Squirrel Hunting Quotes

My mind is wandering like a squirrel on Red Bull.

I bunched the squirrel-fur hat up under my head and left the pack for Mal to use as a pillow. Then I pulled my coat close around me and huddled beneath the new furs. I was nodding off when I heard Mal return and settle himself beside me, his back pressed comfortably against mine. As I drifted into sleep, I felt like I could still taste the sugar from that sweet roll on my tongue, feel the pleasure of laughter gusting through me. We’d been robbed. We’d almost been killed. We were being hunted by the most powerful man in Ravka. But we were friends again, and sleep came more easily than it had in a long time. At some point during the night, I woke to Mal’s snoring. I jabbed him in the back with my elbow. He rolled onto his side, muttered something in his sleep, and threw his arm over me. A minute later he started snoring again, but this time I didn’t wake him.

Somewhere along the line the American love affair with wilderness changed from the thoughtful, sensitive isolationism of Thoreau to the bully, manly, outdoorsman bravado of Teddy Roosevelt. It is not for me, as an outsider, either to bemoan or celebrate this fact, only to observe it. Deep in the male American psyche is a love affair with the backwoods, log-cabin, camping-out life. There is no living creature here that cannot, in its right season, be hunted or trapped. Deer, moose, bear, squirrel, partridge, beaver, otter, possum, raccoon, you name it, there's someone killing one right now. When I say hunted, I mean, of course, shot at with a high-velocity rifle. I have no particular brief for killing animals with dogs or falcons, but when I hear the word 'hunt' I think of something more than a man in a forage cap and tartan shirt armed with a powerful carbine. In America it is different. Hunting means 'man bonding with man, man bonding with son, man bonding with pickup truck, man bonding with wood cabin, man bonding with rifle, man bonding above all with plaid'.

I realized I still had my eyes shut. I had shut them when I put my face to the screen, like I was scared to look outside. Now I had to open them. I looked out the window and saw for the first time how the hospital was out in the country. The moon was low in the sky over the pastureland; the face of it was scarred and scuffed where it had just torn up out of the snarl of scrub oak and madrone trees on the horizon. The stars up close to the moon were pale; they got brighter and braver the farther they got out of the circle of light ruled by the giant moon. It called to mind how I noticed the exact same thing when I was off on a hunt with Papa and the uncles and I lay rolled in blankets Grandma had woven, lying off a piece from where the men hunkered around the fire as they passed a quart jar of cactus liquor in a silent circle. I watched that big Oregon prairie moon above me put all the stars around it to shame. I kept awake watching, to see if the moon ever got dimmer or if the stars got brighter, till the dew commenced to drift onto my cheeks and I had to pull a blanket over my head. Something moved on the grounds down beneath my window — cast a long spider of shadow out across the grass as it ran out of sight behind a hedge. When it ran back to where I could get a better look, I saw it was a dog, a young, gangly mongrel slipped off from home to find out about things went on after dark. He was sniffing digger squirrel holes, not with a notion to go digging after one but just to get an idea what they were up to at this hour. He’d run his muzzle down a hole, butt up in the air and tail going, then dash off to another. The moon glistened around him on the wet grass, and when he ran he left tracks like dabs of dark paint spattered across the blue shine of the lawn. Galloping from one particularly interesting hole to the next, he became so took with what was coming off — the moon up there, the night, the breeze full of smells so wild makes a young dog drunk — that he had to lie down on his back and roll. He twisted and thrashed around like a fish, back bowed and belly up, and when he got to his feet and shook himself a spray came off him in the moon like silver scales. He sniffed all the holes over again one quick one, to get the smells down good, then suddenly froze still with one paw lifted and his head tilted, listening. I listened too, but I couldn’t hear anything except the popping of the window shade. I listened for a long time. Then, from a long way off, I heard a high, laughing gabble, faint and coming closer. Canada honkers going south for the winter. I remembered all the hunting and belly-crawling I’d ever done trying to kill a honker, and that I never got one. I tried to look where the dog was looking to see if I could find the flock, but it was too dark. The honking came closer and closer till it seemed like they must be flying right through the dorm, right over my head. Then they crossed the moon — a black, weaving necklace, drawn into a V by that lead goose. For an instant that lead goose was right in the center of that circle, bigger than the others, a black cross opening and closing, then he pulled his V out of sight into the sky once more. I listened to them fade away till all I could hear was my memory of the sound.

