by Bill Heavey
That day, as I watched this squirrel take its time selecting which tomatoes to ruin, something finally snapped in me. The bow I hunted deer with hangs from a hook in my office. Archery skill has a short shelf life and requires constant practice. Shooting a bow is also fun. With the opening of deer season just three months away, I was shooting daily. Before I knew it, I had quietly opened the window and was reaching for the bow. I removed an arrow from the bow’s detachable quiver, unscrewed the field point (a conical 100-grain tip, designed to be shot into a foam target) and replaced it with a judo tip, designed to be shot at small game. A judo tip has four tiny spring-loaded wire arms emanating from the center like a lethal flower.
Thanks to my Bushnell rangefinder I knew that the squirrel presently sampling, systematically but leisurely, each and every one of my remaining tomatoes, was exactly eighteen yards away. (Lest my owning a range finder strike you as bizarre, you should know that virtually all bowhunters own and depend on these devices. An arrow drops, for example, six inches between twenty yards and thirty yards, the difference between a hit and a miss.) I watched as the squirrel hopped its strangely vertical hop to the next plant and began sniffing its fruit.
I returned to my desk chair, turning sideways, squaring my body for the shot. The compound bow that many modern hunters use incorporates the first significant design change in this prehistoric weapon in thousands of years—a levering system of cam-shaped wheels and pulleys to bend the limbs, creating significantly more power and arrow speed than a traditional longbow. With longbows, the farther the string is pulled back the greater the force required (the draw weight). Because it’s difficult to hold a bow at its full draw weight, most longbow archers are taught to shoot the instant the string touches their nose. A compound, by dint of its design, can be held at full draw reasonably comfortably for half a minute or so if need be.
I drew and did precisely this, waiting until the squirrel was standing upright and facing me as it chewed. I aimed for the middle of its tiny chest. And then I released my arrow. Eighteen yards away, there was a momentary bicycling of squirrel legs followed by absolute stillness. My heart raced and a rush of conflicting emotions flooded my system: exhilaration and shame, wonder and horror, pride and disgrace. I was astounded at the depth of my reaction. I have killed any number of whitetail deer with less emotional upheaval. I put the bow away, paused long enough at the porch door to make sure no one was around—unlikely at 12:30 on a weekday—and went out to verify my kill.
But there was no squirrel lying where I had shot. Looking around, I saw the shaft waggling to and fro from inside one of the tomato cages. It had evidently struck low, hitting the squirrel in the thigh. Wounded but very much alive, it had moved to the relative safety of the cage. I moved to grab the arrow shaft, at which point the squirrel unleashed a series of unearthly screams and began thrashing, the arrow’s neon-lime-colored vanes waving like a distress flag. This was shocking. The squirrel sounded something like a bawling house cat—equal parts agony and fury—and was most startlingly alive. I staggered backward, shocked. Jesus! I’d never have believed a squirrel capable of this much emotional range, not to mention volume. I had to kill this thing quick, before it roused a neighbor. It wouldn’t be the easiest thing to explain, especially after my profane pep talk to the carrot seeds. I ran to the shed and grabbed the likeliest garden implement for the job, a hoe. I returned intent on lifting the cage with my left hand while bringing the hoe blade down on the squirrel with my right. But at my first touch of the cage, the squirrel made a break for it. The animal had lost the use of the impaled leg, but was still moving with impressive speed for a rodent with a thirty-inch arrow in it. I was sure it couldn’t get through the chain-link fence with the arrow and ran to intercept it there, planning to hoe it to death. By sheer luck or some miracle of squirrel reasoning, once the rodent passed through the fence, it twisted its leg in such a way that the arrow also passed through without hindrance. It couldn’t have done this any better than if it had spent its life practicing the move. My appreciation for the squirrel’s gymnastic abilities was, however, tempered by a horrifying realization, The goddamned squirrel is now in my neighbor’s yard! Once through the fence, it headed straight to a thick bed of English ivy. Had the arrow dislodged, I could have called it quits, trusting a hawk or one of the neighborhood foxes to finish off the squirrel. As it was, the lime-green flag was still waving, semaphoring my demented cruelty. There was only one thing to do. Hoe in hand, I vaulted the fence, fully adrenalized and determined to do the damn thing in at last. I slashed at where I thought the squirrel was but somehow missed it amid the exceptionally dense ivy. In response it unleashed another torrent of squirrel profanities, stunning in variety and operatic in scope. It was all there—fear, suffering and, most of all, an unmistakable threat to exact revenge. Impressed as I was at discovering the squirrel’s emotional range, I was still bent on killing it. I brought the hoe down again and again, but either each stroke missed or the ivy was so thick it dissipated the force of the blow. This was hand-to-hand combat. And the squirrel did not seem to care in the least that I was 170 times its size.
