Dressed To Kill

The author follows the making of an iconic lure— the Mepps dressed Aglia—from the squirrel woods to the factory and finally to the river.

- Bill Heavey

Thank God they flick their tails. I’d been hearing one bark for five minutes, but it’s only that visual cue that reveals the rodent, flattened and frozen against a hickory 30 yards away. I brace the .22 against a massive tree and am settling the cross hairs on the critter’s head when the trunk goes rubbery. But then, 150-year-old oaks aren’t that easily rattled, so it has to be me.

I’m well acquainted with buck fever, but I’d never dreamed it might extend to the smallest of small game. On the other hand, this was my first squirrel hunt, and there was more at stake than dinner. I’d conned my editors into sending me to Wisconsin to write about the Mepps Dressed Aglia, an iconic lure with a squirrel-tail dressing—the lure that I (like many others) caught my first fish on, the same lure that the readers of this magazine once voted the best all-around choice for trout.

The plan was to follow a squirrel tail from the tree branch to the Mepps factory and, eventually, into the mouth of a fish. I had three days in which to accomplish this, and getting the squirrel tail was step one— without which there would be no further steps. If you have a naturally optimistic outlook like I do, you’ll understand my thought process at the moment of truth: No squirrel equals no story fee, equals eventual unemployment, equals homelessness, equals a future squeegeeing windshields at stoplights for spare change. I’m sure not all writers think this optimistically. I only know what works for me.

Finally, I get the squirrel more or less lined up, shoot three times, and miss three times.

Step One: Kill a Squirrel