You might want to know that my dad taught me to shoot so that I could hunt with him, which I’ve been doin’ since I was a kid. I can kill a pheasant in flight. I can kill a rabbit running for its burrow. I’ve even shot a squirrel scrambling up a great big ol’ oak. So, I can damn sure hit your knee from a few feet away. Now, you and your boys need to back the fuck away from our truck, or I will happily give you tangible proof that I am indeed an excellent shot.

Not the Happiness but the Consequence of Happiness He wakes up in the silence of the winter woods, the silence of birds not singing, knowing he will not hear his voice all day. He remembers what the brown owl sounded like while he was sleeping. The man wakes in the frigid morning thinking about women. Not with desire so much as with a sense of what is not. The January silence is the sound of his feet in the snow, a squirrel scolding, or the scraping calls of a single blue jay. Something of him dances there, apart and gravely mute. Many days in the woods he wonders what it is that he has for so long hunted down. We go hand in hand, he thinks, into the dark pleasure, but we are rewarded alone, just as we are married into aloneness. He walks the paths doing the strange mathematics of the brain, multiplying the spirit. He thinks of caressing her feet as she kept dying. For the last four hours, watching her gradually stop as the hospital slept. Remembers the stunning coldness of her head when he kissed her just after. There is light or more light, darkness and less darkness. It is, he decides, a quality without definition. How strange to discover that one lives with the heart as one lives with a wife. Even after many years, nobody knows what she is like. The heart has a life of its own. It gets free of us, escapes, is ambitiously unfaithful. Dies out unaccountably after eight years, blooms unnecessarily and too late. Like the arbitrary silence in the white woods, leaving tracks in the snow he cannot recognize.

She was still obliged to leave the house every day, on her usual hunt for food; and especially on days of bad weather she had no other solution but to leave Useppe alone, his own guard, locking him in the room. It was then that Useppe learned to pass time thinking. He would press both fists to his brow and begin to think. What he thought about is not given to us to know; and probably his thoughts were imponderable futilities. But it's a fact that, while he was thinking in this way, the ordinary time of other people was reduced for him almost to zero. In Asia there exists a little creature known as the lesser panda, which looks like something between a squirrel and a teddy bear and lives on the trees in inaccessible mountain forests; and every now and then it comes down to the ground, looking for buds to eat. Of one of these panda it was told that he spent millennia thinking on his own tree, from which he climbed down to the ground every three hundred years. But in reality, the calculation of such periods was relative: in fact, while three hundred years had gone by on earth, on that panda's tree barely ten minutes had passed.

You have a rule against murder?” he asked. “I do. When my husband and I bought the Bellechasse we made a deal with the forest. Any death that wasn’t natural wasn’t allowed. Mice are caught alive and released. Birds are fed in the winter and even the squirrels and chipmunks are welcome. There’s no hunting, not even fishing. The pact we made was that everything that stepped foot on this land would be safe.” “An extravagant promise,” said Gamache. “Perhaps.” She managed a small smile. “But we meant it. Nothing would deliberately die at our hands, or the hands of anyone living here.

Vladimir, released from prison in St. Petersburg, was given five days in St. Petersburg and four in Moscow to prepare for his exile. He traveled alone across the Urals, taking with him a thousand roubles and a trunk filled with a hundred books. His three years in the quiet backwater Siberian village of Shushenskoe near the Mongolian border were among the happiest of his life. The river Shush flowed nearby and was filled with fish, the woods teemed with bears, squirrels and sables. Vladimir rented rooms, went swimming twice a day, acquired a dog and a gun and went hunting for duck and snipe.

