On one very cold and windy Saturday afternoon while visiting my in-laws waaaay back in the days of my misspent youth, my B-I-L and I decided we'd take my father in law's lemon pointers out for a bird hunt. It was not a fit day to chase quail at all, as the wind was blowing so hard it'd blow the shot pattern back in your fact if you shot straight into a gust; but we were young and we were bored, so off we went. Several hours later, after finding not a single covey and being numbed with cold to the point we took shelter from the wind in a deep hardwood hollow; me on one side of the little creek, and he on the other. As we eased up the hollow, I just happened to notice something odd in a dead hollow tree by the creek; and looking harder, determined I was seeing a squirrel tail thru one of holes in the tree trunk. So I sez "Hey Dewey, I believe there's a squirrel in that hollow tree there; you're on that side of the creek, check it out". So Brother Dewey walks over to the dead tree (it was kinda spindly), and gives it a good kick with his No. 13 boot. Instantly a big old boar squirrel jumps out of the top of that hollow tree and hits the ground in high gear. My B-I-L, having been gifted with cat-like reflexes, is on him in a split second and connects with a load of No. 8's from his 16-bore A5 Browning; but unfortunately he'd hit the squirrel mostly in the rear end, so that about all he'd done was slow the squirrel down just a bit and piss it off big time! Well it seems one of those big lemon pointers just had to join in the fun and was on that squirrel in a flash; grabbing it by the hind quarters and shaking the little beast. From my side of the creek it looked like a tremendous miss-match, that big ole pointer against a two pound squirrel; but that squirrel somehow twisted around and grabbed the big black nose on that ole pointer and went postal, you'd have thought he was working on a big hickory nut! This action seemed to paralyze the dog, as it sat down on its haunches and whined and howled in excruciating pain (I suppose trying to shake that squirrel off its snout with those incisors teeth buried in nose meat hurt to much?). We literally had to beat that squirrel off the dog's nose; but this proved to be an invaluable learning experience, as from that day onward that ole pointer never messed with another squirrel.
