got into hunting. If I had to guess, I’d say this is because they already know the answer. The vast majority of hunters throughout the great span of human history have hunted because their fathers did. Of course, one could argue that many hunters in indigenous cultures had little choice in the matter—they either had to learn to hunt or they would starve to death. That’s a perfectly valid point, as the hunting lifestyle wasn’t just one of several options available to, say, a member of the Koyukon tribe who was born a few hundred years ago along Alaska’s Koyukuk River. But the lack of options hardly negates the importance of fathers to the tradition of hunting. Not only did Koyukon boys hunt because their fathers hunted, Koyukon boys survived because their fathers hunted.
While there are some notable exceptions to the rule of patrilineal descent among modern-day hunters (my dad included, as you’ll see), I’m definitely not one of them. Plain and simple, I am a hunter because he was. However, I hardly do things just because my dad did them. If anything, I’d say the opposite is true. For instance, he used to make me pull old rusty nails out of rotting boards with a crowbar and then straighten them for reuse with a ball-peen hammer and an anvil. If I need a nail today, I’ll just go out and buy a box of them. But there was something about my father’s relationship to hunting that appealed to me in a very direct and immediate way. I was too young then to articulate it, but I see now that it had to do with freedom, strength, and self-sufficiency. My dad was tough and he knew how to take care of himself, no matter what happened, and I was his student. I could reel in bluegills by the age of three, and I was hunting small game by the age of seven. It was early enough that I have no recollection of the first fish that I caught or the first squirrels and rabbits that I ever harvested. Instead, when I try to remember back to some early experience in hunting, my first memory is of a day when my two brothers and I were already out from under the protection of our dad.
I know that it was September 15, because it was the opening day of Michigan’s annual squirrel hunting season. And I know it was 1984, because my dad gave me my first .22 when I turned ten. I was carrying it as I walked through the woods with my two older brothers, Matt and Danny. We were headed toward a patch of forest that we called the Camp Woods, because it was owned by an old summer camp that was mostly shut down by then. This area, on the western side of the state, had once been a thriving region for summer camps and tourist cottages before it became a place where people chose to live full-time. In fact, the Remington I was carrying once belonged to another such camp as part of their marksmanship program. Before that camp closed, my brothers and I used to sneak in there and sift the sand from the rifle range’s backdrop through wire mesh screens in order to get the bullet lead. We’d melt it down with propane torches and then pour it into molds for making fishing sinkers.
Ahead we could see Mueller Road, the dirt lane that separated the Camp Woods from the patch of woods that sat right across the road from our own house. We weren’t supposed to fire our guns until we crossed that road, because our dad didn’t want us shooting so close to home. Sometimes we’d find a squirrel in the woods by the house and then follow it until it crossed Mueller Road and became fair game. The oaks on either side of that road grew out toward each other like they were trying to form an archway. I was always amazed by the way a squirrel would risk a six-foot leap across the gap rather than just come down to the ground and walk across. My dad liked to tell me that in the days of Daniel Boone a squirrel could travel all the way from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River without ever touching the ground—all it had to do was jump from tree to tree. I’m sure he meant this as a way of highlighting the differences between mine and Boone’s worlds, but I simply took it as a testament to the fact that a squirrel was a good jumper. In fact, I would have been willing to bet that a squirrel could whip a monkey in a treetop race, even though I had absolutely no experience with monkeys except for a stuffed one that hung in the entryway of my great-uncle Gunner’s house. He said the monkey bit off two of his fingers when he was a kid and the zoo gave him the stuffed carcass as a form of condolence. Uncle Gunner was, in fact, missing a few fingers on his right hand, but my mom later explained that he’d actually lost them to his lawn mower.
My brothers Danny (left) and Matt (right) and me on the shore of Middle Lake in the mid-1980s. Before you laugh at Matt’s shorts, please bear in mind that my mother made them.
We crossed Mueller Road cautiously and quietly, to make sure no one saw us. We weren’t hiding for any particular reason, but we considered hunting to be a secretive activity. Daniel Boone would walk across downed trees rather than risk leaving a track on the ground that someone might find. Besides, I enjoyed sneaking across Mueller Road with my rifle. It reminded me of the cover of one of my favorite books, The Light in the Forest. It’s the fictional story of a white boy on the American frontier in the 1700s. When the story begins, he’d been kidnapped by Indians eleven years earlier. The Indians adopted him and raised him as their own, and he grew up with hardly a memory of being a white person. Eventually, though, the military comes to recover him as part of a peace deal. The book goes on to tell the awful story of what happens to this boy when he’s returned to the whites, and then it tells the awful story of what happens when he gets away from the whites and rejoins the Indians.
