I took Chuck to a vantage point from which I showed him exactly where those squirrels had been, one in a white oak, the other in a walnut. Since he was my guest, I was most anxious for him to get some shooting. We parted, and I began to hunt up through a strip of the woods lot which had produced in years past. The heavy dew caused a constant rain of water drops, confusing at first, until I realized they don't really sound like cuttings. Cuttings hit more than one leaf on the way down, dewdrops never do.
Cuttings make a more solid sound, too, less of a 'splat'.
I still-hunted for about 2 hours, expecting to hear Chuck shoot at any moment. Slanting yellow early morning light spotlighted hundreds of delicate and intricate spider webs bejeweled with dew, and when the angle was right, made the trees sparkle. It was surreal having cold hands in August. When I reached the end of the strip, having seen only a chipmunk and a Cooper's hawk, I crossed the corner of a field into a small patch of woods, maybe 4-5 acres. Immediately I saw a gray squirrel, in the tall tops of some slender ash trees.