Sandy, Thunder, Patches, Dotsie-some good, some great, and some crazy. As I round the bases towards my 50th birthday, there have been many four-wheel drives and squirrel dogs in my life. It was simply a pause in life for some much-needed formal and informal education. But the love affair never completely died. The dirty trucks and smelly squirrel dogs played a secondary role for some time. That is, until girls came into the picture. And I always had a trusty partner: my squirrel dog named Bocephus. With the brush guard and heavy mud tires, there wasn’t a trail I wouldn’t attempt. We spent hours grinding and sanding on that pipe until his dad was confident a weld would hold. His dad was a welder by trade and offered his help if we got the rust off the pipe. My friend and I carried the rusty, well-worn pipe out of the woods, which we snagged from an abandoned gas well site. The second thing I did was weld a brush guard on the front of it. I never went far and spent most of the time in the backcountry, proving I couldn’t get stuck.

The tires hummed so loud on the hardtop you couldn’t have a conversation, and it road-walked so bad you couldn’t concentrate on anything but keeping it between the lines. The rig was designed for mud, and it hated concrete. The truck either didn’t have power steering or it didn’t work-I can’t remember-but you couldn’t turn the steering wheel unless you were moving. The first thing I did to that old, early-’80s Toyota pickup was buy Buckshot Wide Mudder tires.

My first truck came when I was around 17. That day started the love affair that changed my life. “A dog that hunts and a truck that goes in the woods,” I whispered through that smile. On the ride out of the woods, I couldn’t help but smile. She was the second coolest thing I had ever seen. I had never seen a real working dog in action, and she looked so happy running and treeing in the woods. We would circle the tree looking up in its canopy for a piece of fur, an ear, a bushy tail-something to point at and say, “I see him!” I couldn’t keep my eyes off Gyp. By using her nose, ears, and eyes she would tree the squirrel and then bark loudly to alert us as to which tree the squirrel was in. Gyp’s job on the hunt was to make wide runs through the hardwoods in search of a squirrel. The old dog, named Gyp, was a small, brown-coat, pointy-eared feist. The dog and the truck were tools designed and kept for the sole purpose of hunting. I don’t remember much about the adult conversations or how many squirrels we brought home, but I can still vividly recall two things that I fell instantly in love with that day: a dog and a truck. I was too young to carry a gun but just old enough to tag along with my dad and his friend. My earliest hunting memory is of a squirrel hunt. FebruBy Chris Ellis From the Pages of Wheels Afield

Feist squirrel hunting dog breed