Young hunter – part 5

Young hunter - part 1
Young hunter - part 2
Young hunter - part 3
Young hunter - part 4

by Tom Gaylord

The next morning, mother and I worked the screen in my room the way I had the day before. This time, though, the hornets were ready for us. Before I got off a second shot, they were on their way toward the window with murder in their hearts. Mother let them get on the screen, then squirted each one individually with kerosene. They were mad as hell, so they kept coming over until she had squirted several hundred at least. Some fell to the ground under the window, but we couldn't do anything about it as the rest of them were flying all around the yard and the outside of the house.

We spent the rest of that day inside the house, never trusting that it was safe to go out. We kept most of the windows closed, too. At three o'clock, mother phoned my father at his work and told him how it had gone. He decided to stay away until after sundown.

When he came home, he went up to my room to check on the nest and found it abandoned. The next morning before dawn, he and I went outside to see what had happened. The nest was indeed abandoned, but there were hornets walking all over the ground around our back door. They weren't dead, but they weren't flying, either. I was given the job of getting rid of them.

All that day, I sat on the roof of the porch and picked off walking hornets. I went through a lot of shot, and I must have killed several hundred by late afternoon. Then my mother went outside with her boots on and stomped all the rest of them. We picked up as many as we could find and filled a mason jar and part of a second one. Finally we had our back door again and life returned to normal.

That was when my mother took me downtown to have that picture made. She said I was her brave hunter and she wanted to remember that time forever. What neither of us counted on was that one of the dead hornets would end up in the picture, too. It's on the floor, just behind my left shoe, where it must have fallen off when I sat down.

From that day on, my mother never gave me any trouble hunting with my gun. She laid down the rules, and chipmunks were still off limits, but I was free to shoot any and all pests around our house.

About a week after the incident, one of our neighbors, the mother of one of my best friends, called on my mother to tell her they had a hornet's nest outside their house. She wondered whether I could come over and help them get rid of it. My mother told her to just buy her own boy a BB gun and things would take care of themselves. She said that every home needs a hunter, and the other woman should start training hers. I think that was the proudest moment of my young life, because my mother wasn't willing to hire out her young hunter—she needed me too much at home.

Young hunter – part 4

Young hunter - part 1
Young hunter - part 2
Young hunter - part 3


by Tom Gaylord

Then I got an idea. From my bedroom window, I had a perfect shot at the nest which was only fifteen feet away. In the morning, when the night air was still cold, the hornets were slow and sluggish enough to shoot. The problem was, I had to remove the window screen to shoot them, and if they saw me, they would be on me pretty quick. The element of danger was very real and also very exciting.

The first morning I got managed by holding the screen in by tying a string to it and holding the string against the wall with my shoulder while I cocked and shot the gun through an opening I'd made. With a mouthful of shot, I could spit a BB down the barrel and get off a quick shot. They were clustered around the bottom of the nest, but I couldn't see the opening from my window. So I waited until a hornet came walking around the bottom of the nest before I shot him.

They would open their wings for a few seconds before flying off, and that was when I had to do it. One by one I picked them off as they came around the bottom of the nest to get the sun on their wings. But I didn't hit them all. Some were missed then flew off to God knows where. I think they sounded the alarm to the rest of the nest because they started coming around the bottom in numbers too great for me to keep up, and I had the get the screen back into place real quick. I must say it took real courage to fasten those latches while a dozen angry hornets buzzed around the screen, looking for an opening. Fortunately, the screen fit the window tightly and there were no tears in the mesh.

Within less than a minute, there were about twenty angry hornets walking all over the screen, looking for ways to get in. Many others were hovering just outside, waiting for an opening and making a terrible racket. Although I was scared, I had at least learned how to attract them! Then my mother came in my room and screamed when she saw what was going on. I about jumped out of my skin, but the screen still held them off, so nothing else happened. Except she got an idea.

She figured that if I could attract them to my screen so easily, she could blast them with something that might kill them. She made me close my window that day while she thought about what to do. That evening, she and my father went over some ideas and finally came up with what they thought was a good one. They filled an old squirt gun they had with kerosene. Now many people alive today don't believe we had squirt guns before the turn of the century, but we did. They were cast iron gun frames with a rubber bulb in the grip. They worked quite well, although I must say that when Daisy came out with real metal squirt guns a few decades later, they were much better.
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Young hunter – part 3

Young hunter - part 1
Young hunter - part 2

by Tom Gaylord

The hornets had chosen to build their paper nest on the iron bar that extended off the pole carrying the phone wires, which meant that they now dominated our back door and the yard all around it. We couldn't use the door; we couldn't go into the garden; we couldn't even mow the back lawn close to the house for fear of being attacked.

