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Just as dad was about to die there on the limb of a shagbark hickory, the fellows behind the trees touched off a small dynamite cartridge and threw it under the tree, and when it exploded the wild hogs ran away, dad fell off the limb, and he was rescued.
It might be returned to you if you had behaved yourself meanwhile and had not whispered, thrown spit balls, or pinched the little girl who sat next to you. There were two kinds of walnut trees in the neighborhood; the common name of one was shagbark, of the other pignut.
The timber or the European species, when straight-grained, and clear, or free from knots, is, for ordinary purposes, better than that of the American black walnut, but bears no comparison with the wood of the hickory, when strength combined with elasticity is required, and its nut is very inferior in taste to that of the shagbark, as well as to the butternut, which it somewhat resembles.
The shagbark was the walnut of the market, a nut with a rich, oily kernel; the pignut was smaller with a very thick shell and correspondingly small meat, hard to separate from the shell. They were of little worth, not salable and we gathered them only when the other kind was scarce. It took a hard frost, several times repeated, to loosen them from the tree. We often clubbed them down.
The nuts grow in small clusters as a rule, often in pairs, and the outer husk separates when ripe into four pieces, allowing the nut to drop out clean and dry. The full-grown tree is of good size and is found almost everywhere in the United States. =Shellbark. Shagbark= The shellbark or shagbark hickory-nut is one of the best. The flavor, as every one knows, is sweet and pleasant.
It should have been called "The Shagbark" or "The Doodle Bug's Lair."
The nut is the largest of the hickories, being often from four to six inches around, and it is shaped somewhat like a pear. One variety, however, is known as the square nut. The shell is very thick and hard, but the kernel is sweet when once it is gotten out. This tree is as stately and finely-shaped as the shagbark.
It was a perilous undertaking to climb a walnut tree, for the limbs began to grow high up and the trunk was covered with a rough bark, hence the name shagbark; to shin up, and still more to descend, was apt to make patches or a new seat to your trousers your mother's evening work after you had gone to bed.
This fine shagbark was kind to the cameraman, for some of its lower branches drooped and hung down close enough to the "bars" of the rail fence to permit the photographic eye to be turned on them. Then came the tantalizing wait for stillness!
Nor would his "squirrel-theory" of distribution have been very confidently adhered to, fifty years ago, in localties where the shagbark walnut was almost as abundant as the white oak itself. No squirrel will gather acorns where he can possibly get hickory nuts, and few will gather hickory nuts where the larger and thinner-shelled walnuts are to be had for the picking.
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