







I'd been planning it in my head for a week. Really since I got a birthday card form my six year old son back in June. In his clumsy yet always impressive script, it read,"I can't wait to go hunting with you. Love, Henry." Obviously six years is too young for a boy to be handling a rifle in the woods, but how cool would it be to have my little buddy sneaking through the woods with me trying to spot wily bushy-tails high in the late summer canopy?





On the Sunday night before Labor Day, while tucking Henry into bed for the night, I surprised him with the news that I would be waking him up while it was still dark out and that we were going for his first squirrel hunt. "Just me and you. We'll even leave the dog at home." The look on his face was just what you would expect from a little boy getting that kind of news at bedtime. Still, he seemed to try to hide how excited he really was, playing it cool for Dad. I had originally planned to give him the news in the morning when I woke him up, but I have some very vivid memories of laying in bed trying to sleep the night before some grand event is scheduled to take place. I couldn't deny him the intense anticipation that only a six year old laying in bed wide awake can feel.





I woke him up at 4:30. I touched his shoulder and he sat bolt upright in bed, rubbing his eyes. "Is it finally time to go?" Apparently, he had already woken up and, seeing the glow from the streetlights coming through his window, thought I had overslept and the sun was already up. "Put these on." I handed him camo pants and a camo long sleeved tee. "I get to wear all camo?" I was starting to realize how much he had been looking forward to this. I completed the outfit with his own blaze orange cap cinched down to fit his kid head. We were hunting on public land. It's not required, it's just a damned good idea.

While Henry ate a bowl of cereal, I loaded the car with the rifle, cooler and fanny pack and took the dog out for his business. Henry and the dog both got pretty excited at the sight of the gun case. Locking the dog up in his crate after carrying a gun case to the truck is a heartbreaking thing to do to a bird dog, but my one year old Brittany pup is nothing but a hindrance in the squirrel woods and would have taken most of my attention. I'd been feeling guilty about how much Henry has had to accommodate this new dog in our lives so it was important he was left at home for this trip. I snapped a photo of Henry as he was getting in the car. He had a dreamy look, as if fear and nervousness were battling with excitement for control of his expression.





We had about an hour drive to get to the woods and I wondered if Henry would fall asleep on the ride. Instead, he stayed up and we watched a sliver of moon follow us down the highway low in the eastern sky, discussing that it seemed to be following us because it was so far away, and so big. As the horizon started to glow, we got another lesson as the earthshine really lit up the dark side of the moon. The kid is curious about everything and I love explaining that kind of stuff to him if he'll listen.





When I saw the two pickups in the normally deserted hunter's parking lot, I remembered that it was Labor Day. The orange hats seemed like an even better idea now. Henry gave another little boy "Woah!" as I slid my rifle out of it's case. I understood. It has that effect on me too. He seemed quite honored to hold the box of bullets as I loaded half a dozen into the magazine tube. He was even more proud when I hung my binoculars around his neck. We stopped for another photo of him holding the binocs in front of the WMA sign. In this picture the smile is barely there. He's serious, now. I can only imagine how anxious he was. Dressed in camo, in charge of the binoculars, dad with his rifle, about to enter a (to a six year old) huge and mysterious woods, and the sun wasn't even up yet! I think I missed all this at the time, caught up in my own excitement of my first squirrel hunt with the boy. Letting myself be fooled by the "playing it cool for dad" act.





Once we hit the trail, his anxiety seemed to fade a little. I started hearing quiet robot and explosion noises from behind me. A guarantee you're either being followed by a six year old boy or a Transformer. Squirrel hunting probably wasn't as ninja like as he expected. It was pretty much just a walk in the woods at this point except Dad would stop occasionally and stare at a branch in the canopy that was moving or bend over and pick up a discarded hickory nut and show it to him. "This is what they are eating right now." He's been on plenty of hikes where I prattle on about things that probably aren't as interesting to him as they are to me. Another difference this time was that whenever his fidgeting, stomping or sound effects got too loud I would stop, turn, and give him a serious finger to the lips.





