A ‘Squirrel in a Bucket’ Story

 

In my dad's pool hall, the old timers occasionally referred to a tall tale as a 'possum in a bucket’ story. When my curiosity overflowed, I asked Ol' Bill where such a term came from. He told me that years ago one the old coon hunters had claimed he found a grown possum in a five-gallon gas can, with only the two or three inch nozzle at the top of the can open. The old coon hunter said he figured the possum had fallen through that small hole at the top of the can when it was a little baby and its mother had just been feeding it as it grew older. 

This column, therefore, could be 'squirrel in a bucket story'. It started when I was sitting on my back porch a few years ago and watched a mother gray squirrel carrying a very small baby squirrel from one tree to another when she dropped him. I would have thought the little fellow would have been killed by that fall, but he wasn't. I watched, thinking she would come back to get it, but she didn't. Finally I couldn't stand listening to the little fellow cry for his mama, and I knew he would soon attract a hawk or some other predator. So I went out and picked him up and told him everything would be okay. Looking around for a box to put him in, I could only find a minnow bucket sitting in my boat. I lined it with leaves and he liked it. We took him in and fed him from a bottle until he developed a liking for peanut butter and he grew into a fine young adolescent squirrel. We would lock him in the minnow bucket at night on the screened porch, so nothing could get him. 

Eventually we just set the bucket on the rail of our back deck next to the big white oak tree and he started hauling white oak leaves into it on his own to make himself a nice soft bed. 

I kept him safe by leaving the bucket out there where he could be free and well fed, and every night I closed the lid and every morning I opened it. He would come in the house at times and sit on my shoulder while I wrote, and become one of the gentlest, nicest little pet squirrels I ever had, and I have had a bunch of them over the years. 

I could bring the readers of this column to tears by saying that I went on a fishing trip to Canada and forgot to open the lid and when I got back he had shrunk up to the size of a weasel and didn't have the strength to crawl out of the bucket. I could go on about how I nursed him back to health with the aid of an old retired veterinarian who had become a hermit, and how he had one day met a girl squirrel and raised a family in that same bucket. 

But none of that happened. He must have been around here for a couple of years before he took off with a pack of migrating gray squirrels. I think he ended up in north Arkansas. 

Gray Squirrels are great pets. Fox squirrels are too, but they get cantankerous as they age and bite just a little, then run off to seek their fortune. I had a bunch of squirrels I raised from babies because Uncle Roy McNew would so often cut firewood in February and there'd be a litter of them in a hollow place high above the ground, which he hadn't seen. I don't want anyone thinking Uncle Roy would have intentionally cut down a den tree, it was always an accident 

My mom did let me have several wild pets, maybe three or four different crows. One of them, old Joe was the main attraction in a pet parade in Houston, MO. Mom and grandma made him a little vest and a hat and I tethered him to a roosting bar I could hold and Joe and I marched down main street with him cawing all the way. We won second place, and it was a crime. Some little girl and her ugly cat took first place, only because she was the mayor's niece!  You can never escape politics.

 

The promise I made to tell deer hunters about what the Missouri Department of Conservation is doing to charge and fine hunters with a technicality in order to illegally take and keep trophy deer antlers and capes was suppose to have been printed in my blogspot last week didn’t make it. I apologize for that but it is in there now. I hope you will read it, because what those agents are doing is a crime and I mean that literally! The site is ‘larrydablemontoutdoors’ on the Internet.