Gary Greene's Memories from an Old Hunter..... #53
As a young hunter, I was really excited to host my own hunting party and after several requests, I finally received permission to do so from my parents.
Even though I lived in a rural area of Franklin in the mid-1960s, there were not a lot of boys in my seventh grade classes that were hunters. There were just a handful of us that discussed our squirrel and pheasant hunting at school and there was only Mike Swan in my neighborhood to hunt with.
Franklin is one of the largest cities in Wisconsin in area, so my buddies hunted in their own little neighborhood pockets. We never hunted together because our parents, on a regular basis, would have had to drive us across town and that just didn’t happen.
So I came up with the concept of having a squirrel hunting party. I invited Mike, Keith, Tommy, Ronnie and Randy to join me in a Saturday hunt in my neighborhood woods. Franklin is in Milwaukee County, which is a non-firearm county, so each hunter brought their quiver of arrows and recurve bows. I had never hunted with more than one partner for squirrels. Many times I was on the line pushing pheasants in the cornfields of Waterford with the friends of my dad and the Swan family, but a seventh grade hunting party was a totally new concept.
Saturday came and all my buddies were excited to get out on the hunt. I immediately found that each neighborhood set of hunters hunted in their own manner that they were accustomed to which did not gel with the other hunters and most of which made no sense to me. I also soon found out that there were numerous different hunting experience levels in our group and some were quite below the experience level that Mike and I were at.
Well, we entered the woods and I attempted to keep everyone in a safe, straight line as if we were pushing pheasants, but that never seemed to last very long. When we did tree a squirrel, all of a sudden there were all these arrows flying through the air ricocheting off trees in all directions. It was chaotic and extremely dangerous. We never did get coordinated, and the few squirrels that we shot at were never in danger as much as we were and there were some close calls that could have resulted in some nasty injuries.
After several hours, none of which were fun for me, with everyone still having two eyes, I decided I wanted to call it a day and get all of us back for lunch at my house. My mom set up card tables in the basement and made hot dogs. It seemed like everyone was having a real good time and we ate a ton of hot dogs, soda and chips. There was lots of laughing, but I was totally disgusted with how the day turned out.
My buddies called their parents for their rides home, and I was thrilled that they had left. I never, ever considered another squirrel hunting party.
Later that hunting season, Mike and I found a third hunting partner in Steve Podriznik and the three of us hunted together every autumn weekend for three years until high school sports and girls interfered. We never had to discuss our positioning around a treed squirrel. The three of us always knew were each other was located and we verbally communicated our shooting. For a young hunter, those were great times with great friends and were roots for my love for hunting and the great outdoors.