We walked all the way down to the river because I had wanted to show it to him. The Embarras River meanders through these woods. Here it is shallow but wide and carves it's channel out of the surrounding hills. It starts, however, as a tiny trickle thirty miles north in a prairie park a few blocks away from home that we visit often. "If you spit in the creek at Meadowbrook Park, it passes right through here on it's way to the Gulf of Mexico." The lesson being that, though we are small in the grand scheme of things, our actions have far reaching repercussions. Whatever, Dad.





I told Henry it was time to get really quiet and keep his eyes peeled as we climbed up into the higher ground above the river. We were getting close to a grove of Black Hickories where I had been having good luck recently. I began to stop more often, motioning for Henry to do the same, both of us trying to be as quiet as possible. When we stopped, Henry would scan the canopy with the binoculars. He even pointed out some hickory hulls in the trail I hadn't noticed. As we stooped to investigate, we heard what sounded like rain but it was a perfectly clear morning. It was the sound of two or three fox squirrels somewhere above us hurriedly gnawing their way into hickory nuts and dropping the leftovers. We stood up and the "rain" stopped. "But I don't see them." I whispered back that they had already seen us and were hiding on the other side of some limb or trunk. If we stayed very still and quiet, they would forget about us enough to start eating again.





I saw a leafy branch take a dip high in a stately old hickory and fast stepped to a small tree so I'd have something to steady my shot on. I really enjoy squirrel hunting and I admit I kind of got lost in the hunt at this point, all but forgetting Henry was even there except for the vague feeling that I was showing off for someone. We both watched as the squirrel worked his way through the high leafy branches, the occasional dip of a branch or bright flash of copper in the early morning rays our only clues as to it's location. I watched it through the scope a few times but the distance was too great for a sure shot even if he stopped and gave me one. Suddenly another flash of copper alerted us to a much closer squirrel moving a long a branch about thirty feet up. I stepped to another tree and found him through the scope. He stopped. I squeezed. I missed? I felt a momentary pang of embarrassment to do that in this particular situation but the squirrel simply hopped down to a lower branch, trying to figure out what that was that just whistled past his head. He stopped again. I squeezed. He fell with a thud to the forest floor. I turned and smiled at Henry and he smiled back and gave me a high five. I was feeling good. As moments go, this one had it all.





I had shot the squirrel right in front of the ear but, as squirrels often do, when we walked up to retrieve it, it gave up the last of it's life with a flash and skittered ten feet through the leaves before it died. It's my least favorite part of a hunt. I did something I hadn't expected when this happened. I stopped and put a hand out to stop Henry, who was still a few feet behind me. "Wait. It's not quite dead yet." I did this without thinking. A squirrel in it's death throes is not a dangerous animal. That's not what I was protecting him from. I had been so sure he was old enough for this experience but when the grizzly truth of what we were doing asserted itself, I instinctively tried to hide it from him. Suddenly I wasn't so sure of myself and what I was doing. I retrieved the squirrel and we looked it over. He was an exceptionally nice Fox squirrel. Henry, noticing the bloody mess on the side of the squirrels face commented that "It looks gross on the outside but it's delicious on the inside." My confidence slipped a little more as I finally began to notice that he was hiding some of his emotions about this experience behind his "playing it cool for dad" act. Some major issues were getting worked out in that boy's brain but, without direct questions, I was at a loss as to how to help. We talked a little about being mindful of where our food comes from and thankful to the living things that provide it. It's a topic we discuss briefly before any meal containing wild game but this time it was half-hearted. I was distracted. So was Henry.





In spite of all this, we had just had a successful hunt and our wind was up. With game in the game bag, we moved on. I told Henry we'd hunt a little bit longer and see if we could get one more before we went home. We stopped at another hickory stand a few minutes later. Henry seemed to be relaxing and was taking a more active role with the binoculars. It paid off soon after we stopped when I heard the telltale skittering of claws on bark. The sound of a squirrel that has just seen you and is doing it's best to get out of sight quick. "I see one!" I followed his binoculars to the source of the sound just in time to see a Grey Squirrel disappear around the tree trunk about fifty feet off the trail. "Good job, Henry!" I moved up to lean against a tree but after five or ten minutes, we decided we were "barking up a den tree" and decided to call it a day.