On the cover of this book is a painting of two bare-chested boys, one Indian and one ghostly white, both with Mohawk haircuts and buckskin leggings. The white boy is carrying a rifle, the Indian, a bow. The boys are presented in such a way that the viewer can just catch a glimpse of them as they move through a gap in the forest. And in the moment that I stepped from the dark of the woods and into the light of Mueller Road, it was easy for me to imagine myself as the boy from the cover of that book, traveling through the forest with an Indian. I kept such fantasies to myself, mostly out of embarrassment. But I now see that you can’t overemphasize the role of wild Indians in the imaginations of all young boys who love to be in the woods. We grow up in one of two ways: either wanting to be a wild Indian or wanting to be a white man who hunted among wild Indians. It’s the difference between boys who want to wear feathers in their hair and boys who want to wear coonskin caps. Those who want to be Indians do not generally turn into hunters, but those who want to be whites among Indians do. I’m not sure why this is true, but I’m guessing it might have something to do with attainability. Maybe boys who want to be Indians get overwhelmed by the futility of their quest; they’ll never change their skin. But boys like me, who grow up wanting to hunt with Indians, only have to lose a portion of their fantasy to achieve it.
It doesn’t hurt that the celebrated heroes of American history include dozens and dozens of white hunters who made their lives among Indians. As a kid I had memorized their names and stories, learned their faces from sketches and photos. There were the men of America’s first frontier, like Boone and Simon Kenton, who ranged across the Appalachian Mountains. And then there were the mountain men of the Rockies, like Jim Bridger and Jed Smith. I knew that Boone once killed more than a hundred black bears in a fall and smoked all the meat and sold it as “bear bacon”; I knew that he passed through the Cumberland Gap on a hunting trip to the wilderness of Kentucky, and later opened a trail through there so his family could follow; I knew that he didn’t try to see Indians hiding in the bushes, but instead looked for the unnaturally straight barrels of their rifles; and I knew that he was captured and adopted by the Shawnee Indians, and that he enjoyed hunting with his captors so much that his own people put him on trial for treason when he finally escaped. I saw no reason that I shouldn’t have a life of adventure like that, and I knew that hunting was my way to do it.
The understory of the Camp Woods was mostly sassafras and honeysuckle, with a thigh-high layer of ferns around their bases. My brothers and I liked to dig out the sassafras roots to boil them into a tea that smelled and tasted like root beer. Overhead, the canopy was almost a solid mat of oak leaves punctured here and there by large white pines that jutted out like disheveled church steeples above the skyline of an old town. We considered these white pines to be an annoyance, especially once the hardwoods lost their leaves in the late fall. At that time of year squirrels got super-wary, probably because the lack of leaves exposed them to predators like hawks and owls. And since they were on heightened alert, a human intruder into their area sent them booking through the treetops toward the crown of the nearest white pine. Once a squirrel got into a white pine, he vanished into the upper limbs so thoroughly that it was pointless to bother looking for him.
But at this time of year, mid-September, the white pines weren’t nearly as much of an issue. The leaves seemed to give the squirrels a sense of security and they were less likely to take off if they saw you. Also, the leaves were helpful because they greatly amplified the noises a squirrel made as he picked acorns in the canopy. This is what was going on in front of us now. Leaves were shaking overhead, and there was the pitter-patter of shucked acorn husks falling to the ground. At first it seemed as if a whole gang of squirrels were up there, but as we deciphered the noises it sounded more like there were maybe just two or three in one particular oak. The rest of the noise was birds. Without needing to discuss the plan, we separated and began sneaking in toward the trees.
Matt and Danny were carrying shotguns, which meant they could knock a squirrel out of a tree even it was running from limb to limb. They’d gotten them for Christmas when they reached Michigan’s legal hunting age of twelve. Matt was now thirteen; he’d already killed two deer with his bow. I had yet to get my shotgun. According to the law, I wasn’t even allowed to hunt squirrels with a BB gun at my age. But my parents were reluctant to establish and enforce different sets of rules among us. They generally figured that if one of us could do something, we all could. The one difference was that, for now, I had to do it with a .22.