The civilized man is distinguished from the savage mainly by prudence, or, to use a slightly wider term, forethought. He is willing to endure present pains for the sake of future pleasures, even if the future pleasures are rather distant. This habit began to be important with the rise of agriculture; no animal and no savage would work in the spring in order to have food next winter, except for a few purely instinctive forms of action, such as bees making honey or squirrels burying nuts. In these cases, there is no forethought; there is a direct impulse to an act which, to the human spectator, is obviously going to prove useful later on. True forethought only arises when a man does something towards which no impulse urges him, because his reason tells him that he will profit by it at some future date. Hunting requires no forethought, because it is pleasurable; but tilling the soil is labour, and cannot be done from spontaneous impulse. Civilization checks impulse not only through forethought, which is a self-administered check, but also through law, custom, and religion. This check it inherits from barbarism, but it makes it less instinctive and more systematic. Certain acts are labelled criminal, and are punished; certain others, though not punished by law, are labelled wicked, and expose those who are guilty of them to social disapproval. The institution of private property brings with it the subjection of women, and usually the creation of a slave class. On the one hand the purposes of the community are enforced upon the individual, and, on the other hand the individual, having acquired the habit of viewing his life as a whole, increasingly sacrifices his present to his future. It is evident that this process can be carried too far, as it is, for instance, by the miser. But without going to such extremes, prudence may easily involve the loss of some of the best things in life.

It takes no skill to find a bald eagle. You look for flat rabbits on country roads. Wait a while and the national emblem will appear, menace anything that got there first, and plunge his majestic head deep in a mass of entrails. Alternatively, you can follow some industrious hawk through swamp or bottomland forest until he dispatches a squirrel; an eagle is likely to descend, savage the smaller bird, and steal his prize. The eagle can hunt, of course; he just prefers not to. Benjamin Franklin called him a bird of bad moral character. It takes no skill to find the nest, either. Look for a shipwreck in a tree, layered in feces . . . The likeliest impediment to (the eagles’) reproductive success was a human observer bungling around twice a day, but their welfare was almost incidental anyway. The point was for patriotic human hearts to swell with pride on outdoor weekends, and convincing replicas would have sufficed; the compulsive monitoring was not good husbandry, just an expression of national guilt. I did what I was paid for. Privately I sided with the furred and feathered residents of the area who must have wondered why humans were loosing winged hyenas in their midst . . . They’re glorified vultures. An apex predator that never hunts. Absurd.

According to the American Treeing Feist Association, the treeing feist, or mountain feist, existed in the southern Appalachians long before rat terriers were brought to America. While terriers were bred to catch vermin, feists were bred to hunt. And while squirrels are their primary prey, the feist will gladly hunt raccoons, rabbits, or birds. With longer legs than terriers, feists are built for silent speed. They live to tree a squirrel until its owner comes to catch it. The feist has a storied history intertwined with the beginnings of the country. George Washington wrote about them in his diary, and Abraham Lincoln even referred to them in a poem.

The attitude toward members of one's own species should of course not be equated with that toward other species. Lack of concern for other species is to be expected, given the virtual absence of attachment. Animals often seem to regard those who belong to another kind as merely ambulant objects. Sue Boinsky reports that when an angry capuchin male in the wild ran out of ammunition while hurling things at her, he simply turned around, grabbed an unsuspecting squirrel monkey who sat nearby, and threw it at her as if it were just another branch. The capuchin, who would never have acted in this way with a member of his own species, clearly could not care less about the shrieking little monkeys with whom he shared the forest. Cruelty to other animals is something that we humans may have begun worrying about; it is a concern without precedent in nature. Hunters judge the hunted by caloric rather than emotional value, and even if other species are not perceived as food, usually nothing is to be gained by investing care in them.

Sables from Pechora, and white and dun fox, and the pelts of white wolves, and bearskins. From Siberia, red and black fox and the white fur of squirrels. Lynx and ermine. Wolverine, marten and beaver. What once lived and breathed and hunted through forest and snowfield piled now in stalls, fifty small skins between boards, sold as a timber.

Her father had grown up hunting possums and squirrels in the red maple and dogwoods of McCreary County, Kentucky, right on the Tennessee line.

George Moonlight had introduced his only son to the woods before Charlie could walk. He’d taught him to hunt, trap, fish, make squirrel stew, skin a deer, build a birchbark canoe, construct a wigwam for shelter, distinguish the edible mushrooms from the poisonous ones, start a blazing fire without matches, find his way through fifty miles of virgin forest without compass or map. He’d taught him to appreciate the sound of a mother quail protecting her babies, the rich smell of a fall day, the crispness of a winter night, the majesty of a hawk soaring across a cloudless sky, the gentle tranquility and harmony of snow blanketing a field. He’d taught him to respect Mother Earth, drilling into his head the Quidnecks’ three commandments: Take only what you need; use all that you take; leave something for tomorrow.

Brian snorted. “Aunt Tillie thinks everyone is evil,” he said. “I ran into her in the hallway the other day – she was wearing a combat helmet, if you can believe that – and she told me she was hunting for squirrels.

