I was sitting in my chair, splitting firewood for the evening’s campfire with Virgil squatting down beside me. I don’t know his real name, he told it to me the day before but I couldn’t quite understand it due to his complete lack of teeth. He just seemed like a Virgil. I liked him, he was friendly. Virgil was one of several local old timers camped next to us, and he and the others got a big kick out of watching me try to split the iron hard, aged hickory logs I had brought along from home for campfire wood.

Virgil had been telling me about his 1/2 acre property in an adjacent valley. He asked, “Do ya own enna land?”

“Yeah, I have a 10 acre wooded property in Chatham County.”

“Do ya have enna squirrels on it?”

“Yeah,” I replyed in a puzzled voice, “I have lotsa squirrels on it.”

Virgil paused for a second and then he said, “Do ya eats em?”

Now, I know its common in Appalachia for locals to hunt and eat squirrels, so I was only slightly surprised by the question. I answered half seriously: “No, the squirrels on my property are too skinny – they’re hardly worth the effort of cleanin’ an cookin'”

Virgil looked at me with a gleam in his eye and said through a big toothless grin: “Ah makes gravy out the skinny ones!”

We both laughed.