Another thing my father and his brother had in common with Tom Sawyer were the caves that are part of the Missouri landscape. Like Tom, they explored those what were near where they lived.
The time we were
living on Doc Hunt’s place was at the beginning of the Great Depression of the
1930s. No one in the Ozarks knew much
about national economics and such—at least not in our neck of the woods—but we
sure knew that times were getting hard and money was mighty scarce. That is what we called those days—“Hard
Times.”
There was
practically no way for youngsters to make spending money during Hard Times
except for trapping rabbits. The
countryside was full of cottontail rabbits and dealers from the city would buy
rabbits in the fall when the weather was cold enough for the carcasses to keep
after they were killed. We could trap
rabbits, kill them by breaking their necks, gut them, and sell them at the store
for ten or twelves cents apiece. The
city dealers would come by once a week or so and buy the rabbits—the carcass for
meat markets and the skin for making cheap fur coat collars.
We used box traps
to catch the cottontails. They were
wooden boxes about twenty inches long made from pieces of board six and eight
inches wide. There was a vertically sliding
door at the front. Two holes were drilled
on the top; one for a forked stick for a fulcrum and the other at the rear for
the trigger. The trigger was connected
to the sliding door by strings and a log stick levered over the fulcrum so that
when the trap was set the trigger held up the sliding door. The trap was baited with an apple core or
carrot. When the rabbit went in after
the bait and bumped the trigger the door came down and he was caught.
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| Author's sketch of the kind of rabbit trap he and his brother made. |
Richard and I usually
had six or eight box traps. In thickets
and fence rows we would find the little paths where the rabbits travelled and
set the traps where they would not miss them.
In rabbit season in the fall, we ran our trap line every morning and
each evening—killing those we had caught and re-baiting the traps. We never worked very hard at it, but we would
often have three or four rabbits a week to take to the store. When we got old enough to carry a 22 squirrel
rifle, the rabbit money enabled us to buy shells for the slender little
Remington rolling-block single-shot rifle that Dad got for us when I was ten.
Richard and I were
to grow up carrying that little squirrel rifle while we roamed the fields and
woods. Dad taught us to handle it safely
and how to aim with deadly accuracy. He
taught us never to aim a gun unless we intended to shoot and to shoot
straight. His philosophy was, “if you
can see it, you can hit it.” When we
killed a squirrel, for instance, we did not just shoot at the squirrel. We shot at his eye. We killed squirrels only for meat for the
table and shooting one through the body tended to spoil the meat. If we could not see the head, we did not
shoot.
Once in a while,
of course, we would accidentally gut-shoot a squirrel. When that happened to me (which was not
often, I am happy to say) I would bury a badly gut-shot squirrel rather than be
embarrassed by taking one home that I had not shot in the head. I know that Richard occasionally did that
also, although he seldom missed. He was
always a shade better than I was. In
fact, I saw him competing successfully in adult turkey shoots when he was only
fourteen and I have known him to knock down a quail on the wing with that 22
rifle. Of course I insisted the latter had to be an accident to be an
accident!
That, however, was
later on as in 1930 we were still not allowed to carry a rifle. Instead, we had to be content with trapping
rabbits, fishing, and just roaming the countryside exploring. We found our first cave along the creek north
of the Doc Hunt place. We had been
fishing with a neighbor boy who was two or three years older and were moseying
along the creek bank under the trees along the base of a limestone cliff when
we spied a dark opening about three feet high.
We hiked back across the fields to the neighbor’s house, borrowed a coal
oil lantern, then went back to explore the cave.
It was a dandy
cave. The narrow passageways back into
the cliff a few feet then widened into a low room maybe eight feet across from
which two passageways led off into the limestone. We could go no farther, however, as the
openings were too low to crawl into. The
only thing unusual we found was a small glossy blue and green stalactite to
carry home in my pocket.
Our father gave us
another lesson about that. When I
proudly showed him the piece of stalactite, he turned it in his hands then
explained to us how those stalactites take hundreds of years to form from water
dripping through the limestone. I felt
bad then about damaging it and even thought about taking the piece back and
gluing it into place but I never got around to it. The result was that I never again
thoughtlessly destroyed any sort of natural wonder.
That was the
summer we made a steam cannon and could have gotten badly injured in the
process. We were fooling around with the
same older neighbor boy (whose name I cannot recall) and came across an
abandoned old broken-down blacksmith shop.
There were some dandy pieces of junk piled out behind the weathered old
building and one of them was a piece of iron pipe about ten or twelve feet
long. It was capped at one end.
The neighbor boy
proposed that we make a steam cannon and he proceeded to show us how. The pipe was about three inches in
diameter. We spent about an hour cutting
a plug from the end of a tree branch that would fit tightly into the open end
of the pipe. That done we built a fire
and got it going good while we carried some water from the creek in an old
bucket and filled the pipe about half full with it. We then drove the wood plug tightly into the
pipe, stacked up some rocks and propped the pipe up at an angle with the lower
half across the fire. The idea was to
boil the water until steam pressure built up enough to blow out the plug. Hopefully it would blow out before the pipe
exploded.
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| It is possible the boys had seen an ad like this. |
It took quite a
while for the steam pressure to build up.
I got tired of just sitting waiting and was wandering around when finally,
there was a satisfying BOOM! The pipe jumped
and fell off the rocks, and we could hear the wooden plug screaming off into
the distance. In later years during my
engineering courses at the University of Washington I realized that we were
lucky that we had not driven that plug into the pipe too tightly because the
old rusty pipe could have exploded from the steam pressure and sent shrapnel
flying in all directions. At any rate,
it was a very satisfactory experiment, but we never got around to trying it
again.
The lessons of the Doc Hunt place would come
together in the future when team work, creativity, shooting skill, and a large
measure of grace would protect the Frieze boys.