Kahnawake August 1704 Temperature 75 degrees By summer, Kahnawake children had stopped wearing clothing. Mercy could not get over the sight of hundreds of naked children playing tag, or hide-and-seek, or competing in footraces. The boys--naked!--went into the woods to shoot squirrels and rabbits and partridge. They used bow and arrow, since their fathers did not like them using guns yet. Even the six- and seven-year-olds had excellent aim. Joseph didn’t go entirely bare, being a little too old, but wore a breechclout, a small square of deerskin in back and another square in front, laced on a slender cord. The boys played constantly. They were stalking, shooting, running, chasing, aiming, fishing, swimming--they never sat down. The men, however, mainly rested. They liked to smoke and talk, and when they were showing a son or nephew or captive how to feather an arrow or find ducks, they did it slowly and sometimes forgot about it in the middle. A Puritan must rise before dawn and never take his ease. Puritans believed in working hard. But for an Indian man, working hard was something to do for an hour or a week. After he killed the moose or fought the battle, an Indian took his ease. Hunting men and animals were dangerous; he deserved rest afterward, and besides, he had to prepare himself to do it again. A Deerfield man didn’t risk much plowing a field. A Kahnawake man risked everything going into a cave to rouse a sleeping bear.

Pop used to have a dog, a mutt with some kind of crazy hunting instinct, and it would see a squirrel and just go so still. He’d turn himself into a dog statue.

I could admit I had a bit of a crush. I mean…. Who the fuck asks for squirrel at a diner? Mutt. That’s who. He was weird, and cute—and he liked to stick his fingers up my butt. So like…that made him kinda perfect? Lying about being a dog, aside.

In retirement at Monticello, Jefferson again had ample time for hunting, and he was a true sportsman. His servant Isaac recalled: Mr. Jefferson used to hunt squirrels and partridges; kept five or six guns. Oftentimes carred Isaac wid him. Old Master wouldn't shoot partridges settin'. Said "he wouldn't take advantage of 'em"—would give 'em a chance for thar life. Wouldn't shoot a hare settin', nuther; skeer him up fust.

Anyway,” he went on after a moment, sounding more relaxed, “the first time I went hunting with Firestar, I really wanted to impress him. I ran so hard after a squirrel that I slipped on some wet leaves, went nose over paws, and crashed into a tree. Great StarClan, it hurt! And what hurt even more was that I was pretty sure Firestar had to stop himself from laughing.” “Really?

And then there is the Löwenmensch – the Lion Man of the Hohlenstein-Stadel. In the hills between Nuremberg and Munich in Swabian Germany there are caves that have yielded one of the most important works ever crafted by an unknown artist. Around 40,000 years ago, a woman or man sat somewhere in or near that cave, with the detritus of a hunt scattered around. They took a piece of ivory, a tusk from a woolly mammoth, and carefully considered that it might be the right material, shape and size for something that they had been pondering. Now extinct, cave lions were fierce predators at that time, posing a threat to people, and also to the animals that people would hunt and eat. That person thought about the lions, and how formidable they are, and maybe wondered what it would be like to have the power of a lion in the body of a human. Maybe this tribe revered the cave lions out of fear and awe. Whatever the reason, this artist took that mammoth ivory, a flint knife, and patiently carved the tusk into a mythical figure. It is a chimaera, a fantastic beast that is made up of the parts of multiple animals. Chimaeras exist throughout all human cultures for most of history, from mermaids, fawns or centaurs, to the glorious monkey-man god Hanuman, to the Japanese snake-woman nure-onna, to the Wolpertinger, an absurd and mischievous Bavarian part-duck part-squirrel part-rabbit with antlers and vampire teeth. Today, we have reached the ultimate manifestation of a 40,000-year interest in hybrid creatures in genetic engineering, where elements from one animal are transposed into another, and hence we have cats that glow in the dark with the genes of deep-sea crystal jellyfish Aquorea victoria, and goats that produce dragline silk from the golden orb weaver spider in their udders. The Lion Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel

Mouth open, take a big sip. Keep the water in, not a drip. Make your cheeks like a squirrel, then swish. Spit it all out, and now you can make a wish.

