Outdoors with Mike Marsh

By Mike Marsh
Published in Sports on October 19, 2015 1:49 PM

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My friend and hunting partner, Bruce Trujillo, wanted to take advantage of the opening day of squirrel season last Monday. We decided to try to get in a hunt for fox squirrels before the regular firearms season deer open this past Saturday.

We headed for Bladen Lakes Game Land, which is a three-day per week hunting area open on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays for big and small game. The muzzle loader deer season was open, but I had seen few hunters participating in the season during my trips to the game land so far this year. I hunted deer with a muzzle loader that morning, but saw only two gray squirrels and no deer.

Bruce had an early appointment that kept him from meeting me near White Lake until 9:30 a.m. I had seen two other pickups in the woods and, by the sounds I heard from the hunters and their dogs, it was obvious they had the same idea. I had heard one shot from a rimfire rifle and dogs barking up a tree three times.

It looked like it was going to be a good day for treeing squirrels. We would surely bag our limit of one fox squirrel each and have the rest of the day to hunt gray squirrels, which have a bag limit of eight.

Bruce's dog, Poncho, is a Parnell's Carolina Cur, a breed known for treeing and baying just about any critter in the woods. But Bruce had been training him specifically for treeing squirrels for the three years he has owned the dog.

Turning him out of the kennel, we walked to a large stand of longleaf pine trees with a turkey oak understory, which is perfect fox squirrel habitat. It wasn't long before Poncho was barking up a tree, but he had followed the squirrel's scent into a bottomland thicket. It took us 15 minutes to get to the tree, but we could not see a squirrel.

"It is probably a gray squirrel and he went into a hollow," Bruce said. "I hate to pull him away from it, but we need to move on."

So it went, repeatedly and often.

Poncho would strike scent out in the open longleaf savannahs and trail the squirrels into some of the thickest cover on Earth. We shoved, kicked and Bruce said we even swam through the bay bushes, greenbrier vines and Devil's Club.

The only reason we did not fall is that the vegetation was too thick to allow us to hit the ground. Even the ground was seldom solid, but organic peat that had built up over centuries. No fire had ever touched some of the places we were going, attempting to find a squirrel Poncho had treed.

We broke for lunch without having fired a shot or seen a gray or fox squirrel. Then we headed into the longleaf forests again, hoping to stay far enough away from the bays that Poncho would tree only fox squirrels.

However, it appeared that the gray squirrels had been out all morning and their scent was still warm enough to keep Poncho returning to the bottoms, trailing some of them several hundred yards before barking up a tree.

By late afternoon, Bruce and I were very tired. He wanted to head back to the pickups for some water, but I had a part of a bottle remaining and shared it with him.

"This is harder on a body than a mountain grouse hunt," he said. "I don't think many 62-year-olds would have lasted this long."

Nevertheless, we decided to keep hunting in a loop that would bring us back to the pickups just before dark. Poncho was even showing the effects of an all-day hunt. His pace had slowed, but soon, he was barking up another tree. This one was also in a bay, but near the edge of a pine ridge.

I saw the squirrel scamper up a gum tree. Bruce shot at it with his shotgun, but missed. For several minutes, we tried to spot the squirrel, until I picked it out, flattened against the trunk thanks to my binoculars. A single shot from a scoped .22 rifle and the squirrel fell into the briers and vines.

Poncho brought the squirrel to his master.

"For what was supposed to be an easy hunt, this one was quite a chore," Bruce said. "I hope we used up our bad luck today, so the rest of the season can only get better."

To contact Mike Marsh or order his books, visit www.mikemarshoutdoors.com for credit card orders.