Squirrel stew

I'd got it in my mind to try some squirrel stew:
the article on the local free magazine
had a yuppie reporter claiming it was pretty good
Your dad shoots squirrels on the yard as a hobby;
he thought it odd but he stuffed the body in a bag
under ice, with the guts all torn out so our hands
would stay nice and sweetly clean. We could have
argued that we wouldn't fritz out at a little blood,
but he was trying to be nice, and besides, we really
didn't know which parts stayed and which went,
and how to do it best. But he did.

You tossed in a vat some vegetable broth
(the base, we thought, would bring out
the wild flavor), and I added some potatoes,
because stew; plus a few daikons, because
they were about to go bad. I set it on the stove
and we chopped the meat off the bone; it was
young and we'd have felt worse about it all if
the squirrel hadn't kept insisting on eating your
flowers, or if your dad hadn't planned on
killing it anyway, and just leaving it to rot where
the crows fly thick. But it was young.

I wasn't hungry, not really, by the time we'd
worked our way through the third game of
Monopoly. The cracker crumbs covered the table
and a little chocolate was left in the Easter Basket,
but not much. But we'd decided we would try it,
except maybe we should have used a recipe--I think
there were some online, only we didn't bother
to look, despite the long, old tradition of eating
North Carolina squirrels. Somehow I'd made it
bitter, and it tasted foul; the meat was fresh but
maybe the daikons really had gone bad.

We decided not to make squirrel stew again.
At least, not without a recipe--
on the whole
I felt
rather dissatisfied.