Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 199, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 August 1910 — IN A BEE-SQUIRREL BATTLE [ARTICLE]

IN A BEE-SQUIRREL BATTLE

Prowling Boy Has Time of His Life Defending Himself While Up in a Honey Tree. Germania, Pa. —To have enraged a colony of half a dozen flying squirrels and to have been viciously and disastrously attacked by them was the experience of Harry Sloan, an eighteen-year-old Stewardson township boy, while toe incident as 1 a whole has suddenly disclosed a trait of this type of squirrel that even old woodsmen and hunters never knew .of. Flying squirrels have always been looked upon with more or less contempt, and many gunners utterly refused to shoot them because of a superstition, something akin to that with reference to a white doe, that the killing would bring bad luck to some member of the offender’s family. Young Sloan is an adept at “lining” wild bees and was engaged at that business over in the Kettle creek region when he had the experience of his life. He invaded the tree inhabited by bees and squirrels and the latter attacked him, one after another, as fast as the bees themselves, and equally mad. The little animals bit the boy terribly, one of them inflicting an ugly gash on the eye. Sloan was almost blinded, but he finally groped his way down along the tree to the ground, though the aroused squirrels continued their onslaught until he was squarely upon the ground and able to defend himself with a cudgel.