Run Rabbit! Run!

Growing up on a farm in Nebraska during the 1920’s and 30s, my father hunted rabbits with a house cat named Lucky. The way it worked was, Dad would pick Lucky up in his arms when the chores were done near dark and head out for the corn cribs and wheat bins stationed along the edges of Pop’s homeplace away from the house.

That was where the weeds grew thick and shaggy because the plow and disc could not reach the ground because of the aforementioned tin granaries. Shaggy weed growth also grew snow drifts late in the winter when the wind blew, and if you could jump a rabbit from alongside one of those granaries, then Lucky had a shot. Well, so to speak.

The rabbits, there because of their love of the leaking corn and wheat, and the dense cover provided by the weed growth, would be impeded somewhat by the drifts when jumped from their forms where they huddled next to the granaries. It would be the wildest lie to suggest, even, that Lucky nailed every rabbit flushed. By Dad’s own calculations, if they jumped 10 rabbits, Lucky would get two. Maybe.

The method was to release Lucky skyward and in the direction of the rabbit, à la Polaris missile. Just to say that Russ threw the cat at the rabbit would not convey the true artistry involved in this ballet between a boy, his cat, and a rabbit.

Well, on second thought, “he threw the cat at the rabbit” does transfer the imagery best after all these years.

Two out of 10. I have hunted with men that averaged about that with a shotgun on rabbits. Lucky must have been a full choke cat. In any case, the rabbits brought into the kitchen that way were a welcome break from the unending salt pork and homemade kraut stored in the basement in a big crock whose only lid was the oxidized crust formed by the older kraut on top. Hard times, Mississippi was just down the road from Palmyra, Nebraska.

Well, since you’re wondering but are too polite to ask, Lucky got the heads; the Vollertsens got the rest.

That was a 20th century farm where Dad grew up, but this hunting that I just described was of the most primal sort, never mind the combustion engines of the day. Any time a man picks up an animal and throws it at another animal in order to eat, mankind is going backwards, not forwards. Coon hunters know exactly what I’m talking about. They throw dogs, don’t they?

Ray Jean Knight called the house the other night, no pun intended. Since I had written about some rabbits lately, and she had noticed, did I not know that she still liked rabbits, hmmmm? I knew what to do.

Nobody has seen Lucky in years. Like every cat you ever had, she disappeared one day without so much as a hello, goodbye, or kiss my foot. She was out of the lineup. I did the next best thing: I loaded up Pam, an Ithaca 20-gauge pump, bored modified, a box of light load 7 ½'s  and headed for the Panhandle. What Pam wanted, a looksee at the Test’s new re-model, was the excuse; Ray Jean’s rabbits were the guiding force.

That’s what put Bryon Test, his two sons Jack and Jacob, and me at the pipe piles; once more with feeling. Rabbit season in Oklahoma ends March 15^th. We were getting in our last licks. Hopefully Ray Jean would be getting in her next rabbits.

As usual, I covered the “main exits” to a junk pile of old farm machinery and irrigation pipe with the Ithaca, while Bryon and the boys lifted and moved pipe and shot at artful dodgers with homemade longbows and blunt tipped arrows that only make you say “Ouch!” when shot in the leg, but make a rabbit cry out, “You got me!”

Rabbits probably have the fewest life options of any species on earth. Whether brought to earth by pellet, arrow, or tooth and talon, sooner or later they are going to be eaten. Come to think of it, it’s about the same for all of us, maybe. Ray Jean got her two rabbits. It might have been two out of 10. I hadn’t counted the misses.

I took them by her house last night. She smiled and seemed pleased when I handed over the sack. Lucky and Russ. Yea, these many years. People still smiling over rabbits. The circle is unbroken.

© 2011 Conrad M. Vollertsen