Only a dozen or so of the Fae who had been gathered in the Court when she arrived waited on the green. Most held the reins of creatures so incredible that even Delphine, subsumed with sick fear about Emily, was momentarily transfixed. The Fae man with the golden eyes stood next to a salamander on legs like tree trunks, its ink-black body spotted with brilliant yellow. It opened its maw for a treat from the man, revealing a row of terrifying gilded teeth. A woman with dark blue eyes and a faint blue tinge to her complexion absently stroked the head of a white chicken whose comb bloomed with crystalline roses and whose dark red talons raked the earth. A dark-haired Fae woman with sinewy arms and strong shoulders bare had turned a black-and-white goat into a unicorn by twining its horns into a single ivory-hued spiral, as well as giving it a generous increase in size. Emily clapped her hands in delight. "Would you like to pet one, love?" the Fae woman asked, guiding her toward a bronze-furred creature that Delphine slowly appreciated had once been a squirrel, its size now outstripping a large dog. "That one cannot be ridden, but he is as good a scent hound as any earthbound canine." "Where did they come from?" Delphine gaped. She didn't expect a reply, but the man with the salamander laughed. "The same place you do. They wander in, rarely. When the door is opened, whether we mean it to be or not. Occasionally, they are bargained. But mostly they are just strays." She opened her mouth to ask how, and he cut her off with an abrupt wave of his hand. "We do not know how it works or why the doors open of their own accord any better than you, and we wish they would not." "Why, when they become wonders like these?" She reached tentatively toward the squirrel, who butted her hand with his enormous velvet head.

Everything was in fine shape for the hunt. Everything was fitly ordered and we were well away when a disconcerting element tumbled in among us. With a yap of glee, there, bounding, came that full bull terrier, Silly Billy. Like a June-bug among honey bees, like a crazy schoolboy in a council room, he rollicked and yapped, eager to be first, to be last, to take liberties with Thunder, to chase the Rabbits, to bay the Squirrels, ready for anything but what was wanted of him; to stay home and mind his own business.

Gods took many of the animals, too. In the end, only six kinds of creatures were left in the Million Acre Wood for the canids to hunt: Deer, raccoon, rabbit, squirrel, rat, mouse.

You don't know what to do with the jam jar, the chicken stink, the sinister mountain fog that is everywhere, but the adults pretend to ignore when you are in the room. It seems the only thing you can do is listen for it. You hear it in the four measures of Vivaldi's "Winter" that you can still remember from Sarah and the Squirrel, and once you make the connection between the music and mountain fog you play the notes over and over again inside your head. You paw up the trash-strewn ravine. The sky is low and gray, the color of the cinder blocks the men in your town manufacture from ash and dust. The dirt-filled strawberry jam jar is in your denim coat pocket. Vivaldi is in your head. The music you hear is like the blaze-orange clothing the men wear on the mountainsides while deer hunting in autumn. The music is like a bulletproof vest, a coiled copperhead, a rabies shot. The music is both a warning and a talisman. The music tells you things: You're not imagining this. Better children than you die in the snow for no reason. The music says: What's hidden beneath this picture of strawberry jam? The music says: This isn't a Disney movie. Death doesn't just take the wicked villain. Look at that dirt in the jar. It will take you. It will take everyone, and everyone, and everyone. The music says: What you feel is real. Follow me. Run.

They turn on short-range telemetry kits, and we approach through the clear-cut. The black soil is deformed into thigh-high welts from earth-moving equipment. Pings from the radio collars tell them that the male is south of the female, who is farther up the wood line. Because the male wolf and the yearlings will often sit the pups while the female goes off to hunt or rest elsewhere, the biologists must choose which wolf’s signal to focus upon. This morning, they can’t decide which wolf might be with the pups. Chris whispers a game plan to Ryan. “I’m going to walk up on the male,” Chris says. “You walk farther up and get a bead on the female. Wait a few minutes before you go in - give me some time to find him first because the wind will wash your scent south right back on top of him, okay? If the pups aren’t with him, I’ll just keep moving north toward her and find you.” Ryan nods his agreement, and Chris slips into the woods. The density of the vegetation encloses around him within a few feet from the tree line. Chris, having spent twenty-five years using telemetry to track wolves, can interpret the pings like most people read road signs. His body melts behind thick vines, woody growth, and an abundance of wax myrtle bushes that crowd the understory. Ryan and I walk north along the clear-cut. He listens for the female, holding his telemetry antennae high. He waves the unit this way and that, searching the radio wave for the best strength. It begins raining. He paces up and down a fifty-foot stretch of the tree line. Where the female wolf’s signal is the strongest, he scratches a large X in the dark muck with his boot heel. We wait in the light drizzle. Minutes tick by. Finally, Ryan motions for me to follow him into the woods. We creep deliberately, slowly, and I plant each step where he does. After about ten yards, he drops onto his hands and knees and crawls beneath a cluster of thorny devil’s walking sticks. I trail him as if playing a silent game of follow the leader. We pause here and there to let the wolf confuse our sounds with a foraging squirrel. He uses vine clippers to snip through several large branches obscuring our way. Soon, Ryan pulls the cable from his antennae and shows me that he can hear her with just the receiver box. We are close. I try not to breathe. She is within thirty feet. Then the pinging in his headphones tells him she is running. We don’t hear or even see her flush. It is like tracking a ghost.

