Rabbit Run

 

I seldom sit down on a deer stand for what could be either a long wait, or a very short one, but always a very cold one, that I don’t think of the first “big game” I ever shot. I’d like to say it was a rhino, but it was a rabbit.

I could lie to you and bolster my image at least a little bit by telling you it charged me, like the one that charged President Carter while he was on vacation down yonder in Georgia, but it didn’t. It was running the other way. But it was a jackrabbit that probably maxed out pretty close to the top weight for the blacktail subspecies at around seven pounds. I would’ve bet it at nearly 20, but I was only 10 and was only guessing its weight at nearly that of similarly sized dogs I’d slung over my shoulder and carried home for one reason or another. It was a mile back to Grandma and Grandpa’s house.

It was a big rabbit, and to me, like I said, it was “big game.”

I shot it with Uncle Norm’s gun, a .22 Savage pump with a tubular magazine feed that fired either shorts, longs, or long rifle cartridges. Norm used that gun to shoot the rats that ran out of the corn crib when we shelled corn to chop and mix with oats to feed Grandpa’s dairy cows up yonder in Nebraska, 20 miles east of Lincoln. He’d let me shoot at them if no one important was standing around where they might get shot, and so I guess you can blame him for a lot of what has transpired in my life over the years.

I got to where I could almost hit them as well as him, even the running ones. It would’ve been embarrassing not to have progressed at least a little as there were so many targets, hundreds, on which to hone my skills, and shells were cheap: Fifty cents and 50 to a box.

 “Watch out you little *&$!head, you almost shot me in the foot!” he would sometimes yell in jest when the rat run would really get strong and heavy, the squeal and squeak of two pound rats in terror of their lives even breaking through the roar of the heavy grinding rattle of the shelling machine. There was nothing boring about it for a 10 year old, and on occasion I wonder if it would stack up favorably, today, against a bout of Dungeons and Dragons or an hour or so of Sponge Bob, commercials included.

In any case, I had the old Savage out on the back of the farm the day the big jack bit the dust. I jumped him out of a patch of uncut prairie hay and started pumping rounds at him at about 40 to 50 yards as if he were just another giant rat. I could tell I was shooting behind him, but I couldn’t tell how far until he made a slip.

For no apparent reason, he decided to cut across a disced-over winter wheat field that bordered the prairie hay. When he did that, I could see the puffs of dirt where the bullets hit, and how far I was shooting behind him. You know there is a lot of luck in life: Mine, yours, and that belonging to rabbits. I finally caught up to him and “walked in” the last cartridge in the gun, and caught the streaking jack right behind the shoulder and rolled him in the dust.

It may have been the worst thing that could’ve ever happened to me. I’m positive it kept me from being a Rhodes scholar. Who could possibly opt for Cambridge or Eton after a shot like that? Homework? What homework? It’s been biscuits and gravy and The National Enquirer for me ever since.

Speaking of which, I was put to thinking about rabbits by Pam clearing a spot in our freezer for a deer the other afternoon. While digging, she found three packages of pheasant, one of turkey, and a big one of rabbit. Well, sure, we’re working our way through all of it: Two nights back it was pheasant; tonight it was turkey; tomorrow night it will be rabbit.

Sometimes rabbit season gets lost in the big money shuffle brought on by deer, ducks, and pheasants. Too bad. There’s hardly a better way to start a young boy or girl out hunting than taking them out to one of the numerous public hunting areas scattered all over our state and just walking through all of the heaviest cover you can find, no dog necessary, and seeing what you can jump up that has hair on it.

Hunting them, shotguns are the safest where proximity to people and outbuildings are a concern. Shotgun pellets, relatively speaking, do not travel far. Rifles certainly have their place in big, unoccupied country and when wielded by youngsters not apt to shoot their uncles in the foot. I have friends in the Panhandle that shoot them with longbows they whittle from trees as did the Indians. They kill an unbelievable number of rabbits. I will look around and see if I can’t find a picture for you.

The season in Oklahoma opens Oct. 1 and runs through March 15. The limit is 10 cottontails a day; three swamp rabbits a day, and three jackrabbits a day, with no jacks being legal east of I-35.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a jack in our part of the state. There are still a few around. When I first moved here in 1966 there were still quite a few of them in the prairies east and north of Tulsa.

Stacy Gibson tells me he used to hunt them near his home in LeFlore County, but hasn’t seen one there in years. Like quail, jackrabbits seem to have fallen victim to urban sprawl as much as anything else.

Wherever you find them, they are as fun to eat as they are to hunt. When I found that package of bunnies thawing in the sink the other night, I asked Pam how she was going to fix them. “I think fried,” she said, which is O.K. with me but I immediately put in for stew for no apparent reason.

“Oh?” she said. “You’re a cook now?”

Looks like the “frieds” have it. See how easy I roll with the punches?

I got over not going to Cambridge just that quick.

© 2009 Conrad M. Vollertsen