I slashed again, this time breaking the carbon-fiber arrow, but not completely. The two parts were still connected by a few strands of the material. It was at this moment that the list of laws I was breaking ran through my head: discharging a firearm inside a township (a bow is considered a firearm in most locales), hunting in a nonhunting area, hunting out of season, and God only knows what else. Criminal trespass was a possibility, given laws I’d heard of that granted certain rights to animals. Animal cruelty was probably in there somewhere. There was no way any authority would view me as a farmer protecting his crop. My vegetables—the tomatoes, corn, basil, carrots, and others I’d planted—had become dear to me over the time I’d nurtured (and, yes, on occasion threatened) them. But in the eyes of the law, I was a criminal. And as long as that squirrel had my arrow lodged in its leg, the little fucker might just as well have been wearing a wire. I was starting to panic. The neighbors in whose backyard all this was taking place were an older couple who rarely came out. But eventually even they would have to hear the squirrel shrieking—it was unbelievably loud—and emerge to investigate. There was a moment when the enraged squirrel’s invective became so forceful that I was actually afraid that the tables had turned and it was coming after me. I raised the hoe high over my head now and brought it down as hard as I could, over and over, desperation fueling each swing.
Suddenly, the squirrel—arrow still attached—scampered out of the ivy bed and into the azaleas growing right next to my neighbors’ house. I was trying to invent a plausible reason as to why I was hacking their azaleas to bits when I heard a car door slam. It was Jane’s car. Jane was out front. I’d forgotten that it was Wednesday, early-release day at Emma’s school, and my turn to have her for the afternoon. I jumped the fence back into my yard, threw the hoe in the general direction of the garden, and made for the front yard to head them off before they came upon the scene. I must have still been in fight-or-flight mode because Emma—after happily shouting “Daddy!”—took a look at my face and said, “Is everything okay?”
Of course it is, I told her. Everything’s fine! Fortunately, Jane was late for something and was waving good-bye as she pulled away. Emma busied herself climbing to her accustomed perch in the diseased dogwood tree. I sat on the steps and tried to calm down and take stock of the situation. The only thing I knew for sure is that nobody hearing or seeing what had just taken place would entrust me with the welfare of a child. I found myself praying that the squirrel would die quickly and in a place where I could find him before anyone else did.
This, of course, was not to be. Later in the afternoon, while Emma was watching Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron for the eight-thousandth time, I hopped the fence again, hoping to find the dead squirrel and my broken arrow. Nothing. Now I began to pray that the wretched thing would die where nobody would fi
nd it.
Two days later, Dave, my across-the-street neighbor, came over. “You lose an arrow?” he asked. As a matter of fact, I said, I had. “The reason I ask is I found a squirrel dead in my chain-link fence along the alley.” He told me he had found it yesterday morning. “It had part of some kind of arrow in it, kinda creepy, you know?” I nodded in the most noncommittal way possible and waited. “So I called the cops. I thought maybe some whack job had a crossbow or something and was going around killing squirrels.” I nodded again, as if I understood perfectly and was not, in fact, wondering what sort of defense I might attempt at my trial. I ask what happened. “Well, they didn’t send out a cop, just an Animal Control officer.” He sounded disappointed, as if he’d been hoping for an Arlington CSI team. This person, Dave said, had examined the arrow fragment (the arrow had apparently finally broken completely, thank God, which made identifying the kind of bow it had come from more difficult) and the squirrel, which had died while stuck in the chain-link fence. I asked what the Animal Control officer had deduced from his examination. “Well, he said it had obviously been shot at point-blank range with a crossbow and died immediately.” Dave said that they were going to do an investigation. My face must have betrayed me. A look of comprehension suddenly creased Dave’s brow. “Hey, I didn’t know it was you!” he protested. I nodded as if this were understandable. I was done talking to Dave.
