Grey Diggers and Crawdads

In an earlier post I told you that my Uncle Bob had a filbert orchard. Along one side of the orchard was a stand of Douglas fir trees. As the filberts began to ripen all of the trees next to the Douglas fir stand were being stripped of nuts. It was ground squirrels, grey diggers my grandfather called them, crossing over the line to raid the nuts.

Uncle Bob had an old .22 rifle. That rifle must have been fired over a million times. There was almost no rifling left. However it was just fine for shooting grey diggers. On several occasions I sat, watching the no-man’s land between the forest and the orchard. I shot a number of raiding grey diggers. When I tired of the sport I hung a dead squirrel on the barbed-wire fence.

After a few days I wrapped a burlap sack around an old barrel hoop to form a net. I tied the dead squirrel to the center of the net. By now the dead squirrel was very “ripe”. Cousin Suzie, my brother, and I took this assembly to the next door neighbor’s crawdad pond where we lowered the baited net into the water.

A few minutes later we retrieved the net and collected some large crawdads that had come to feast. Within an hour or so we would have a sizable collection of crawdads.

Sometimes, but not always, we filled a large, copper washtub with water and put it on Aunt Alta’s wood-burning kitchen stove to heat. When the water was boiling we tossed in the crawdads after rinsing them off with fresh water. When the crawdads were nice and pink we proceeded to eat them.

Usually, however, we would feed the crawdads to the hogs. The hogs seemed to relish crawdads, shells and all.