Hunting - With Apologies to Sandy

Image by cj berry 2009 via Flickr

We hunted more for sport than for food, but we didn't waste the food either. Mac and I would go hunting some Saturdays and we would tramp through the woods with Flip the squirrel dog and let the dog do most of the work. Flip would spot a squirrel, run it up a tree and then spot where it was hiding on a limb and point it out for one of us to shoot. We used a .22 rifle to save the meat and always tried for a "head shot." Some days we would come home with 3 or 4 squirrels. We would then clean them and give them to Mamma who would put them in a dishpan in salty water and soak them overnight before either frying for breakfast or stewing for dinner. I remember the squirrel and dumplings was a family favorite, but I don't remember eating a whole lot of it. I did eat fried squirrel and fried rabbit whenever we had it.

I seldom hunted with Daddy. He didn't like to roam around hunting - he preferred to sit silently in one place and wait for the game to come to him. It must have been effective, because he always came home with game. He only hunted with a .22 rifle. I never saw him with a shotgun unless he was trying to get blackbirds out of his planted fields. One time he killed over a hundred starlings with two shots from a 16 guage. Daddy told us that when he was very young - and when everyone was very hungry, the whole family would go out at night and surround bushes and drop a blanket over each bush and collect the birds that were under it for eating. It didn't matter what kind of birds they were either. I remember him saying that Crow tastes a lot like chicken!

As I've probably mentioned earlier, there were no deer in our area then. Deer had been hunted out of the area well before the War Between the States. The only SC deer were in the "low country." Someone brought us some deer meat from a hunt in the low country and Mamma fried it and covered it with gravy. I really liked it.

Sometimes we would catch a turtle or two and make a stew. The story that was most often told was that "there are 7 kinds of meat on a turtle!" I never knew because I wouldn't touch it.