Sage of the squirrels

By NATE HUBBARD/Staff

“My earliest memory, I was probably about 3 years old. I was sitting at the table, on my mom’s lap, and my chin would come up just about to the tabletop. We were eating squirrel and she was cracking the squirrel skulls with the back of a spoon and feeding me the brains.”
Yes, some tots get Gerber.
This young’un slurped up rodent gray matter.
And today?
He hasn’t stopped chowing down yet.
“I still cook the heads and eat the brains,” said the now 46-year-old.
Still shoots the tree-hoppin’ rascals himself, too, as he’s done since age 8.
On the last day in September, among the hickories atop East River Mountain, he’s on the hunt again.
Not for deer, not for bear, not for turkey or any of those other more glamorous types of game.
For this Bland County resident, nothing beats bagging the main ingredient for his famous suppare sciurus carolinensis.
Or as he’s more apt to call it, his Brunswick gray squirrel stew.
“I love squirrel,” he said.
While many hunters today – especially adults – scoff at the virtues of a good squirrel hunt and meal, this middle-aged man still exudes an unsullied, kid-in-the-woods enchantment with stalking the bushy-tailed critters.
But this pursuer of the most primitive of practices – hunt, kill, eat – is far from a backwoods simpleton.
He’s Cecil Sink – The Sage of the Squirrels.
Keeping it Clean
“The way he put it to me was, he says, ‘You don’t want to leave your shells lying around and advertise to everybody where you’re getting your shots at squirrels’ – which is one way to look at it.”
That most basic mannerly adage your mother always told you – leave it better than you found it – is Sink’s maxim in the woods.
In Sink’s case, it was his grandfather, a conservationist and Sink’s squirrel hunting mentor, who taught him to respect nature.
Whether it’s scouring the leaf-strewn ground for dispensed shells or slipping a piece of stumbled-upon trash in the front pocket of his green flannel shirt, The Sage of the Squirrels is just as much The Housemaid of the Hinterlands.
“A lot of hunters,” he said, “don’t consider empty shells to be litter, but I kind of do. … You know it kind of is litter.”
Sink, though, isn’t merely a trash collector.
During that final-day-of-September hunt, he was a walking Britannica, pouring out knowledge of the forest and its inhabitants in his own entertaining, entrancing, storytelling style.
On deer activity just before mating season: “It’s kind of like cruising the drive-in when you’re a teenager,” he said. “Everybody’s checking things out, but nothing’s happening.”
On his trick (poking the animal in the eye) to ensure that it’s dead and not suffering with a wound: “If he blinks,” Sink said, “he needs some more attention” – although he added that he wouldn’t recommend using his tip if you’ve just shot a bear instead of a one-pound rodent.
Throughout the morning, Sink pointed out everything from bear claw scratches on a telephone pole and squirrel nut shavings on the ground to types of tree leaves and what bird was making that weird pecking noise (a flicker, for the record).
When he wasn’t tossing out facts, Sink was happy to offer his opinions on, well, pretty much whatever came up.
“I have theories on everything,” he said.
Relative to the forest, Sink said his overall mindset is that he’s a houseguest in the animals’ abode.
When asked if he was worried about hawks or other predators snagging two squirrels he had shot and left slung over a branch when he went to another part of the woods, Sink shrugged.
“If they need them that bad, they’re welcome to it,” he said. “I’m really out there taking their squirrels anyway. I’m shoplifting in their supermarket, you could say.”
On the Job
“I had this great sausage quiche recipe and I made a couple of sausage quiches and took them to work. Most everybody I worked with, most everybody knew that if they didn’t want to be eating game meat they better not eat anything I brought.
“But [one co-worker], I don’t know, he loved that quiche. He had two big chunks and then when someone said, ‘OK, Cecil what did you bring?’ I said, ‘Well, I brought the squirrel quiche.’ And [the co-worker] is a black man, and I swear he turned green. I felt so bad for him and I apologized … but I was always bringing squirrel and dumplings or squirrel quiche.”
While Sink had a quick response to how often he hunts – “every chance I get” – he’s not one who uses the woods to avoid work altogether.
For the past 21 years, he’s worked for the Virginia Department of Health as an environmental health specialist throughout the region – a job he said he loves for many of the same reasons he enjoys tracking squirrels.
“I’m not severe ADD, but I have a little bit of an attention deficit thing going on, although as I get older the hyperactivity is going away,” he said. “I get bored really easily and I don’t think I could survive being cooped up in an office all day.”
During his years at Ferrum College, from which he graduated in 1985 with a degree in environmental science, Sink similarly did all he could to make sure the outdoors were his classroom.
“[I took] all the ‘ologies,’” he said. “Anything that would get me out in the woods, in the creek, on the lake.”
Sink’s job now takes him all around Bland and Wythe counties, and he does everything from inspecting septic tanks to monitoring vendors at Wytheville’s Chautauqua Festival-in-the-Park for food safety.