As we made the hike back to the car I reminded Henry to keep looking for squirrels along the way. He told me, "You can also listen for their claws scratching on the trees." He'd learned something and you don't soon forget something you learn while hunting. Humans are predators and some primal part of Henry's brain recognized that what we were doing could be a survival skill and it was filing away bits of information it considered to be important. Hunting for us is by no means a matter of life or death but try telling that to that part of your brain that evolved when it was. We didn't see any more squirrels on the way out so we put our single squirrel on ice and hit the road back home.





I had planned to preserve the hide so instead of the quick skinning job I usually do, I was painstakingly attempting to remove the skin without damaging it. A much longer, much grosser job. Henry was in the other room watching a nature documentary about a man that hatches a clutch of turkey eggs and then spends every waking moment with them in the wild for the next year or so. I had seen it before and I could hear the narration from where I was.

There is an incident described when one of the hens goes off to nest and starts laying eggs. She doesn't return for a few days and when he finds the nest the eggs were destroyed and the hen had also been killed and eaten. Henry turned off the TV and came in to watch what I was doing. We chatted a little about the skinning process and then he got quiet. I looked up and noticed that there were tears standing in his eyes threatening to spill at any moment.

I asked him if he was sad about the hen turkey and he said yes and put his face in his hands. Henry has always been sort of sensitive and I've always been proud of that aspect of his personality and tried to encourage him to explore the way things make him feel. I told him I agreed it was a sad story but made some comment about the circle of life and that it was just like the squirrel we killed so we could eat. He opened his eyes and looked down at the gory mess in my hands and stared at it for a moment. The connection was made. He put his face back in his hands and really started crying.





I asked him if he was sad for the squirrel too and he shook his head. I asked him again and he shouted, "No! I don't want to talk about it!" It all came crashing down on me then. I felt like I'd been punched in the gut. I dropped the squirrel and the knife on the table. I wanted to pull him in and hug him but then I looked at my blood stained hands. The boy was crying for the squirrel. He was crying for the squirrel that I had killed in front of him. The squirrel I was now skinning in front of him. Worst of all, and the part that really bothered me, is that he thought he had to hide it from me. That I had somehow sent the message that being sad for the animals you hunt is not ok. That I had somehow sent the message that I wouldn't understand these feelings or that I would be disappointed in him for feeling them. What had I done? Who the hell did I think I was?





What I haven't mentioned so far is that I was not a seasoned hunter. In fact, this was my second season ever hunting anything. It was not that he was too young, it was that I was. I didn't know enough about hunting to be worthy of introducing it to anyone, let alone this impressionable little boy. I had spent the day teaching him everything I could about hunting while ignoring the most important part. I could talk all day about the circle of life and the constant struggle of the wild but what about the struggle that goes on in your heart and your conscience every time you make a kill?





I washed my hands and hugged him. I told him that it was ok and good to be sad for the squirrel. I told him that I was sad for the squirrel too. How much I hated the part between the shot and when the animal finally dies and that that's why I hadn't wanted him to see it. I mostly told him that he should never be afraid to share his emotions with me and to never be ashamed of his emotions at all. I had thought he already understood that. I never wanted to be the father that he would have to "play it cool" for. I hadn't just screwed up that day, I had screwed up somewhere along the way and failed to make myself completely emotionally available to him. Or maybe I was just seeing the first evidence of the inevitable divide between father and son. In any case, I pledged that going forward I would try harder to be the father of a son that knows he's "cool" in Dad's eyes no matter what.





When I confided in his mother about my blunder, she wondered if I had made him into a vegetarian. She's very supportive of my intentions to teach him about hunting but she had a valid concern. As it turns out, Henry had no problems eating the soup I made from that squirrel and even helping with the tanning process. He has even asked when we were going again. Like my first clumsy attempt at introducing Henry to hunting, it was my first attempt at tanning a squirrel pelt and it shows. It's a misfit of a thing, missing half of it's tail and part of it's nose, some fur off the ears. But it will last for years to come. The perfect reminder of Henry's first squirrel hunt with Dad. The things he learned. The way he felt.







