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Speaker 1: Welcome to This Country Life. I’m your host, Brent Reeves from coon hunting to trotlining and just in general country living. I want you to stay a while as I share my experiences in life lessons. This Country Life is presented by Case Knives from the store More Studio on Meat Eaters Podcast Network, bringing you the best outdoor podcast that airways have to offer. All right, friends, grab a chair or drop that tailgate. I’ve got some stores to share. Squirrel It’s what’s for supper. We’re gonna be hunting and eating squirrels this week, and I’ve shared my fish cooking recipe on episode one eleven and how I Cook a coon on episode two seventeen. There’s a lot of ways to prepare squirrels, and the recipe I’m sharing here today is simple and it was on a very special occasion. I’m going to tell you just how my mama did it. But first I’m going to tell you this story. This one was sent in last June by This Country Life listener John Perkins. John is a civil engineer in Albertville, Alabama. John sharing his story of growing up with an older parent and was inspired to send it in after listening to episode three point thirty three of This Country Life titled Pocket Knives, Squirrels, and Father’s Day. Now that’s all the lead in you get, so in John’s words in my voice, here we go. I recently listened to Your Father’s Day podcast about your dad. I’ll admit I had to stop what I was doing and shed a few tears as the story had so many similarities to my dad. My dad was born in nineteen twenty nine in Lamar County, Alabama. He married my mama when he was seventeen and she was sixteen. They quickly had my oldest brother and three other siblings through the years, and when finally, at the age of forty seven in nineteen seventy seven, my mother brought me into this world. Growing up, I always felt a little embarrassed by my parents’ age, as they were older than some of my buddy’s grandparents. But my dad’s huge personality and his love for hunting and fishing and the outdoors, and his willingness to share it with anybody made me a lot of friends growing up, several of which I spend regular time with in the woods to this day. At some point in my younger years, I realized that I most likely did not have as many years as most young men would have with their fathers due to our age difference, so I spent many hours with him in the film. Much of the time was spent behind his huge pack of beagles, chasing rabbits, running walkers, and bluetick hounds after deer. Most especially, we followed a tree and fists and rat terror squirrel dogs around the hardwood bottoms of the butter Haatchee River. We lived on seventy acres in the middle of ten thousand that we had permission to hunt on, so there was no shortage of space for my tom Sawyer want to be lifestyle. And my first memory of hunting with my dad was at age three now, he took me and the dogs on a short walk around the house on a squirrel hunt. We traveled no more than half a mile, and when my short legs got tired of crawling over logs and wading through briars, my daddy put me on his shoulders to carry me the rest of the way home, two hundred yards from the house behind the old quail pin my dad built to raise birds to trade his English owners. Jack our best tree in Fice treed the last squirrel of the day. Dad pulled me off his shoulders and sat me on the ground in front of him, and he helped me line up a shot on the squirrel with his little brown and twenty two short semi automatic, which somehow I miraculously hit. The squirrel toppled out of that water roape for Jack to retrieve, and that day set off twenty three formed of years I got to spend with my dad. We followed the hunting seasons throughout the year, starting with doves in September. It ended with squirrels and rabbits in February. Deer, coon, and quail were thrown into the middle, and when hunting seasons ended, we focused on catfish and panfish and our local rivers and lakes, and grew a ten acre garden every year. I wouldn’t change my youth for anything that I could imagine. But my dad had a stroke in May of two thousand. He stayed in the hospital mostly unresponsible until June, when he passed away around two months later, with my Mama by his side. For ten years after that, I barely hunted or fished. It just didn’t seem right without Dad either, being there with me or having him around to tell about the experiences that I’d had. I went to college, I got a degree in civil engineer and started a family, settled down into a domesticated life. Finally I felt the pull of nostalgia for the old days starting to creep in. I had started still hunting for squirrels again, and after a few deer hunts, I knew it was time for me to get busy living. Found a great houseman with an awesome bloodline of Tree and Phiston, and bought a pup in March of twenty ten, Perkins Delilah Jane DJ for short, and by October of that year she had treated her first squirrel and we killed over one hundred before she turned a year old. She helped reignite the love of the outdoors for me, and now I’ve since spent the last fifteen years getting a lot of young folks into hunting and getting to take some awesome trips from my friends and family to as far away as Canada and Alaska. In fact, I’m planning to fly out at the end of July to Anchorage for a two weeks salven and Halibu trip while living out of a tent all because of a great dad and a twenty pound squirrel dog that got me back where I belong. And according to John Perkins, son of mister Ralph Perkins, that’s just how that happened. And there’s so many things to take away from John’s story. Taking advantage of the time you have with someone and passing along the traditions that they taught you to the next generation, and sharing the things you love with others who love it too. That’s good stuff, John, Thank you for sending it in neighbor. How long has it been since you had a steaming plate of fried squirrels? Well, that’s too long now for you more seasoned listeners. That question may sound a little familiar. That that was an old Wolf brand chili commercial that I altered a bit to fit my narrative of one of my favorite things to eat, and that’s fried squirrels. I