Suddenly I heard a slight whoosh overhead. I froze dead still and moved my eyes in the direction of the sound without moving my head too much. Sure enough, I could see a dark blob of solid material among the leaves toward the end of the limb. I could tell by the squirrel’s size and shape that it was a fox squirrel. While we had greater respect for gray squirrels, which we considered to be warier and woodsier because we tended to find them in the darker forests and ravine bottoms, we admired fox squirrels for their size. We’d gotten a few large males that were so big they had back hams almost like a rabbit’s.
This one was about a hundred feet up in the tree. I waited until he was busy shucking another acorn before I dared to raise my rifle. When I did, I rested the barrel against a small oak tree. With a shotgun I could have shot the squirrel as it bobbed around behind the curtain of fluttering leaves. But my dad was an advocate of hitting squirrels in the head with a .22, and so I had to wait for a clear shot. One time, a few years later, we were hunting with our dad and we killed a whole bunch of squirrels* with our shotguns while our dad killed only two with a .22. He said that his two were better than all of ours put together, because he didn’t mess up any meat and there was no worry of busting your tooth on a shotgun pellet while you ate. But what he didn’t understand was that he hunted squirrels because he liked to eat them; we, on the other hand, hunted squirrels because we liked to hunt them. Busting teeth wasn’t something we were particularly concerned about.
Legend has it that Daniel Boone killed squirrels by doing something called “barking” them. The rifles that the frontiersmen used to kill deer and bear and Indians were too big for squirrels—they ruined too much meat. So Boone would aim for a patch of tree bark next to the squirrel. The shock from the bullet hitting the wood was so strong that it killed the squirrel and sent it flying.† As much as I would have loved to do that, there was no way a .22 was up to the task.
I was still waiting for my clean shot when the squirrel suddenly bolted toward the base of the tree. He’d seen me. When he got there, he headed outward again along an opposing branch. When he hit the tip of that limb, he launched himself into the air and landed in another tree with a whoosh of leaves. He ran toward the trunk of that tree and vanished.
Matt and Danny came walking over and stared into the tree with me. There was a white pine a couple of trees away, and Danny went toward it in case the squirrel tried to head that way. The first thing Matt and I did was start looking for nests and holes, which are almost as bad as white pines when it comes to hiding squirrels. A squirrel nest looks like a bird’s nest except it tends to be more ball-shaped than disk-shaped. Some of them are as big as an eagle’s nest. It’s frustrating when a squirrel runs into his nest because you know right where he is and you know that he’s protected only by a buffer of leaves. When we hunted with BB guns, we’d fire right into the nests. A BB gun is almost never instantly fatal to a squirrel, so even if you hit the animal he’d still have enough life in him to flop free of the nest before he dropped. But with a .22 or shotgun you could feasibly kill him right in the nest and he’d never come out. This wasn’t a big worry if it was the kind of nest you could climb up to. But usually squirrels are smart enough to build their nests in places that are inaccessible to terrestrial predators.
It was obvious that there weren’t any nests around, though we did find a place where a limb had broken away from the trunk. There was a cavity in the center of the remaining stub, and there was a white ring around it from squirrels that had been chewing on it to expand the hole. Sure enough, that was probably where the squirrel had gone. I stared up at the hole for a few moments, thinking that I’d get lucky and he’d poke his head out for a look. But Matt and Danny knew that this was pointless. They’d already started drifting away through the woods. I followed after them, unsure where we’d ultimately end up.
I got a tremendous sense of freedom from being in the woods like this, from wandering with no constraints. The hunting woods were a place where my brothers and I were our own men. We didn’t get as much of that as we wanted—I don’t imagine any boys do, really—because our dad liked to keep us busy with chores. He drew them up in lists of twenty-eight, because that’s how many lines were on his legal pads and apparently he didn’t want to waste any space. Some of the chores on these lists were necessary and easily accomplished, such as putting in the garden and cleaning the garage, but others were knuckle-bustingly hard and mind-numbingly boring. One summer, for instance, he made us move an old pile of rotten leaves and then replace it with an old pile of red bricks from a demolished building. We then spent the summer knocking all the old mortar off the bricks with hammers and cold chisels so that they could be used to build a circular fire pit.