The keen eye his day job requires also pays off in the forest.
Even when he’s engrossed in reciting one of his stories, Sink’s blue/gray eyes dart at the slightest movements as he keeps a vigilant watch on the happenings around him.
Seemingly out of the blue, Sink will break in mid-sentence to point out the most subtle shifts in the landscape. He’ll also often calm his hyperactivity long enough to silently gaze into the treetops for minutes at a time, taking in details in the manner of The Terminator scanning the terrain for adversaries.
“If you’re taking your kid, you have to teach them the discipline, but you also have to understand that they don’t have the attention span,” he said. “If you make it unpleasant, they’re not going to like it – we just got checked out by a crow to see who we are and what we’re doing.”
With a slight bulk to his belly and a beard where salt is starting to overshadow pepper, Sink at first glance doesn’t look like his legs can match the speed of his eyes.
But when he spots a squirrel, Sink is much more hare than tortoise.
With a lighting fast flick of his wrist, he flips his camo hat backward, raises his 12-gauge shotgun and …
Fires.
Student to Teacher
“I shot a squirrel one day on the other side of the river and it was cold, it was late season. There was ice frozen on the banks of the river, ice on top of the water, almost halfway across there was just a little channel in the middle. So here’s this dead squirrel lying on the other side of the river and there was no log lying across and it was probably almost a mile to the nearest bridge.
“And there’s my squirrel lying there. So January, I strip down to my underwear and wade icy water waist-deep to get a stupid little gray squirrel. It was the last time I shot one on the other side of the river, but I wasn’t about to leave it.”
Sink was raised in Franklin County on a farm on the banks of the Blackwater River.
And as his polar bearesque swim illustrates, Sink has never treated hunting merely as a how-many-heads-can-you-mount-on-the-wall competition.
“It’s not about how many lives you can snuff out in a day,” he said. “It’s about getting the exercise, being out kind of for a little while becoming part of nature again.”
The values his granddad taught him, Sink is now in turn passing along to his children, specifically his 13-year-old son, Nick, a seventh-grader at Narrows Elementary/Middle School.
Sink moved to Bland County in October 2007, after 18 years in Giles County. He shares custody of Nick with his ex-wife.
He said squirrel hunting is the perfect way to get kids off the Wii and into the woods.
“It’s not boring because you can move around quite a bit,” he said. “You’ve got small game animals – they’re small animals so you don’t have to shoot a 12-gauge shotgun to kill a squirrel. … It teaches you to aim at small targets.
“It also teaches you a little bit about what happens when you shoot an animal – something’s going to die.”
Nick was in school during the recent Wednesday morning hunt on the Bland County side of East River Mountain, but like his dad, eating is half the fun for him anyway.
Sink got three squirrels – enough for the self-admitted hefty eater and Nick to have their hunger rumblings satisfied.
“I can make a meal off of about one and a half squirrels,” he said. “My son and I, three squirrels will make us a good meal. He’s got a big appetite – he eats as much as I do. I think most people would be satisfied with one gray squirrel.”
Between hunting most every weekend and his full-time job, Sink doesn’t have much free time for additional pursuits.
He’s thought about teaching, though, and he said passing on his knowledge of hunting and the woods to youth beyond Nick may become his retirement pastime.
In a world before video games and the Internet, Sink said his time growing up was spent outside.
On his parents’ 98 Franklin County acres, Sink said he knew the location of every hickory.
“If you’re a teenager like I was, the first thing you learn is how to identify a hickory because that’s,” he said, “where the squirrels are.”
Prep Work
“We had just got settled into the dorm, you know our first year of school. I saw them going down the hall – they had been squirrel hunting. … They had killed a bunch of squirrels, had cleaned them in the dorm room and were carrying the heads and skins and everything. … And I noticed they had the skins with the heads still attached. So I asked, ‘Um, why are you throwing the heads away?’
“‘Well what do you do with them?’
“‘You eat ’em!’
“So anyway, I’m sitting there in the hall skinning off these squirrel heads.”
Ah yes, skinning.
Meat from the forest doesn’t come wrapped in cellophane on a bed of Styrofoam.
Sink said part of the bad rap game meat gets – it’s tough, it’s odorous, the critics say – often comes from poor preparation by the hunter/cook and not problems inherent to the flesh.
After bagging a third squirrel during the September outing, he returned to the other two he had left slung over a branch and gave a gutting and skinning demonstration.
Using his trusty sheepsfoot blade, Sink first makes a small cut on the squirrel’s back and then methodically gets to work.
“You just make an incision crosswise of the back and pull ’em off just like jeans and a T-shirt,” he said as he removed the fur.
Sink said he’ll often wait until he gets home to skin his squirrels as a bit of water and detergent helps wash away stray hairs, but he almost always guts in the field to get meat-spoiling stomach bacteria removed from the rest of the body.
And, no, the brain-eater doesn’t dine on the innards. Sink leaves the heart, liver and intestines behind.
