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Thursday, September 06, 2007

Remembering those squirrel hunting days with Billy Leonard

By Bill Cochran

Billy Leonard called me Saturday. I hadn’t heard from him for a long time and it was no happenstance that Saturday was the opening of the squirrel season. Billy said he had been reading an early 1970s copy of The American Hunter, which contained an article on squirrel hunting that I had written about him.

No telling how many stories I wrote about Billy in a number of magazines and in The Roanoke Times 30 or more years ago. A few Times’ readers informed me that I wrote too much about him. There are other squirrel hunters, they told me, often including themselves in the bunch.

True, but none like Billy, as far as I knew. I spent a decade opening days with him and was in awe of his abilities. He took limits in good seasons and bad. He hunted with an open-sight .22 rifle in which he shot shorts. He would put a piece of aluminum foil around the front sight so it would be easier to see in dim light.

The shorts made less noise than the sound of more potent long-rifles. They weren’t that much different from a nut falling from a tree. They didn’t get squirrels uptight. There were occasions when Billy would kill a limit from a single tree. You start with the ones nearest you and work up, he explained.

He always shot offhand with both eyes open, never using a rest. Rests are a luxury you can’t depend on when squirrel hunting. He did a lot of practice shooting, a favorite target being walnuts hanging from a tree. They were roughly the size of a squirrel’s head. Billy always aimed for the head.

He was the greatest rifle shot I ever saw. His old, beat-up, bolt action Remington Model 511 Scoremaster was an extension of his eyes and arms. I’ve seen him drop a squirrel that was leaping from branch to branch high in a tree.

“I don’t like to shoot them on the run, but that one was getting away,” I remember him saying. I would show up with a fancy Anschutz bearing a 4X scope. He would outshoot me 5 to 1.

He was one of the few people I know who did serious preseason scouting prior to the squirrel season. When you hunted with Billy, you met him while the stars still were shining and you watched dawn give shape to the woods. He believed in being in place early.

Billy had superb eyes and ears and he would let them do most of the “walking” for him. When he advanced, he did so in a crouched position, with the sun to his back, moving his head from side to side like a cautious old tom turkey. He knew how to get through the woods without cracking a stick or rattling leaves.

Movement was what he was looking for, but he also was a master at spotting squirrels that had pancaked themselves on a limb high in a hickory. I believe the title of that American Hunter piece was “A Bump on a Limb is Meat for the Pot.”

Billy could skin a squirrel almost as quickly as he could kill it. Back in those days, there was a seasonal limit of 75 and he’d get it every year. He ate a lot of squirrel and gravy.

He knew all of the oddities that impact the actions of squirrels, from moon phases to mast production; from rainy days to reproduction.

Billy developed health problems and had to give up squirrel hunting. When he quit a good bit of my passion dissipated. Now when opening day comes I am reminded of that verse in 2 Samuel that says: “At the time when kings go out to battle … David stayed at Jerusalem.”

Some people outgrow squirrel hunting. Billy never did. Never wanted to. He told me Saturday that he feels he is getting to the point he may be able to hunt again. Not like the old days of crawling through fences and racing up ridges to get to a hickory grove near his home in Blue Ridge, but maybe just a gentle walk in the woods when the September sun is bathing the golden-hewed hillsides.

If not that, there always are the memories.

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