This past summer had been particularly grueling, because he’d come across a trailer load of used railroad ties from a crew that was ripping out a length of track. He’d concocted a plan for a tiered system of walkways in an area of the yard that no one ever had any business walking in except if they were going over there to do chores. Because the ties were decayed on the ends, and the hollow portions had accumulated an abundance of dirt and gravel that would destroy the bar and chain on our chain saw, we had to cut the ties to length using an antique two-man crosscut logging saw that had been hanging as a decoration on the cedar siding of our home. Then, using two sets of old-fashioned ice tongs that had been hanging next to the crosscut saw, we had to drag the ties to the job site and bed them in place. Every evening, after we got a few of the ties anchored in place with lengths of steel rebar, the old man would come out with a four-foot bubble level to check our work. Any ties that were off-level had to come back out and get reset. This went on for three months, nonstop.‡
I mention these chores in order to show what I was escaping, and I don’t mean escaping in the sense that I headed into the woods to hide from my dad. By far, the fear of him coming to look for me was way worse than the fear of being around him. Rather, hunting in the woods provided me with an excuse of absence that my old man considered to be acceptable. He respected hunting, even encouraged it. At the time this baffled me, because I couldn’t figure out why he’d surrender his workforce in order to let us chase squirrels. But now that I have my own son I understand his thinking a little better. He wanted his kids to be disciplined, tough, resourceful, and humble—he wanted us to be survivors. And he saw physical labor and hunting as equally viable paths toward that goal.
As the three of us continued westward, we ascended a slight ridge where the oaks were bigger than anywhere else in the Camp Woods. We leaned against the trees and listened, but no leaves rustled. The squirrels were there, no doubt, but they weren’t giving themselves up. We walked down the other side of the ridge. At the base, we entered an area of smaller oaks where we seldom saw squirrels. We walked quickly through that area and didn’t pause until we came to the edge of Staple Road. A squirrel that wanted to cross this road had to come down to the ground in order to do so. It was a two-lane blacktop, wide enough that the oaks on either side of the road couldn’t reach out overhead far enough for a squirrel to be able to make the leap. We stood in the woods near the edge of Staple Road and watched and listened for a few moments. When we were sure no cars were coming, we trotted across the road into the trees.
Technically we’d been trespassing all along, since we didn’t have permission to be in the Camp Woods. But that hardly mattered to us, because we’d never gotten chased by anyone for being there and we considered it to be sort of like our own property. But the woods we were in now were absolutely off-limits; it was one of the few woods in the area that someone had actually bothered to mark with No Trespassing signs. The guy who owned it had some gutted-out appliances scattered around the entrance to his driveway, which was long and curved so you couldn’t see the end of it from the road. None of us had ever gotten a really clean look at the place, but from here in the woods you could look through the trees and make out the shapes of vehicles and a shed and a house. Supposedly he would come after you if he caught you on his land. We’d seen where he took some earth-moving equipment one time and used it to pile up stumps to block an old motorbike trail that followed a natural gas pipeline across his property. That made him seem plenty serious.
My father in a moment of levity. Here he wears a hat made from a raccoon that I killed. He’s holding an orphaned pet raccoon that was given to me by a friend.
Normally we’d move into woods and get out of sight of his home before making any noise, but right away we spooked a gray squirrel out of a small oak tree. “There’s one,” someone said. The squirrel leapt toward the trunk of a larger oak and hit with the sandpapery sound of claw on bark. He corkscrewed up the tree, covering about twelve feet of elevation in a single rotation of the trunk. We ran to surround the tree so that the squirrel would be in view of one of us at all times. The squirrel zipped past my side of the tree but didn’t stop long enough for me to shoot. But Matt’s shotgun boomed as the squirrel made his way past him. The blast was followed by a couple of seconds of silence and then the thud of the squirrel hitting the ground followed by the swishing of leaves as it flopped around. An eruption of dog barking came from the house, followed by what sounded like a slamming car door. Matt grabbed up his squirrel by the tail and the three of us ran.
It was thrilling to be scared like that, thrilling to have danger in the woods. It was just one more thing that bound me to my heroes, who kept death and danger as close to them as their rifles. They hunted the best land out there, and they paid for it. After he was mutilated by a grizzly, Jed Smith was killed by a Comanche who buried a tomahawk in his head. Jim Bridger lived through many skirmishes, and once spent a few years carrying two Indian arrowheads stuck in his back. Simon Kenton was tortured for days by Indians who punched a hole through his skull with a hammer, busted his collarbone and arm with an ax and a club, and then tried a couple of times to burn him at the stake. John Colter was forced to stand on the banks of a river while Indian warriors pelted him with the lungs and testicles of his slaughtered hunting partner.
