It is amazing how much worse extremely cold weather affects us as we get older. Now all I want to do is sit by the fire when it is freezing outside. I still make myself get out and do things, even going fishing on the worst days, but when I was a kid I loved the cold.

Squirrel hunting is so much better after all the leaves fall and the food for tree rats gets scarce. They have to move a lot more to find buried acorns and other things for lunch, and they are much easier to see in the trees.

When an oak is loaded with leaves a squirrel can go high and sit still and you will never see him. But with bare limbs you can approach the tree, throw a stick to the other side to fool him, and he will edge over to your side, offering an easy shot. And you can see them moving in bare limbs for a hundred yards where earlier you had to get within feet of them to spot them.

A couple of trips stick in my mind. Hal and I were easing through the dead leaves, making as little sound as we could, when we spotted a big black ball up in a oak tree. We had never seen anything like it. We could tell it was furry but it didn’t look like anything we had ever seen.

Hal and I both took aim with our .410 shotguns and fired on the count of three. The critter fell to the ground and, when we got to it, it looked like a squirrel. But it was a whole lot bigger than any squirrel we had ever seen. That was the first time I ever saw a fox squirrel.

Another time Harold and I were squirrel hunting and we saw something big and brown in a tree. It didn’t move. We could tell it was a bird but had no idea what kind. We started to raise our guns and Harold said something. I thought he said for me to shoot but later after fussing at me he said both of us shoot at the same time.

Anyway, I killed a great horned owl. They were not protected way back then, but we really didn’t know what kind of bird we were shooting, anyway. I kept that owl carcass around for months admiring it. I have no idea what it was doing on a low limb in the middle of the day and I have never shot another one.

We would have never have seen the owl or fox squirrel if the trees had been covered with leaves.

There is nothing quite as comforting as building a fire outside on a cold hunting trip and warming for a few minutes. I always wanted to be a pioneer and build fires by rubbing two sticks together or striking a spark with flint. But I never left home without some strike-anywhere matches.

One favorite place to build a fire was in our rock fort. In the edge of one of our fields there was a big rock pile about 50 feet long and 30 feet wide sitting 50 yards from the edge of the woods. There were huge rocks half buried in the ground and smaller rocks were everywhere. Over the years farmers had moved rocks from the field to that spot.

We build a circle rock fort about eight feet across and four feet high. Get down in the middle of it and you were out of the wind and well hidden. We had secret crannies in the rocks to store stuff and had built a simple fireplace. It even had what looked like a chimney but was so full of gaps between the rocks it was for looks only. Smoke came out everywhere.

We would sneak some eggs from the hen house, shoot a couple of birds and head to the fort for a feast. We kept an old tin can in it and would go to the nearby branch for water. It sat on flat rock on the edge of the fireplace and we could boil eggs in it in about thirty minutes.

Birds were plucked and gutted and put on a spit of green branches across the front of the fire. Slowly roasting a robin until it was golden brown gave off a delicious smell and it tasted good, but was so tough it was like trying to eat a good a smelling and good tasting inner tube.

Every winter we hoped for extreme cold. There was on big pool on Dearing Branch. Now by big I mean about ten feet long and eight feet wide. But when it got cold enough it froze over and we cold go ice skating on it. Ice slipping, really, in our boots. One time Joe, a little bigger than the rest of us, broke through and was thigh deep in freezing water immediately. We got mad at him for messing up our skating that day.

Our parents would not have been happy if they knew what we were doing and the possibility of getting wet, but in retrospect they probably did know. But since the branch was waist deep at its deepest, even on us boys, we were not in danger. And we always had our matches, heads dipped in wax to keep the dry, to start a fire and warm up!

Enjoy the cold weather like you are still a kid, if you can stand it!