The inside of the tavern was well lit and filled with men and women in plain but sturdy clothes, most covered with some kind of fur, as though everyone worked with animals. They didn’t have the look of farmers. An odd stink rode under the scents of roasted meat and bread, but the food made his stomach grumble loudly. It was all he could do to keep from launching himself onto the nearest plate. Conversation died as everyone stopped what they were doing and turned to look at him. “Ah, hello.” He gathered his courage. This was just like reading poetry, but subtract poems and add people casually placing hunting knives and daggers on their tables. One of the women was filing her fingernails into sharp points, like claws. Just like reading poetry. G regathered his courage and strode to the far end of the room, toward the bar. He had to squeeze in between two burly men with tear-shaped scars on their faces. They all smelled vaguely like wet dog. A young man at the end of the bar leaned forward and smirked at him in a decidedly unpleasant manner. The bartender eyed him. “What do you want?” “I—” G had never needed to admit to not having money before. “I don’t suppose you have any work that needs doing around here?” “Work?” This fellow clearly had not so much brain as ear wax. “I could clean the tables or scrub the floor.” The bartender pointed to a haggard-looking serving wench, who scowled at him. “Nell here does that.” “Or I could peel potatoes. Or carrots. Or onions. Or any root vegetable, really.” G had never peeled anything before, but how hard could it be? “We have someone who does that, too,” the man said. “Why don’t you push off. This isn’t the place for you.” G would have suggested yet more menial tasks he’d never attempted, but at that moment, he put together the hints: the wet-dog smell; the fur on everyone’s clothes; the defensive/protective behavior when he, a stranger, entered. That, and they were eating beef. Cow. Possibly that village’s only cow. All at once, he knew. This was the Pack. “Er, yes, perhaps I should be pushing off, as you suggest—” he started to say. “Rat!” Someone near the door lurched from his chair, making it topple over behind him. “There’s a rat!” It couldn’t be Jane, he thought. He’d told her to stay put. “It’s not a rat, you daft idiot,” cried another. “It’s a squirrel!” “It’s some kind of weasel!” Bollocks. It was his wife. “It’s dinner, that’s what it is.” That was the man directly to G’s right. “And he’s a spy. Asking all those questions about vegetables.” “She’s clearly a ferret!” G yelled as he lunged toward the dear little creature dashing about on the floor. 

Indians walk softly and hurt the landscape hardly more than the birds and squirrels, and their brush and bark huts last hardly longer than those of wood rats, while their more enduring monuments, excepting those wrought on the forests by the fires they made to improve their hunting grounds, vanish in a few centuries. How different are most of those of the white man, especially on the lower gold region—roads blasted in the solid rock, wild streams dammed and tamed and turned out of their channels and led along the sides of cañons and valleys to work in mines like slaves. Crossing from ridge to ridge, high in the air, on long straddling trestles as if flowing on stilts, or down and up across valleys and hills, imprisoned in iron pipes to strike and wash away hills and miles of the skin of the mountain's face, riddling, stripping every gold gully and flat. These are the white man's marks made in a few feverish years, to say nothing of mills, fields, villages, scattered hundreds of miles along the flank of the Range. Long will it be ere these marks are effaced, though Nature is doing what she

Fine." I shook my head. "Let's go squirrel hunting.