It was at this moment that I decided to abandon any further attempts at squirrel control. If the squirrels wanted my tomatoes, they could have them. I turned and walked up my front steps. “I really didn’t know it was you,” Dave called after me. “You never know what kind of whacko could be running around!”
RAW RIPE CHEROKEE PURPLE TOMATO
Plant some Cherokee purple tomato seeds, now available from Burpees. This is an extremely ugly tomato that is thought to have been given to settlers by the Cherokee people in Tennessee. It has a deep purplish red color, with green or greenish black shoulders. But the meat inside is dense, sweet, and smoky-tasting. Eighty to eighty-five days later, go out into your garden and sniff the tomatoes. When you find a tomato that gives off a vegetal funk unlike anything you have ever smelled in a grocery store, that’s the tomato you want. Pick it, rubbing it gently against your pants leg to get the dust off. Eat it as you would an apple, slurping up the juice before it leaves your hand. This is as close to heaven as many people will ever get, in this life or the next.
Chapter Four:
Of Cattail Disasters and
the Blue Goose Incident
After Paula had shown me the watercress patch that day, something in me had shifted. I’d begun paying more attention to plants on our outings. And now that I had embarked on gardening and recreational squirrel homicide, the idea of learning more about foraging seemed especially attractive—if only because the penalties for killing plants were comparatively lenient. As with so many of the new skills I took up, I completely misjudged the level of knowledge needed. I knew that certain plants were edible, even tasty, and that others could lay you out like one of the perch I had recently killed. How much more could there be to know? A lot, as it turned out. Reams. Most of which was insanely confusing.
I had known Paula for several years before I realized how much of their own food she and Gordon got themselves. “You should see our grocery bill sometime, honey,” Paula once bragged. “Sugar, coffee, cooking oil, bread, milk, that’s about it.”
Gordon had grown up here, and told tales about how, as a boy, he had carried a disassembled shotgun aboard the local bus in a paper bag to hunt squirrels and rabbits inside the Beltway. “Hell, there were places you could sight in a deer rifle inside the Beltway then,” he once told me. If you tried that today, you’d have a Homeland Security SWAT team jumping out of a helicopter before you got your third round off.
Paula had her own tales of adventure regarding hunting and D.C. public transit. When parts of “her” territory were overrun with Canada geese a few years ago, she would occasionally grab one, wring its neck, stuff it into her backpack, and take it home on the bus. “You gotta be fast and know what you’re doing with Canadas, though,” she said. “They can hurt you.” One day, she said, she had taken a big, fat goose on the Mall, wrung its neck, and was headed home on the bus. “But about the time we got to Georgetown, I hear this sound coming from my pack. The goose ain’t dead. It’s coming back to life. It’s going aw-uk, aw-uk. And people are trying to figure out what this sound is and where it’s coming from.”
“Are you serious? What’d you do?”
“I didn’t know what the hell to do. And people are starting to look at me, ’cause they’re starting to realize where the sound’s coming from. So I did my crazy-lady act just to buy some time.”
“Your crazy-lady act?”
“Yeah, you know.” She demonstrated. Her eyes suddenly got wide and moony. Her neck went limp. She swung her head to and fro, moaning a sort of unhinged stream-of-consciousness about buses and birds and someone called the Gravy Man chasing her. It was so good it freaked me out, despite having known her for more than a decade.