Boone suffered as much as anyone. In 1773, his eldest son, James, was shot and tortured and mutilated by Indians near the Cumberland Gap; in 1780, Boone and his brother Ned were shucking hickory nuts along a trail in the Ohio Territory when Daniel took off after a bear that came wandering through. He gave chase and killed it, then returned to find Shawnee Indians celebrating over Ned’s murdered body because they believed, mistakenly, that they’d killed the mighty Daniel Boone. Two years later, in 1782, Boone’s son Israel was killed next to him by a shot through the neck fired by Indians at the Battle of Blue Licks. That my own hunting grounds might prove dangerous seemed only right.
We didn’t stop running until we hit the old blocked-off trail that followed the gas pipeline. While we waited for any noises that might betray a pursuer, Matt laid his squirrel on the leaves. It was a male, with a scrotum the size of a big lima bean. Male squirrels have been known to castrate each other in fights, and we considered intact squirrels to be lucky. Most of the shotgun pellets had ended up in the head and neck. The old man might compliment us on that. Matt slipped the tip of his knife between the squirrel’s rear legs and cut through its pelvic bone. Then he made a shallow cut up the squirrel’s belly, just beneath the abdominal lining, all the way from the base of the tail to the ribs. He kept going and split the rib cage right where the two halves meet. Then he reached in and grabbed the heart with his fingertips and tugged out the entire package of guts. The inside of the squirrel was clean and glistening.
The rest we’d do at home: take a sharp knife and cut through the squirrel’s hide all the way around its belly, right where a belt would sit if squirrels wore belts; then peel the bisected hide in both directions at once, the bottom half off like a pair of pants and the top half off like a shirt, until the hide was connected to the squirrel by nothing but the four feet, the head, and the tail; free it by severing the ankles, neck, and the base of the tail; then split the squirrel into five parts, the four legs and the back. Three or four squirrels cleaned like this would inspire my dad to heat up the deep fryer, or better yet, they’d inspire my mom to get out the Crock-Pot and cook the squirrels in a bath of cream of mushroom soup.
When the dogs quit barking and the woods went quiet, we crossed the pipeline and entered a marshy area where we’d jumped up grouse and woodcock in the past. But it had been a wet summer and water covered the ground in the brushy areas where the birds liked to hang out. Instead two wood ducks busted out of there so close that Matt and Danny said they could have had them both. But duck season was still over a month away. And while we’d shoot a squirrel out of season now and then, there was no way in hell that we’d ever kill a duck out of season. Our dad told us that many species of ducks had almost been wiped out by hunters in his own lifetime, and that he’d personally watched poachers in Arkansas shooting ducks off the water with large-bore shotguns that were mounted to the gunwale of a boat and fired all at once with the pull of a string. The sight had made him sick. The previous autumn, we were hauling leaves to the leaf pile in the woods when we stumbled across a bunch of plastic garbage bags that were full of wood ducks. There were forty in all, with nothing but the breast meat taken out. Forty ducks is way over the legal bag limit, even if the hunter happened to be hunting with four or five other guys. My old man conducted a little investigation and learned that the ducks belonged to a neighbor who had just moved into a nearby cottage. According to this man’s son, he had once killed a dog with a baseball bat because it was chewing on the carcass of a deer that he had killed and hung from the rafters of his carport. Despite this, my old man went down to the beach and told the guy that he better watch out for trouble if he was going to be shooting that many ducks.
We separated around the pond, Danny following one shore and Matt and I going the other way. When we met back up we could see the occasional flash of a car going by on White Lake Drive. We moved ahead to the edge of the road and waited until there were no cars coming. We jogged across and dropped into a little bog with some blueberry bushes in it. We paralleled White Lake Drive in an easterly direction, staying just deep enough in the woods to pass behind the two houses along that road. A few years earlier, a single-engine airplane had crashed in these same woods. It was carrying a man in his fifties and a twelve-year-old boy who wasn’t his son. My brothers and I showed up in time to watch them pull the bodies out. I remember a firefighter removing the boy’s torso from the hole that the plane tore into the ground. The torso was missing its head and appendages, yet it still wore a T-shirt that you could tell was baby blue despite all the blood.
After walking a ways, we passed the intersection where Staple Road ended at White Lake Drive. We then sneaked back across into the Camp Woods. In about an hour it would be what our dad called “prime time,” which was the last hour of the day, when the deer movements peaked. But a squirrel’s schedule ran a little ahead of a deer’s, so they’d probably start moving any minute now. We headed back up toward the ridge with the oaks, and this time the trees were alive with squirrels. We spread apart. I went off to the left and hit the top of the ridge beneath an oak where a squirrel had been shaking around. I couldn’t see him now, but then I hadn’t seen anything to indicate that he’d left. He was probably just holding tight.
