Death of a Squirrel

I still remember the crunch and crackle of fallen leaves.

I don't remember how old I was, but imagine I was around six. I don't remember what month it was, but it must have been the fall.

Because I do remember the crunching leaves.

Every day, Melissa and I watched our dad leave to hunt in the forest that surrounded our house. Sometimes he came back with a deer, sometimes a squirrel or rabbit. And, during the night hunts, he came back with raccoon.

He didn't hunt for sport, though I think he enjoyed his rambles. He hunted for food to feed his family. He hunted for the pelts he sold to a furrier. He bred and trained his hounds until they worked as a single unit, their noses to the ground, their bays of pursuit echoing off the trees of the Ozark Mountains.

Melissa and I begged him to take us hunting until he finally relented. We had an indistinct idea of what it entailed. I pictured a walk through the quiet woods, a romanticized adventure mirroring those in my favorite book, Little House in the Big Woods.

We tromped along, kicking leaves, our voices loud in the hush of the forest. Hawkeye, trotted before us, nose to the ground, searching for his prey. Dad, so tall and strong, led the way with his rifle resting over his flannel covered shoulder. Listening to our chatter, he turned to us and said that if we wanted to go hunting, we'd have to keep quiet. The quiet lasted, in the way of little children, seconds. Finally, he gave us a job.

"Look up in them there trees and let me know if you see a squirrel," he drawled in his thick accent. Excited, we began searching the trees for a squirrel.

Hawkeye's nose caught the scent before our eyes spied the squirrel sitting high in a tree, eating his lunch. Giddy with excitement, we pointed it out, jumping from foot to foot. We watched while the squirrel nibbled away until the world exploded and he fell to our feet.

Gun smoke hovered in the air, slowly wafting away from the man who had pulled the trigger. I looked at my dad and then at his gun. I looked down to the squirrel, lying bloody and still.

And I cried.

My mind could not understand how the gentle man who read us stories every night, who stayed up late nursing a sick dog, who had such respect for everything in nature, could kill. Walking to the squirrel, he picked it up by the tail and handed it to me. I recoiled.

"You need to carry it home, baby doll."

Melissa leaned against me, sniffling quietly, as I reached a shaking hand for the squirrel.

I carried it home, crying the whole way, not understanding why this evil man was making me do it. Not understanding what he was trying to teach me. In our world, the creatures of the forest were not Disney characters, but food. The meat he put on the table, the food he and mom grew in their garden, was what kept us from going hungry in a place where grocery stores were over an hour away.

I didn't understand that he'd seen us looking at his guns in fascination, not realizing their deadly power.

The walk home, through the woods, was quiet. The crunching leaves under our feet and our sniffles, the only sounds, a sharp contrast to our earlier exuberance.

I never asked to go hunting with my dad again, but I kept the squirrel tail as a reminder that as modern and complex as my world gets, I grew up in a place where life and death played on a stage behind a small house nestled on the edge of a forest.

This post was inspired by The Red Dress Club memoir writing prompt. We were asked to remember an event from our childhood.

On a completely unrelated note, I'm reviewing Rembrandt tooth whitener over at Makes Fun. I don't think I could have written two more opposite posts.