Squirrel Hunting in Kentucky

I've talked before about eating squirrel for breakfast and supper.  Now, as an aside to anyone not familiar with the country and the time, there were three meals of a day.  Breakfast, then as now, was the first meal and quite large.  The noon time meal was dinner and was quite large.  The evening meal was supper and was minimal.

There is a good reason for this.  People needed a big breakfast to fuel them through the hard work of the morning and people needed a large meal for dinner to fuel them through the afternoon.  And the work day was, as they used to say, "From can see to can't see".  Now that was for the men.  The women had to wake up early enough to cook all this before the men got out of bed and stay up late enough to do the dishes  before they could get in bed.

I'm not sure where or when "dinner" became the name of the evening meal but it is a "city" think I guess.  I know my wife has told me she missed a lot of good meals because someone would invite her to dinner and she would show up in the evening.  There is a reason it is called a "dinner bucket".

But back to the subject at hand.  Squirrel hunting was a big part of my childhood in Kentucky and a big part of the life of all the adults in my life.  There are a lot of people today who find the idea of eating a squirrel to be repugnant.  They just don't know what they are missing or they just have never been really hungry.  Or, they have never had a chance to eat my mother's squirrel, squirrel gravy and homemade biscuits. 

Country squirrels and city squirrels have some very distinct differences.  City squirrels have gotten used to people not shooting them and have gotten quite lazy.  Sometimes coming from work to my truck I can barely get them to move out of my way on the sidewalk,  Country squirrels are always vigilant knowing inattention leads to an appointment with the cook pot.

This leads to another area of difference between my wife and I.  She calls a container in which you cook things and it has high sides is a 'pot'.  To me it is a 'kettle'.  And a frying pan to her is a 'pan' while to me it is a skillet.   Squirrel is really good cooked in a kettle or fried in a skillet.  Or a pot and pan as one prefers.

Another difference between city and country squirrels is you are liable to see a city squirrel roaming around any time of day where country squirrels are up before dawn and finished roaming by ten AM.  Then they will come back out for an hour or two in the late afternoon.  In between the hours of ten in the morning and around five in the afternoon you're only out in the woods because you just like it or you were never taught much about squirrel hunting.

Squirrel season comes in in mid August (though when I was growing up hunting season was a foreign concept)  and the days were still quite warm.  But, the mornings were wonderful.  Daybreak was around seven AM so one would need to get up around four AM to get dressed and head out to where he was going to be hunting.  You'd need to be there and have time to move up the hill through the darkness to where you wanted to start your hunt before the sun came up.

My favorite place was the hill between where I grew up on Nat's creek and Burgess Branch on the Chestnut side.  I'd park my truck beside the road and move up the hill, past the graveyard and slip through the fence until I came to a fairly large rock in the path.  I'd sit there very still and just listen.

At that time of year the leaves would be dew covered and, in the stillness, the swishing of squirrels jumping from limb to limb could be well heard.

Now, moving up there in the dark had it's problems as you really could not see and big, old spiders loved to weave webs across the path which you'd run into if you were not careful.  I always lead off with the barrel of my shotgun clearing the path for me.  But once we got to where we (mostly me by myself) was going to begin the hunt we just sat, waited, listened and enjoyed the morning coolness and the anticipation of a good squirrel supper.

Then there'd come the swish of a squirrel moving around and one would perk up and make out the direction from which the noise came.  Move slowly, as noiseless as possible, in that direction until one could see the leafy, limbs moving.  Wait hardly breathing until one could see the squirrel then take aim and ... miss or have one for the kettle.

Most of the time squirrels were old enough to need to be stewed but if you hunted "out of season" which we all did, you could get young squirrels that were great fried.  Same with young rabbits.  In fact if you fried them in the same skillet you could not really tell the difference.   And, no, neither tasted like chicken.

When it grew to be around ten o'clock it was time to make one's way back to the road and drive home (or just walk home if you lived that close) and clean your kill, cut it up and put in in the refrigerator in salt water for some hours or days before cooking.



I can't explain that feeling really.  It is very calm and peaceful and at the same time one is tense with anticipation, ears straining for that faint sound which will set one off on the stalk.

It has been a good number of years since I've had a squirrel to eat.  I'd give a lot for some fresh squirrel, squirrel gravy and home made biscuits for breakfast now.  *sigh*