A Squirrel's Tale

What could possibly go wrong with three armed 12-year-olds and gravity?

I don’t think we would have gotten into trouble if Grandpap hadn’t thoughtlessly left an old worn-out truck tire at the top of the hill. A nice round tire off the wheel is the siren call of trouble for anyone under the age of thirteen.

We were twelve.

Cousin, Delbert P. Axelrod (An Alternate Life Form), and I were hunting squirrels with the Old Man that cool October morning in 1967. For some reason, instead of helping Grandpap change the tire on his ’57 Chevrolet pickup, Dad thought it was a good idea that year to take three pre-teens at the same time on their first real squirrel hunt.

Walking toward the river bottoms through the pasture, we passed Grandpap and Uncle Lee beside the barn at the top of the hill, grunting and wrestling the tire off the wheel in the shade of a wide red oak.

Dad waved and spoke for a moment, but none of us boys made eye contact, afraid they’d ask us to stop and help. We had guns, and were intent on hunting, instead of hustling tools for a bunch of old men over fifty.

After hiking through the woods for what seemed like an hour, we finally found a place that suited the Old Man, and he assigned us to individual trees, making sure that everyone faced a different direction. “Shoot up, not down, or level. Now, settle in and watch this old trail. I heard when I was a kid that Davy Crockett might have ridden right through here after he got to Texas.”

I glanced around. “I thought he went down to the Alamo.”

“That was later, but he spent some time exploring this area, looking for land. He wrote a letter back to his family and told them he was thinking about settling a couple of miles west of here around Garrett’s Bluff, or back about thirty miles, close to where he crossed the Red River.”

Then, he settled himself inside the semi-circle, so he could watch us shoot squirrels. “Now, you boys get quiet.”

We sat still as posts, a skill already carefully honed by wishing ourselves invisible in math class five days a week for the past month—two years after arithmetic had been abandoned and we were afflicted with New Math, which tried to destroy our developing brains.

Each time Miss Exum looked around the classroom in search of the correct New Math answer she’d chalked on the blackboard, the three of us sat perfectly still to avoid being called upon. We became one with the scarred, wooden desks. In fact, at the end of that year when we rose to leave on the last day of school, Miss Exum was shocked to see that the desks were actually occupied.

This camouflage worked just as well in the woods. Squirrels scampering in the trees high overhead just thought we were three scarred school desks. The single cracks from our rifles that echoed through the woods were the only thing that broke the stillness.

The Old Man called an end to the ambush around noon. We counted eighteen bushytails in the bag, and he pronounced the day a success.

“Now, c’mon boys. I want to get these critters cleaned before dinnertime and y’all might as well learn how.”

Dang it. We were going to learn something anyway.

On the Old Man’s orders, we shucked the rounds from our guns, handed the ammunition over to disappear into his pockets, and gathered our game. The walk through the woods itself was quiet, most likely because the three of us were mulling over the New Math in our heads—sets, unions, tangents, square matrix, radius, quadrant, hypotenuse of the triangle, algorithms, slope—slope, which brought us to the problem at hand.

After about thirty or forty miles of hard marching, we lagged behind the Old Man, who preferred to walk slightly under the speed required to qualify for the Indianapolis 500.

“Hurry up,” he said over his shoulder, never breaking stride.

“But we’re tired,” I answered. Tongues hanging out like hound dogs, Cousin and Delbert were reluctant to speak.

“I’ll go on ahead to get everything ready. You boys don’t take too long, those squirrels won’t keep if it starts to warm up.”

In minutes, he was gone and we struggled along, burdened by guns, squirrels, and brains heavy and full of New Math. At the top of the long hill overlooking Grandpap’s house, we stumbled across the tire he’d carelessly leaned against the tree. It looked innocent enough sitting in the shade.

We stopped and stared.

It beckoned. “Hey, we need to do something with this,” Cousin announced.

I had an idea. “Delbert, you get in, and we’ll roll you down the hill.”

“Are you sure? This doesn’t sound like a good idea to me.”

Holding the tire upright, I rocked it back and forth and caught Cousin’s eye. “I did this once. Remember?”

Cousin’s gaze cut to the tire and back to my face. “I want to do it.”

“Hey!” Delbert frowned. “He said I could go first!”

“Don’t roll me fast.”

Cousin and I were shocked at his agreement.

“Fine then,” Cousin answered.

Delbert leaned his rifle against the tree. “You’ll have to carry this for me.”

We held the tire and being the smallest, Delbert folded himself inside in the appropriate position.

Annoyed that I was going to have to carry his rifle in addition to my own, I needed to lighten my load. “Here.” I leaned over and stuffed my game bag into Delbert’s curled form. “Hold these for me.”

“Me too,” Cousin said, adding the contents of his own game bag.

“Ready?” I asked, and without waiting for an answer, we gave the tire a push.

The first rotation was glacial.

“This is fun!”

His initial squeal of joy shut off as gravity quickly took over. Horrified at the immediate results, we watched the tire gain speed until it rolled so fast downhill the entire thing was a cylindrical blur.

“Eeeeaaaahhhhuuuurrrrpppp!!!” Delbert and his rolling tire shot down the hill, took several impressive bounces over dried cow pies, and plunged through the five-strand barbed wire fence beside the house.  Grandpap was coming up the red rock drive in his truck. His eyes widened and to get away from the runaway tire, he turned hard and slud to a stop, throwing a spray of gravel a hundred feet behind him.

We pronounce slud for slid in rural northeast Texas.

Delbert missed the front bumper by mere inches and crossed the yard in a whirring hiss, slamming into the front porch just as the Old Man stepped back outside through the screen door. The tire hit so hard that Delbert and eighteen squirrels exploded out of both sides as though someone had tossed a grenade in the front yard.

He lay on the ground, retching, amid the squirrel carcasses. I did similar actions a few years later in college, without the squirrels, only it wasn’t the result of tires or gravity.

While Cousin and I slowly moseyed down to the house, trying to act as if we weren’t a part of the event, Delbert tried to stand. He staggered one way, then the other, before falling again.

“Hypotenuse of the triangle,” Cousin said, punching my shoulder in joy.

“Nope, square matrix,” I responded, and New Math finally dawned on us.

Reavis Z. Wortham is the New York Times bestselling author of the critically acclaimed Red River historical mystery series and the high-octane Sonny Hawke contemporary western thrillers. A retired educator, Wortham now writes full time, with The Rock Hole named a Top 12 Mystery of 2011 by Kirkus Reviews and Dark Places listed among True West Magazine’s Top 12 Modern Westerns. His novel Unraveled was praised by The Providence Journal as “Longmire on steroids.” In 2023, Wortham’s The Texas Job won the Will Rogers Medallion Award Gold Medal for in the Western Modern Fiction category. Reavis lives with his wife in Texas.