The Squirrels

Here’s something that still bothers me: Shortly after moving into this house with Groenlier, in the spring, we couldn’t help but notice that there were an awful lot of squirrels in the yard. Well, squirrel is one of my favorite small game meats so; I decided to try to get a few. Now, if I wasn’t so concerned with having money for drugs and alcohol, I’d have just bought a pellet rifle but my priorities wouldn’t hear of it, especially since I could think of a way to do it and spare myself the unnecessary expense. I searched the garage despite it being in the middle of collapsing, and I searched the basement of the house. This led me to a rattrap that hung from a nail on a floor joist but that wasn’t until after I had tried to build a live trap using a five-gallon paint bucket and a refrigerator grate. The wire shelf made a lid that I attached to the bucket with a couple pieces of wire coat hanger for fasteners that also created the hinges. Then I tied a brick to the lid and placed some birdseed in the bucket. I used a stick to prop the lid open, and tied a rope to it- like a box trap from the days of old. It was just like in the cartoons or on the Little Rascals. It worked well if the squirrels just relaxed a bit but they freaked out, shooting out of the trap like furry little rockets with claws. The rattrap was a cartoon moment. Like when you see the light bulb over a characters head appear and illuminate. I tied a piece of heavy yarn to it and tied the other end to a large broken tree branch that laid there on the ground so they wouldn’t run off with the trap. Figuring that peanut butter would be great bait, (and remembering the Planters commercials), I ran in and got the jar, slathering some on the trap. Well, before I pulled the cellar door shut behind me, I heard that awesome, “snap!”, that said I had one. Dragging the bucket with me, I took the squirrel off, dropped him in, and baited the trap again. I was pretty excited! Hunting squirrels with a rattrap! Well, as I put the trap back down I saw the squirrels at my feet. “Wow!” I thought, “This is too easy. I can’t believe I never thought of this before”. In about ten minutes I had five of them. Ron Groenlier volunteered to clean them and cook them. The sounds of him gagging and dry heaving from the act and the smells that go along with it, had me choking on the laughter that was a challenge to keep under my breath.

While he was doing that, I was looking out the window, at the back yard, filled with a sense of pride for having succeeded in trapping squirrels. There was an overabundance of them, which is one of the reasons I even killed them but now I see past our fence, and there is an old woman on her backyard deck. She had a three foot “A” frame, carpet covered perch for them to climb on, where she fed them from her hand and talked to them. These squirrels I just killed had a caretaker, with names and everything. They were more or less pets and very friendly. Suddenly I was sick at heart! I just killed a bunch of tame squirrels and, boy, was I ashamed. To this day I still feel bad about it.