“Well, it only works for a little while. I got off the bus, but I was right in the busiest part of Georgetown. So I walked around a little, found an alley, waited till no one could see me, and finished choking that goose. Then I got on the next bus and came home. Me and Gordon ate that bird for a week.”
In addition to wild game, however it was gotten, I knew that Paula also harvested mushrooms and wild greens when she happened across them. These were generally eaten fresh. When fruits and nuts came in season she put in a lot of time gathering them in quantity and preserving them for use throughout the year. Paula had an inventory of trees and bushes she had discovered during years of tramping all over the metropolitan area. Some were in parks and in other public places but many were on private property. If people were either unaware of the peach or apple tree in their own yard or too lazy to make use of it, Paula considered it fair game. I knew this from having trespassed extensively with her. We once drove to a house and used a ladder to hit the pear tree in the front yard. On a busy street. In broad daylight. Amazingly, no one said a word to us. Brazenness often carries the day.
In addition to apples, peaches, and pears, Paula had places where she got sweet and sour cherries, figs, and persimmons. She picked serviceberries (a native, something like a blueberry, that grows on small shrublike trees from Canada to Alabama); blackberries; and wineberries, introduced raspberries that often grow more profusely than native ones along highways and waterways. She gathered large quantities of black walnuts. The trees are common, but the quality of the nuts varies widely, even on adjacent trees of similar size. Paula is picky about her walnut trees.
Walnuts were a lot of work just to hull and dry, a messy job in itself. You waited until the outer hull had gone from hard and green to soft and brown. Then you put on boots or heavy shoes and rolled the hulls under your feet on the street, at which point you had the wet nut itself. If you handled the hulls or nuts at this stage, you acquired a brown stain on your hands that lasted for weeks. Then you had to dry the nuts, putting them in a box or basket and rolling them around every few days to make sure they dried evenly. It could take weeks to dry a big batch to the point where they were ready to crack. Cracking and picking were the real work. Walnuts are amazingly hard and are cracked by being struck with a hammer. I learned the hard way to wear safety glasses to protect my eyes from walnut shrapnel. Most time-consuming of all was picking out the meat, as the nuts have many interior chambers. Armed with a pick the size of a dental tool, I coaxed forth tiny bits of meat, along with tooth-cracking bits of shell that invariably adhered to them. (I made my own pick by hammering a four-inch nail lengthwise through a two-inch section of broom handle and then using a grinding wheel to form the tip into a spatulate shape. This was another of the few times I’ve managed to impress Paula. She said nothing but awarded the tool a rai
sed forehead and an appreciative grunt.) It could take me fifteen minutes to get a tablespoon of walnut meat, which was a little crazy when you could buy shelled black walnuts at Costco for ten bucks a pound. Paula insisted that wild black walnuts tasted better, mostly, I thought, to justify the time she spent on them. She would even process hickory nuts, which yield so little meat for the effort that they make cracking and picking black walnuts look like a good use of your time. I know of no other human being who shells hickory nuts, although somebody must, since you can buy shelled commercially grown hickory nuts online for twenty-four dollars a pound, plus shipping.
Paula’s knowledge of wild edible plants was wide but, like the woman herself, anything but systematic. She had learned on the fly, and she limited her foraging to the specific things that interested her. For me, foraging had quickly become the most daunting aspect of getting my own food. The body of knowledge about wild plants was endless. Worse, more so than in any other of my attempts at food-gathering, it required quite a bit of education before you could safely eat anything. A child could catch and eat a fish the very first time he put a worm on a hook. That same child could shoot and eat a rabbit, a squirrel, or even a deer the first day he went hunting. A child could also pick and eat a wild plant the same day he or she opened a copy of Peterson’s Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants—but that child might not survive the night. Most books advised the novice to forgo eating any wild edibles for the first year unless an experienced forager had confirmed the plant in question. My problem was that the only experienced forager of my acquaintance, when asked to confirm a new plant, often responded with an irritated, “How the fuck should I know?” So I kept reading, trying to identify any single plant in multiple field guides before ingesting any of it.