Tell Aunt Mary about Uncle John

I’m fixing to tell Aunt Mary about Uncle John.
Uncle John used to hire me out to go squirrel hunting with him on Saturday mornings when I was a young boy. I had to get up real early because he wanted to get out into the hardwood forest while there was still a little frost on the ground.

Before the hunt began my uncle would pull out his pocket knife and slice himself a generous hunk off a plug of Brown Mule chewing tobacco, and just before he popped it into his mouth he would admonish me to be sure and not say a word about his chewing to Aunt Mary.

By that time his big spotted dog would be straining at his leash, ready to hit the woods.
I carried an old army backpack to keep the game in. It was stiff from old dried blood from previous hunts, but it fit nicely on my back and was quite handy.

It was usually pretty chilly out in those woods, and I knew I would be in for several hours of hard work. But the reward outweighed the sacrifice because Uncle John always gave me fifty cents after the hunt was over.

As soon as his dog treed a squirrel my job was to sneak around through the briars and brambles to the other side of the tree and shake a vine or bush to trick the squirrel into moving around to the side of the tree where Uncle John stood with his sixteen gauge shotgun at the ready.

That big gun would go boom! And the squirrel would come tumbling down through leaves, branches and vines until it plopped onto the forest floor where his big dog would come charging in to finish it off.

I would run in and slap that dog on the head until he reluctantly released the prize from his jaws, and then I would deposit the quarry into my backpack. Afterwards, we would go trudging on looking for another bushy tail flickering among the foliage.

I can’t say I really enjoyed the hunt, but I surely enjoyed the fried squirrel later.

What I really looked forward to was earning fifty cents. In 1955, on Saturday afternoons, fifty cents would buy me a comic book, a sack of jaw breakers, a bag of popcorn and a ticket to the picture show.

The Saturday afternoon picture show was preceded by a fifteen minute news reel from around the world, a cartoon (sometimes two), the weekly edition of the currently running serial, and then the big movie.

Well, on this particular Saturday, after the hunt, Uncle John dropped me off and after spitting a long brown stream of tobacco juice on the ground, he told me he didn’t have any money today.

That’s why I’m fixing to tell Aunt Mary about Uncle John.