Now some people who don't know better will tell you that a hornet is the same thing as a yellowjacket, and what's the big deal about them? You get stung by yellowjackets every summer and, although it is painful for a few minutes and itchy for a few days after, unless there are a lot of stings, it's not so bad. Well, hornets are nothing like that.

Yellowjackets are among the smallest of wasps. Most are no larger than a honeybee and many are much smaller. Although they are dangerous in large numbers, they will usually let you alone if you run away from them. Hornets won't. Hornets can grow to a length of more than two inches, which makes them among the largest of wasps, and they are aggressive to the point of being vengeful. They will get after a person or animal like Jipper and chase them for long distances, stinging all the way. They fly fast and they tend to do everything in bunches, rather than individuals. And their sting is one of the most painful you will ever get. All in all, they are very much insects to be avoided.

Father talked to some men at the hardware store about our problem and they told him to forget about it. Just leave the hornets alone and they would eventually die off when the cold weather came. That meant we couldn't go in our back yard near the house all that time. No more gardening, no more using the back door, which we all did. No nothing that had to do with the back of the house.

Father was unwilling to settle for that, but he wondered what else he could do. Nobody in town wanted to mess with a hornets' nest. One man suggested blasting it with a shotgun, but father thought that was too extreme for a house so close to the center of town. He might have been able to get the sheriff to let him do it, because everyone soon knew about our problem, but I don't think he wanted to raise such a ruckus so close too all our neighbors.

He tried feeding them poisoned meat, but the hornets wouldn't touch it. He was going to try a water hose until my mother talked him out of it. She reminded him of the saying, "Madder than a wet hornet". So there we sat, prisoners in our own home, able to come and go by the formal front entrance only and having to have our wits about us when we did even that! Our horses were spooked by the pests when father brought them out to harness them to the carriage, and life was generally miserable that summer.
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Young hunter – part 2

Young hunter - part 1

by Tom Gaylord

Then I got the idea of sitting on top of the back porch roof, where there was a good view of the whole garden. I was looking down into the rows of plants and the small critters were now quite visible to me. I shot loads of them after discovering that, and once my mother learned what I was doing, she not only gave me her blessing, she encouraged me! In fact, she would often bring me a glass of lemonade or a sandwich while I sat out there and watched.

Once I shot a chipmunk outside our coal cellar and started an argument between my parents. My father thought it was a good idea because he said they were digging holes around the foundation of the house, which they were. But my mother said they were so cute they shouldn't be killed. They didn't argue in front of me, of course, but I could hear them when I went to bed, because my room was right above the kitchen where they talked. The outcome of that argument was what triggered my most famous stunt as a BB gunner.

My mother was against my shooting anything that she didn't consider a pest. I told her I figured that gave me an open license to blast my older sister, but she wasn't amused. She said that in the future I would have to clear all game with her.

For several days, I didn't hunt anything at all. The mice and moles were almost gone from the kitchen garden and there was nothing else I was allowed to hunt, so for what seemed like several weeks but was probably only a few days, I was reduced to shooting at clothespins and marbles. After a stint as a hunter of live game, these were poor substitutes. Then one day, everything changed.

My dog, Jipper, was stung by hornets while he was romping in the back yard. He came tearing around to the front of the house and finding no way inside, went off down the street at a fantastic clip. My mother and I both heard him, but he was moving so fast and howling so loud we were temporarily confused as to what to do. Then my mother heard the noise through the kitchen window. It was a loud humming coming from above the window, so she called me and we went up to my room together. There we saw it—a colony of hornets was building a nest on the tall pole that suspended our telephone wires outside the house.

Although our house was not yet electrified, my dad was one of the first people in town to have a telephone installed. It was on the wall in our parlor, and the wires came in from the street through the back yard. There were only 23 other families in town who had phones at that time, but businesses had them and dad wanted to stay in touch. The telephone exchange was only a block from our house, so the connection wasn't hard to make.
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