never remember not eating them, but neither my mother nor my dad would have at one had they been starving slapped to death, the stigma of their animal order being too much for either of them to overcome. Me. I have no issue with squirrels as long as they as long as they have hair on the tails, and they don’t get wet any deviation from a fuzzy tail and dry as a bone, and I’m out as well. I’ll eat it, but I ain’t picking up a wet one before it gets skinned. Both of my parents nestled firmly in the squirrel nests of musophobia. It’s reasonable to see where my aversion to rodents comes from. And I’ve said it a million times. I ain’t scared of rats and mice. They just creep me out to the point of wanting to jump off a bridge to get away from them, or if it came down to it, throwing one of my kids that wanted to keep it from getting near me. I exaggerated that last part. Maybe not no, not really, but I don’t like rats or mice, But squirrels ain’t neither one of them. And as long as they have bushy tails and stay dry, they’re good to go. Now, how did I get to eat them so much as a young And when neither parent would eat one, they fixed them for me and they had something else just like now in my house, but in reverse, I fix squirrels in a Lexis and Bailey they eat something else. Now what I like for them? To eat them, of course I would, am I sorry it works out that all the squirrels I fried are going to be at by me. Of course I ain’t, So why do we eat them? The short answer for me is they taste good. I’m very proud of my heritage and where I come from. The only thing more southern to me than a plate of fried squirrels, biscuits and gravy is nothing, not one thing. If I was blindfolded and carted around in a van for three days and sat down at a table in an undisclosed location and told the guess where I was by the meal they served me, and that meal was fried squirrel mash taters, biscuits and gravy, my first thought would be after I eat this and escaped this place, I probably would be close enough to the house to walk home. But why would I want to leave? I mean, really, the reality is I could have been anywhere in the eastern half of the United States, from a Gulf coast to Canada and over to the Atlantic Ocean. That’s where the great squirrel lives in Cyrus. Carolyn Nenzs can be found in every corner of Arkansas. People outside of the squirrel circle. Think about folks eating squirrels, that’s only associated with economic hard times and the Great Depression or poverty stricken areas where people are forced to eat them because they can’t afford to eat nothing else. I know this because I’m married to one of those people. And by those people, I mean squirrel snobs. She accused me once of growing up like the people she saw living on little house on the prairie. Now, I would have preferred gun smoke bonanza. The horses were faster and there was more gunplay, but I took it as the complement of which she didn’t intend. I eat squirrels because I like the way they taste, and there ain’t a lot of trees out on the prairie to shoot squirrels out of. Anyway. I saw a headline for a Lee story one morning several years ago that said, coming up here, the near death survival story of a lost man having to eat squirrels and berries for several days until he was rescued. Rescued from What if someone pulled me out of a place where I was eating squirrels every day, I call that kidnapping. I have no idea how old I was when I shot in my first squirrel six or seven, I’m sure, but I remember as plain as if it happened this morning, the first squirrel I ever shot out hunting by myself. In nineteen seventy eight. I was twelve years old and in the sixth grade. The squirrel season in Arkansas now opens in May. It runs to the end of February, but back then it didn’t start until October. It was cool that morning, and I remember walking down an old road across the creek north chicken houses on our farm. Brown and yellow leaves were floating down as the view in front of me framed by hardwoods on either side of that old lane that I was slipping down. A cool breeze brushed across my face as I carefully picked my steps, avoiding twigs and mudholes that lay in the dim ruts that lined the way, being as quiet as I could, watching for movement on the ground and in the trees for anything it resembled a squirrel. Every gust of a breeze would bring water, oak and penoak leaves and acorns raining down all around me, and I stopped and I made sure it was the wind knocking the acrons down, not a squirrel. Then the breeze died down for a moment, and I froze straining to hear a squirrel shaking leaves, barking, or loudly gnawing on an acre. You’d be surprised how far you can hear that. Then twenty five yards in front of me, I saw a single acron bounce in the middle of the right hand rud of that old lane. That’s all I needed to know, as if my life depended on it, I started slipping up that old dirt road, walking just like my brother Tim. It showed me slowly stepping with the outside part of my heel first, then rolling my foot forward, keeping all the weight on the outside of my boot, cutting my footprint by nearly two thirds, before slowly flattening out my foot, redistributing the weight and the pressure, then repeating the process with the other leg. With a little practice, you can teach yourself to do some show Enuff Daniel Boone slippage. And as a youngin I literally used to practice how to do that. It’s a technique I still used today. But the water rope from where that acorn dropped had stood in that old patch of woods for a long time, and two an eleven year old boy. It was as big as a skyscraper, especially when that boy had never seen one. As I got closer to where the acron hit the ground, I saw the one that I thought had fallen. It was half chewed and missing the acron cap, the cream colored meat on the inside being the object of that squirrel’s attention. But with so many within easy reach of wherever he was in that tree, it might take a while before I ever saw him move. Saw a limb shake in a nearby tree and started to go in that direction. But why would I leave the squirrel to go find another one. I already found this one slipped right up under where he was. I just needed to sit