“Nothing goes to waste,” he said as he buried the guts under the forest undergrowth. “The ants or other critters will finish them off.”
Sink works quickly, taking no more than five minutes to complete his task on each squirrel even as he pauses frequently to explain the process.
While he sports an earring and on occasion flipped open his cell phone to read a text message throughout the morning, there’s no glamour or technological doodads involved in turning a recently living creature into a slab of meat.
When he’s done, Sink casually wipes his knife blade on his green pants and uses leaves as makeshift paper towels to sop up at least the first layer of blood on his hands.
But for an old farm boy – even one who doubles as a health inspector – a little red tinge to the palms is no reason to bring out the hand sanitizer.
Straight-ish Shooter
“My granddad … he said he would really appreciate it if I would take his 20-gauge shotgun and get him a mess of squirrels for supper. Of course, I was all over that. … He was real big on the ‘one shot, one kill’ on the accuracy thing and he was always a dead shot. He used to give me a lot of grief about missing. He gave me six shells and he said, ‘I don’t really need but two or three squirrels, but get me as many as you can with these.’
“He would give me all kinds of grief for going squirrel hunting with more than six shells because he said with six shells you ought to have six squirrels and six squirrels is your limit. … It was just one of those evenings where every tree had a squirrel or two in it and I killed six squirrels with five shells. I brought him his six squirrels back and gave him the one shell and he accused me of having a shell in my pocket.
“… He never gave me a lot of grief about missing after that.”
Sink tells it like it is on a variety of topics – and that includes his own shooting skills.
“I’m not exactly strong with marksmanship this morning,” he said as he used four shells to take down the first two squirrels in one firing burst.
“If they’d only hold still …,” he added, trailing off into a laugh.
Later in the day, as the gray morning was on the cusp of becoming a slightly more pleasant early afternoon, Sink fired at a squirrel, but instead only buzzed a tree limb.
“I usually bring about a dozen [shells] – that allows me one miss per squirrel – but that ain’t cutting it today,” he said. “The ideal is you shoot once and the squirrel falls out.”
But while Sink may not be James Bond in camouflage garb, he’s not Elmer Fudd either.
On this day’s hunt, he suddenly pauses on a path and interrupts his latest story to take down his third squirrel from a good 50 yards away.
Part of Sink’s regular need for multiple shots also comes from his strong conviction that leaving an animal injured instead of dead should be avoided at all costs.
After shooting the first two squirrels down from high up in the treetops, he took one extra shot at the second critter after it fell to the ground to ensure that it wouldn’t disappear wounded into the woods.
“I didn’t like the way he came out of the tree,” he explained.
Sink’s weapon of choice for squirrel hunting is generally, as it was during the recent hunt, an old 12-guage shotgun, a black weapon with spots here and there where rust has taken over in the years since he got it from a friend in 1988.
“We’re used to each other,” he said as he slung the firearm and a soft-cover cooler over his shoulder and set off into the woods.
But more than any gun, Sink prefers a bow and arrow. He said, though, that it takes a William Tell to consistently kill squirrels with anything other than a firearm.
“I’ve probably shot at 100 or more squirrels with a bow and killed six,” he said.
While Sink most enjoys tracking the bushy-tailed rodents, he does also hunt everything from deer to wild boar.
He’s planning a trip to Maine this spring in the hopes of killing his first bear – something he vows to do only with a bow and arrow.
“If I kill a bear, I want to kill it with a bow,” he said.
Cerebral Custom
“She was just taken aback. She said, ‘Why would you hunt a squirrel?’ And I said well, you know, it would be the same reason you hunt any animal: it’s good to eat.
“‘You eat squirrels?’”
In the case of the surprised woman Sink once encountered at the Blacksburg Farmers Market, it’s a good thing he didn’t share more details about his squirrel feasts.
For as Sink first learned on the lap of his mother at the dinner table of his childhood Franklin County farm, it’s not just squirrel flanks that can make a scrumptious meal.
“I usually, when I boil the squirrels, I’ll pull the heads out and usually snack on the brains and the cheek meat and the tongue while I’m cooking the rest of it,” he said.
“Most people who grew up eating squirrels, most people my age or older who grew up, ate the brains. Most younger people, a lot of them have never even heard of it.”
In the late 1990s, the New York Times published an article highlighting a study done by Kentucky doctors that seemed to show a link between people eating squirrel brains and developing a brain disorder similar to mad cow disease.
Sink’s squirrel-fueled noggin appears to be functioning just fine still and he said he’s not fully convinced he needs to be concerned about his brains turning to mush.
“There’s some, I don’t know …,” he said. “There’s supposedly a tenuous statistical link between people who eat a lot of squirrel brains and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which is a prion-based [brain] disease. I don’t know.”
The Sage of the Squirrels has one last philosophical musing to offer.
“Everybody’s got to die of something I guess.”
Nate Hubbard can be reached at 1-800-655-1406 or nhubbard@wythenews.com.