Home is the Hunter, Home from the Hill
Back in the 70’s when everyone else in America was putting on leisure suits and rocking out to the BeeGees and disco, I headed north up to a Polish homestead in upper Wisconsin. Had a farmhouse and the old summer cook shed, a smoke house and a barn. We pumped water from a well outside and we did our business in an outhouse we had to build to replace the rotted original one. It was primitive living, but you ask me, better than disco by a country mile or two.
I guess I went whole hog on this going back to the land thing. We put in a big garden over the old pigpen, laid in wood for the winter that was going to come soon and hard, made homemade bread and tried to steal honey from the bees in the barn who taught me a vicious lesson about theft and the need for better bee helmets. Somewhere during that idyllic summer I decided to become a hunter. My father-in-law gave me a .22 semi-automatic rifle and so I wandered into the oak woods across the road to pursue my luck at squirrel hunting.
Maybe you never shot a semi-automatic rifle before. If not, let me explain that it’s made for folks who don’t intend to be marksmen. You sort of point it in the direction of your target and start shooting. It fires as fast as you can pull the trigger, a couple times a second. You don’t really need to aim, just watch the bark peel back as you zero in on that poor little squirrel who really has never seen anything like that in his woods before. Needless to say, Davy Crockett here came home with plenty of varmint for dinner those first couple weeks of autumn.
We skinned em, we tanned the hides, we ate stews, we fried em, we put em on the grill. It took a couple or three to make a meal. A squirrel is really more of an hors doeurve than a meal, but you have to kill a few mammals to fill your belly. It started to seem, well, cruel. I mean, I know I was going back to a hunter/gatherer ethos and all, but a lot of squirrels were dying to satisfy my pioneer dreams. After all, this was the 1970’s, not 1870.
My last hunt I shot a little gray squirrel, knocked him off his limb and he managed to hang on to another on the fall. I shot him again and he stayed put. I put another couple of slugs into him and he finally dropped in a heap to the leafy ground, but then he hauled himself into a hole in the trunk of the oak. I had to pull him by the tail out of that shelter and dispatch him mercilessly with one final shot. I still remember that moment and I still remember that little squirrel, riddled with my bullets, dying for what would be a morsel to me. Call me squeamish, call me a bleeding heart liberal, call me a squirrel lover … but don’t call me a hunter. I put the gun back in a closet and never shot it again.
When I moved out here, I threw the gun in the Conestoga along with most of our possessions, but that first few months I traded it for a 5 string banjo. Which can fire a note as fast as I can pull the trigger. So … I guess I’m still inducing unnecessary suffering on innocent creatures. But at least no lives are being lost….
Hits: 139
Soooo the question is: can we credit the poor little bugger with the ultimate creation of the South end String Band?
Well, admittedly, I had to learn how to play that banjo traded for the gun that shot that poor squirrel. And okay, it was 30 some years later and in full disclosure, the 3rd banjo I owned by then. And the rest of the band might figure they have something to do with creating the South End String Band, but otherwise, yeah, that little rodent gave its short life of acorn-gathering to grow the oak tree that is now the mega band you know today. Small price to pay or a crime against nature, you be the judge…..