"At 6:30 Saturday morning, Jason Cary, 10, walked into an oak and palmetto forest with his father,  Within 10 minutes, a fox squirrel began to bark and skitter from branch to branch.

"Dad, look, it's right there,"Jason said, raising his .20-gauge shotgun and shooting an orange-hued fox squirrel with a tail a foot long.

Squirrel season opened at dawn Saturday, and within minutes the retort of shotguns boomed throught this part of Evangiline Parish.  Elsewhere squirrels might be viewed as rats with good public relations. Here squirrel season's opening celebrates and preserves a distinct local custom at a time when many of the estimated half-million Cajuns have been assimilated into the broader culture.

Villa Platte Hight School shut down at noon on Friday, Sacred Heart High school did not open at all.  Friday night high school football--a consuming passion in this Cajun prairie town of 9.000--was pushed back to Thursday night.

Friday, instead, was a day for preparing, for loading pickup trucks with gun, pots, stoves, generators and all-terrain vehicles, and for heading into the woods.

While fathers and sons hunt this weekend, wives and daughters shop...  But some women cannot resist the woods...

Excitement rushes throught your body when you see a squirrel and you say, "I've got to shoot it",...

Squirrel hunting is a lesser known tradition than the piquant Cajun food and fiddle and accordian music.  But in the Ville Platte area it remains a vital rural ritual, (just like it used to be in all of Cajun Country)....