I know it’s deer season here in Dixie, and like the rest of you Southern boys and girls who head to the woods in hunter orange, I am thrilled to no end.
We don’t mind the unusually warm days we get mixed in with the cold ones and sit in our favorite shooting house or ground blind wiping sweat or swatting mosquitoes.
We wouldn’t work for what we put up with in our pursuit of the whitetail buck! For us it is a fever like no other.
But back when I was a young adult, one of my favorite ways to hunt was squirrel hunting with dogs.
The late Rev. Earl Carney of Tylertown was one of the best in providing the hunts and the dog. He always had a good scope of woods to hunt with abundant squirrels to harvest and a keen-nosed dog to trail them up with.
The best one I can remember was a large black male mixed-breed dog, but it would not bark once he had treed the squirrel. It would just rear up on the tree the squirrel ran to or gnaw at the hole in the tree if it was hollow where it had gone into to hide.
As a result, Bro. Carney had to hang a bell on the dog’s collar so we could listen, and when the bell quit ringing we knew he had treed. If the dog was chewing at the hole, usually at the base of the tree, we knew the squirrel was content to stay put. No problem.
First off, Bro. Carney would cut a slim switch from a bush or tree and try twisting the bushytail out of its concealment.
If that didn’t work, another procedure would, without fail.
Bro. Carney always carried a box of matches in his coat and would have us hunters spread out all around the tree as he stuffed dry leaves into the hole.
Then he would say, “All right, boys, get ready, it’s time for him to go.”
Then he would set the leaves on fire and the smoke would fill the hollow tree, and up near the top the squirrel had no choice but to run out, giving us hunters a shot.
Many were the times Bro. Carney put the smoke to the hidden squirrel and it had to go!
Then there was quail hunting, following a bird dog and easing up to it in a lockdown, frozen like a stone statue in a point.
No matter how you were braced, when the covey of quail or even a lone one exploded up in flight you could never keep from being startled. In my case, I missed far more fluttering feathered targets than I hit.
Most of the quail population is gone now due to the mixed encroachment of fire ants and coyotes, and the plantation pine forests where once were open fields.
Times have changed, but not the memories of those days when life was simple, smoking squirrels out of hollow trees and following the switching tails of English setter and short hair pointer quail dogs across broomstraw fields.
Not to mention easing up in and around those baygalls and sloughs to shoot wood ducks, that we always called “squealers.”
Or a pack of Yellow Creek beagles yelping on a frigid cold morning in pursuit of Mr. Cottontail hopping along the bunny trail.
No, you can’t beat hunting here in the good ol’ South, be it the elusive big game whitetail deer or the small game so abundantly supplied.
It’s a fever like no other.
Merry Christmas!
God bless you and God bless America.
BRO. MALCOLM “MIKE” DYKES of Tylertown is chaplain for the Mississippi Highway Patrol and the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation. Email him at angelsmannow02@gmail.com.
