Saturday, May 18, 2019





A Cat Tale
My uncle, Cecil Wayne Wilson, was one heck of a marksman with a .22 rifle. I was privileged to accompany him on a few squirrel hunting safaris when I was about seven or eight years old.   Those excursions would usually take place on a crisp fall morning, after the hickory nuts had reached full maturity.
                                               

He only allowed me to go with him if I promised to be absolutely quiet and to obey his instructions.  Of course, I would have promised him anything as long as he let me go.  The woods behind grandma’s house extended for several square miles and he had a few favorite places to stalk the furry little creatures.  When we reached a spot to his liking, he would position my backside beside a tree and warn me to be quiet. 

Thus would begin my squirrel education.  If he saw an unwary critter nearby, it was lights out for the little guy.  If a squirrel saw us, it would skitter behind a tree trunk.  Cecil would tell me, “Now watch him.  He will just go around to the other side and peek out to see if we are still here.”  Sure enough, it went just like he said, and there was one more dead squirrel.

Sometimes, the squirrels weren’t very plentiful and he had a special way of calling them.  Most people have heard of duck calls or deer calls, but Cecil had a unique way of calling squirrels.  He would hold two half dollar coins apart with a finger of one hand use the other hand to snap the coins together, making a clicking sound.  Eventually one of them couldn’t resist checking it out and you can guess the result.  Cec seldom missed and he furnished himself and grandma with squirrel for supper.  I never could summon the courage to try squirrel, probably because I was horrified the first time I saw grandma crack the head to retrieve the brains and cook them with eggs for breakfast.

The squirrel narrative is only prologue to the point of this story.  One fine day Cecil and I had the .22 out behind the root cellar practicing our shooting (Mostly his, but he let me have a shot occasionally.)  While we were there grandma’s old cat sauntered by.  Before I
even knew it happened, Cecil shot the tail off that cat slick as a whistle.  Pop!  The tail went one way and the cat took off like a shot in the other direction.  Well we didn’t see hide nor hair of the cat for several days, but it eventually showed up and grandma couldn’t understand what had happened to the cat’s tail.  She doctored the stump of a tail with turpentine and after a while the cat seemed none the worse for wear.

Some thirty years later, when grandma was staying in a residential care facility in Poplar Bluff, I came to visit her and, by chance, Cecil happened to be there as well.  As the conversation among us progressed, I asked Cecil if he remembered shooting the tail off that cat.  Grandma sat straight up in her chair and exclaimed, “Cecil, did you shoot that cat’s tail off?”  Cecil smiled a sort of half smile and replied sheepishly, ‘Yeah, Mom, I did.”  It was only then that she learned the truth about the old cat’s tail.

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