If you were in my Sunday School class when we had a lesson on Nimrod, you would know he was a great-grandson of Noah, who was also known as a mighty hunter. In fact, the non-slang definition of nimrod is hunter. I have known great hunters around Dutchtown, but I am not one of them.
I’m not opposed to hunting; it’s just not my thing. I was pretty young when I got my first BB gun for Christmas, and I loved shooting. Occasionally, I would shoot a bird, but my heart wasn’t in it. I did enjoy shooting at tin cans or targets.
A few years later, I got a 20-gauge single-shot shotgun. My neighbor, Kenny Wesley, and I went hunting several times. The first time we went hunting for rabbits, I got one on my first shot. We went quail hunting a time or two, but I don’t think I ever hit one.
The thing we hunted for most was squirrels. As soon as we entered the woods, the squirrels would run back into their nests and be gone. Kenny explained to me that we would spread out a little bit and be very still and very quiet. The squirrels would eventually come back out and start running around again. Well, that is a nice theory, and it probably would have worked, but I have very little patience today and had even less then. After probably five minutes, I would find a nest and shoot up into it.
One time when I did that, it destroyed a nest of flying squirrels. I thought they were bats as they were coming down all around me. That freaked me out for several seconds as I felt like I was in the middle of a bat storm and had no idea which way to run. Then when they hit the ground running, I got even more freaked out.
You might think that would have been enough to teach me a lesson, but it wasn’t. I shot into another one, and this gigantic beast fell right down at my feet. It was a possum, and fortunately, it was dead as a doornail when it hit the ground.
I don’t know if it was my idea or Kenny’s, but my hunting career didn’t last too long. It was back to tin cans and targets for me.
Even though I would buy many guns over the years, I don’t think I killed an animal for probably 40 years. That changed when I went to war with squirrels once again. They loved my strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, and muscadines. Now, these were not the squirrels of my youth. They would let you get 10 feet away from them. They would grab a strawberry and scamper up onto a limb 10 feet off the ground, and I think they were taunting me, knowing I couldn’t reach them. I guess they never heard of a pellet gun. I took out a few of them, but there was no shortage of fresh squirrels to come in and fill the void. Eventually, I got an electric fence, and my hunting days were over once again.
On a cold winter morning, I’ll lay in my warm bed and think about those resilient folks already out in a deer stand somewhere. For a second, I think it might be great to be out in nature, enjoying the thrill of the hunt. But I roll over, and the thought quickly passes. When you get to be as old as me, you realize some things just aren’t going to happen for you. I will never be a nimrod, and I’m OK with that.
‘The best thing about hunting and fishing,’ the Old Man said, ‘is that you don’t have to actually do it to enjoy it. You can go to bed every night thinking about how much fun you had twenty years ago, and it all comes back clear as moonlight.’ – Robert Ruark