down and wait for him to show himself. On the opposite side of that old road where the tree was was an equally old fence. The posts were split rails, and the fence had passed being rusty many years ago. It sagged in places and was hidden in others by trees in the passage of time. The metal of the net wire was slick, dull, and dark, having more or less been blued by decades of rust. I leaned back against a fence post that was at least as old as my grandfather and as sound as the day it was splitting set in the ground. That acre that hit the ground fifteen feet in front of where I was now sitting, and the angle I was looking up into that tree was steep, so I leaned back like I was on vacation with a Stephens Model ninety four seventy eight single barrel, twenty ages laying across my lap. Hunting by myself made me feel grown, responsible and trusted to be safe and do the right thing. I was basking in my new found independence, staring up into a big fork in that oak tree that hung out over the road when something caught my attention. Is that a squirrel? I strained to see, focusing all my attention on the space where those two huge limbs separated, each going their own way in the race for sunlight. That must be a knot right in the middle. That wasn’t a squirrel. Looked like a squirrel’s head kind of, but it didn’t move. It couldn’t be a squirrel. I never took my eyes off that spot, imagining if it had been a squirrel, all I’d have to do is ease my shotgun up, cock the hammer, aim, and squeeze the trigger, and I heard another limb shake, and I turned to see a squirrel three trees over, jump to another limb and disappear from you. I looked back to the knot and the big fork above me, and it was gone. Hey, where does I not go? Was I looking in the wrong spot? No, it’s the biggest fork in that tree, and it’s right above where I saw that acorn fall. I looked back to where I’d seen the squirrel that other tree and saw nothing. I looked back toward the fork, just in time to see another acron falling on the same path as the one before, and I followed it to the ground. They had been chewed on too. I looked back up in that tree and the knot had reappeared, except this time it was poking halfway out in the middle of that fork. Looking down at the acorn, it just dropped. I slowly shouldered my shotgun, never taking my eyes off that squirrel. I cocked the hammer and shot bark flew off that fork all around where I’d seen that squirrel, only to realize he was gone. It seemed like forever, but just a moment later, that squirrel followed suit of both acorns. He dropped and rolled off that limb and landed right in front of me. The only thing between him and a hot skillet was his hide and a half a mile run back to the house, and I couldn’t wait to show him off. I did a bunch of squirrels before that one in a million squirrels since, but I’ve never had one that tasted as sweet as that one did. I skinned him out and Mama fried him for my supper with biscuits, mash taters, and gravy made from the renderings. And this is how she did it. As soon as I got back to the house and got him skinned, we dissolved about a tablespoon of salt and a mixing bowl of water and threw his naked carcass in there. And there he sat all day, soaking in that bowl in the ice box, or as you sophistic as referred to it, the refrigerator. I’ve heard folks say that soaking wild game and saltwater takes the gamy taste out of it. I ain’t no chef, but I know what a brine is, and soaking a squirrel in salt water is brin in the meat. What it does is help breaks down some of the proteins that make the meat tough to chew, and soaking it overnight works best. It also cleans away any blood, which may cause what folks refer to is as a gamey taste. Now, I don’t think I’ve ever eaten anything that was gamy. I’ve never really understood that term. Things taste different. Fish is different than the chicken. That’s different from pork or beef. Things taste like what they taste like, But anything wild or different is labeled gamy. But whatever, anyone, My mama took that squirrel out of that bowl and renched him off and poarded him up, and then she dried the parts off with some paper towels. She would then roll him in flour she’d seasoned with salt and pepper, then dunk him in a bowl of buttermilk and a beaten egg. Then she’d rolled and powdered his fanny once again in that flyer and lay him in a cast iron skellet that had a half inch lard waiting on him, the thermometer peeking around three twenty five and three fifty degrees America. Once the crust on the cooking side resembled the gold and brown or fried chicken. She’d turn him over and he do the same on the other side. As far as how long for side item, I don’t know. I guess about five minutes on the first side, and maybe a little less on another. I don’t know. It seems like it takes forever to get it done, especially when you like squirrel as much as I do. But internally, the temperature you’re looking forward about a one hundred and sixty to one hundred and sixty five degrees. Anything over that and your risk making it tough, which is the opposite why you soaked them in the salt water to begin with. I remember seeing that plate with all four quarters laying on there, with a buttered biscuit and a mash tater’s colored with gravy mama maid and skillet with the grease and the renderings from where she fried that squirrel. I challenge anyone for a better tasting gravy than that made after frying and mess the squirrels. For me, it is distinct and stands above all others. Now, that was my supper, That was my reward for killing my first squirrel. By myself, and it was a feeling that I remember as well or better actually than anything I did yesterday. But then nothing I did yesterday even came close to killing that squirrel on my first solo hunt. I love everything about this, every bit of it, and I hope you all like it too. Keep sending those stories into my tcl story at the meat eater dot com. Share that episodes you think other folks might enjoy that you hear on the Bean Greece Channel, whether it’s Meet Clay or Lake or all three of us. Until next week, this is Brent Reeves signing off. Y’all be careful
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