Like many suburban homeowners, I like to kill and eat the wild animals that populate my backyard. To keep it sporting, I hunt naked, with my teeth and long, sharpened fingernails as my only weapons. I’ve feasted on squirrel, raccoon, vole, and numerous songbirds. But no matter how long I lay spread-eagle and motionless in the hot noonday sun, I have never been able to outwit and catch any of the plump and juicy rabbits that hop just outside my reach and then bolt for the woods when I leap forward with a blood-curdling shriek. I have chased them at a dead run through the yards of the many unoccupied homes that surround mine, but the pursuit always ends in frustration. But no more, thanks to Amazon. Every week, I order a fresh whole rabbit and affix it to a remote control car that is operated by one of my children. This way, I get the thrill of the hunt, and when the car’s batteries are exhausted, I can leap upon it, bury my teeth into the rabbit’s soft flesh, and perform my ritual victory dance right there in the Walgreens parking lot.

But could she see things clear like you can? Could she see straight through you? See through your hair and skin to your blood and bones? Did she ever give your cheek a lick to see how you tasted and tell what you would become? Did she have a scar on her chest like a door? Did she ever leave you for long periods? Did a squirrel ever come and sit on her shoulder and whisper in her ear?

It was in the woods here along Camp Branch that Bill White, my grandfather’s Negro hired hand, taught me to hunt squirrels. Bill lived in a little tin-roofed house on up nearer the head of the hollow. And this was, I suppose more than any other place, his hunting ground. It was the place of his freedom, where he could move without subservience, without considering who he was or who anybody else was. On late summer mornings, when it was too wet to work, I would follow him into the woods. As soon as we stepped in under the trees he would become silent and absolutely attentive to the life of the place. He was a good teacher and an exacting one. The rule seemed to be that if I wanted to stay with him, I had to make it possible for him to forget I was there. I was to make no noise. If I did he would look back and make a downward emphatic gesture with his hand, as explicit as writing: Be quiet, or go home. He would see a squirrel crouched in a fork or lying along the top of a branch, and indicate with a grin and a small jerk of his head where I should look; and then wait, while I, conscious of being watched and demanded upon, searched it out for myself. He taught me to look and to listen and to be quiet. I wonder if he knew the value of such teaching or the rarity of such a teacher.

A cigarette between one's fingers was as much a part of Tennessee life as squirrel hunting or country music.

told him, “but it’s not so bad. I think it’ll be fine once we get moving.” “I can see a scratch on your back,” Alderpaw meowed, turning to Needlepaw. He felt slightly shy at offering help to a cat from another Clan. “Do you want me to look at it?” “Please,” Needlepaw replied with an uncomfortable wriggle. “That mange-pelted fox threw me into a gorse bush, and it hurts.” Examining her more closely, Alderpaw saw that a couple of thorns were sticking into Needlepaw’s back, and she had a nasty scrape clotted with dried blood. “You’ve picked up some thorns,” Alderpaw mewed. “Crouch down and I’ll get them out.” Needlepaw flattened herself, and Alderpaw managed to get his teeth into the shanks of the thorns and yank them out, then spit them onto the ground. A trace of blood welled up where they had been. “Now comfrey root,” Alderpaw continued. “This will take the pain away.” She stretched and relaxed as the comfrey juices soaked into her back. “Thanks, Alderpaw. You must be a really good medicine cat, because I feel better already. And hungry!” Alderpaw’s pelt grew hot with embarrassment at Needlepaw’s praise, and he was glad to step back as Cherryfall organized a hunting patrol. She and Molewhisker, Sparkpaw, and Needlepaw headed off into the trees, while Alderpaw stayed with Sandstorm. “You’re doing a good job, Alderpaw,” Sandstorm murmured when the others had gone. Alderpaw ducked his head. “Thanks, Sandstorm.” He wasn’t sure he deserved the compliment, but he felt himself filling up with happiness like a hollow filling up with rain. Sunhigh was still some way off when the hunting patrol returned. Molewhisker and Sparkpaw were each carrying mice, while Cherryfall had a vole. Alderpaw’s eyes stretched wide with amazement when he spotted Needlepaw with her prey. She was dragging along a pigeon and a squirrel, both of them so big that she could hardly manage them. She picked up her pace to stride ahead to the bottom of the hollow, where Alderpaw and Sandstorm were sunning themselves beside the pool, and dropped her catch at their paws. Alderpaw tried hard to hide how impressed he was,