I started walking circles around the tree to see if I could catch a glimpse of him, which hardly ever works if you’re alone. That’s because a squirrel will just walk around the tree ahead of you, keeping the trunk between you. A trick for this is to tie a string to a sapling on one side of the tree and stomp back to the opposite side. Holding the string in your hand, take a seat in a place where you have a good view of the tree but you’re still a little bit hidden. Obviously the squirrel will know where you are and it will stay on the opposite side of the tree—the side where the string is tied to the sapling. Within a few minutes, though, the squirrel’s memory will start to fade. He’ll become increasingly unsure of what’s going on. After a few more minutes, you give the string a sharp pull in order to shake the sapling. If you’re lucky, the squirrel will think you’ve doubled back on him and will come zipping around to the side you’re actually on.
I didn’t try this, because I suspected the squirrel was up there lying on top of a limb, belly down, with his tail laid flat to the bark so it didn’t give him away. We called this bellying a limb, and when a squirrel does it he’s nearly impossible to see. I walked away from the tree to get a more horizontal perspective of the larger limbs that could hide a squirrel.
The oak was a big white oak, straight and strong. A few years later, when the camp was completely shut down, word would spread around that it had been sold. Surveyors came in and marked the woods with lengths of orange tape tied to wooden stakes driven into the earth. Soon after that, Danny and I would come here and find hundreds of the biggest oaks along this ridge marked with red slashes and bars spray-painted about chest high on the bark. A few trees with heavy storm damage or trunk cavities had NO CUT written on them. Knowing what was coming, one day we rearranged many of the stakes in a way that was meant to befuddle the surveyors so thoroughly that they’d abandon their project. The next morning we sneaked some red paint from the garage and went up to the ridge. Our paint didn’t quite match the color used on the trees, but we went around writing NO CUT anyway.
It didn’t help. A few months later they took out the oaks. Then, a year or so later, crews came in with heavy equipment and started clearing a network of roads. In the years after high school, at least a half dozen of my friends would build houses in what was once the Camp Woods. They’d put in square-shaped lawns of turf grass and their young kids would play in the very places where I used to hunt. Even though I’d resent my friends for this, I’d turn around and find work using a chain saw to clear building lots in other, not-too-distant patches of woods. Later still, I would look at that period of time as a form of madness that I not only endured but participated in.
But right now, as I looked for a squirrel that was bellying a limb, that future was unknown to me. I shifted around and viewed the tree from a variety of angles until I noticed a slight bulge on the top of a limb that didn’t seem quite right. The bulge was against a backdrop of leaves. I moved back and forth a little in order to position the bulge in such a way that there was clear sky behind it. My suspicions were confirmed. Against the sky, the bulge on the limb had the slight halo-like appearance that occurs when sunlight shines through fur.
I leaned the barrel of my .22 against a trunk and used my right hand to stabilize it. When I squeezed the trigger the squirrel’s body went instantly stiff and then it slid off the limb a bit. It hung there by four feet and then two feet and then one foot and then none. The array of complex emotions that would later come to me whenever I killed an animal for food—gratitude, reverence, guilt, indebtedness—were still years away from developing. Instead, I felt nothing but the pure joy of accomplishment when the squirrel hit the ground. I walked over to finish it off by cracking its skull with the sole of my moccasin. I was a hunter in the American wilderness, and that was good enough for now.
*In Michigan, the daily bag limit for squirrels is five. There’s a possession limit of ten, which means you’re not supposed to have more than that in your freezer at any one time. Other states, such as Montana, do not recognize squirrels as a game animal and there is no limit. The daily bag limit in New York state is six. In California, four.
†The famed naturalist and painter John James Audubon claimed to have joined Boone in the task of barking squirrels along the Kentucky River in 1810. Boone’s shot sent “the squirrel whirling through the air, as if it had been blown up by the explosion of a powder magazine.” Apparently, this strategy worked very well for Boone. “Before many hours had elapsed,” claims Audubon, “we had procured as many squirrels as we wished.” Historians have since questioned the veracity of this claim, as it seems that Boone was not in the state of Kentucky in 1810. He was in Missouri.
‡I finally assumed the task of ripping those now completely rotten railroad ties out of the ground twenty years later. They’d become colonized by ground wasps, and I was stung so severely that I had to pay a visit to the emergency room in Muskegon. In all seriousness, not one single person ever took an honest walk along those walkways—fulfilling a prediction that I’d been punished for making two decades earlier.