About fifty years ago I had a Christmas to remember. Two things happened back to back. My boss gave me my first Christmas bonus (200 bucks), and I bought my first muzzleloading rifle ( two actually). One was a Dixie York flintlock kit, and the other was a CVA .50 cal. Mountain Rifle kit. I built them and began shooting. But the Dixie was unreliable, so the CVA became my main gun. The spring after getting my new toys, my dad told me he thought he was losing a goodly part of his pear crop to ground squirrels in the part of his orchard that bordered the hills. He asked me to thin the heard. So every evening after work I would cruise over there, and shoot squirrels, with my muzzleloader. Squirrels are pretty smart and quickly figured out that stopping to have a look at close range was a death sentence. So the more I killed the farther away they would go before stopping. One evening as I drove along the fence, I spied a squirrel standing lookout on top of one of my dads smudge pots. He was way out there, but the light was right, and he was in a spot where I could make a safe shot. I guesstimated the shot to be about 200 yards. Since I didn’t want to hit the smudge pot, I held a little higher than I normally would. I squeezed of the shot, but instead of seeing squirrel parts flying at the edges of the billowing smoke cloud, I saw nothing. The squirrel simply vanished. I was curious, and went out to check for random squirrel parts. At first I found nothing, but then noticed something white, like a piece of eggshell sticking to the stack of the smudgepot just beyond the one the squirrel had been standing on. It was a piece of skull, and after finding it, I found the decapitated squirrel beyond the second smudgepot in the tall grass. I had counted the paces it took to get from my truck to the squirrel, and it was 204 paces. One very lucky shot for sure.
Hungry Horse
