Only once did anyone top them, and that was a fluke. They probably forgot about that day after a full night's sleep in Frank's over-the-cab camper. More than three decades later, however, I still cherish the bragging rights I earned by returning to the clubhouse with my first limit of bushytails and a grin wider than the yellow gate leading to it.

Deer hunting was new to me, but I'd long been the terror of the squirrels living on the U.S. Steel property next to our house. I spent more time marking off the days leading to squirrel season than waiting for Christmas.

I hunted with a 16-gauge double-barreled shotgun in those days. I owned a .22, but I never understood the concept of sighting-in the scope on the little Marlin I'd received one year from Santa; if the gun was shooting low and to the right, I learned to aim high and to the left. I managed to take quite a few bushytails with the compensation method, but not nearly as many as I did with a scattergun.

The day I ventured into the bottomland we called the old Ganguet (pronounced gun-gate) place was perhaps the greatest single day of hunting I'd enjoyed prior to discovering South Africa in my 40s. And I wasn't even old enough to buy a license.

About the only things in my squirrel-hunting arsenal were patience and a keen sense of hearing. I found a likely spot, sat down on a fallen log beside a dry oxbow and in maybe three hours collected eight squirrels. My daddy heard all the shooting, but his jaw still dropped when I walked out of those woods with my pants pockets bulging, the animals carefully arranged so that all of the tails sprouted from the openings like flowers in a vase.

My friends, it doesn't get any better than that.

How I managed to grow into adulthood and lose my affection for squirrel hunting now perplexes me. But if one thing instilled in me a love of the outdoors, it was prowling the woodlots after school and on weekends, shooting squirrels and then frying them for supper. I also had a drawer full of squirrel tails, just in case I ever decided to answer an ad in the back of one of those national sporting magazines and mail them off to makers of crappie jigs.

Nowadays, sadly, far too many adults have forgotten the joys of hunting bushytails -- or, in this day and age, never learned them! Since the whitetail deer population explosion in Alabama, kids often skip the small-game phase and rush straight into deer hunting.

It's not too late, though. There are probably more squirrels in Alabama today than there have been at any point in history. And even if other members of your lease might frown upon small-game hunting -- out of fear that all the shooting will drive their beloved deer onto adjacent lands -- there are plenty of public places teeming with bushytails that are dying of old age.

Nearly all of the state's wildlife management areas, national wildlife refuges and national forests are perfect starting points. Some of the best are in Jackson County. Here you'll find Crow Creek, Raccoon Creek and Mud Creek WMAs, as well as the North Sauty Refuge. That's more than 25,000 acres available exclusively to small-game hunters and some waterfowlers. Other north Alabama tracts are the Swan Creek WMA in Limestone County and the Mallard-Fox Creek WMA in Lawrence and Morgan counties.

Central Alabama is loaded with opportunities, too. The ones most special to me are the Oakmulgee, West Jefferson and Mulberry Fork WMAs. And way down south are the sprawling W.L. Holland and Mobile-Tensaw Delta WMAs, which encompass nearly 60,000 acres of tidal marshland habitat.

The season is long, from Oct. 1 through Feb. 29.

RABBITS
I was too little to shoulder a shotgun back when my father was in the beagle trade. Besides, though we've never broached the topic in the many years since, I tend to believe that rabbit hunting was Daddy's personal escape from the wife and kids. I'm certainly not complaining, because he found innumerable other fun things for the two of us to do outdoors.