Rabbit Wise: Not All Things Move About in Daylight
There’s not a better way I know to check the current population of
cottontail rabbits than to walk about after a recent snow looking for “sign”. I
did that a couple days back after our most recent light snow, about an inch,
out here on Baker’s Branch.
There, right in front of the carport where I park the truck, was a
nice, clean set of cottontail tracks. So clear and sharp were they, they
might’ve been chiseled there by a master artist working in hard, white clay,
and perhaps they were; a reminder that not all things move about in daylight
where we can observe and control them.
There are years out here when so populous are the rabbits, and
numerous their trails, that I cannot follow by separation in the snow one
sinuous line of hop, hop, hopping's from another. The tracks are everywhere, and
so are the rabbits. This is not one of those years.
Wildlife biologists know that rabbits, like grouse in the North
Country, follow a cycle of wax and wane, that encompasses roughly eight years.
Year One, lots of rabbits; Year Eight, not so many, and seemingly none. Nobody
knows why the variance.
They do know that accompanying the ups and downs of the rabbit cycles
seems to be a parallel cycle amongst rabbit and grouse predator populations,
with reasons for same that would seem to be fairly obvious. How about less fuel
(meat), less production. Maybe?
In any case, the Test boys out Guymon way have been killing rabbits
like crazy with their longbows. Yes, I have an invitation, and will see what I
can do to work it into my busy retired man’s schedule.
When I go there, I usually assume backup with a twenty gauge Ithaca
Featherlight to the real hunters with the homemade Indian gear. Any irrigation
pipe pile escapee that avoids their rubber blunt arrows has a more difficult go
of it dodging a one-ounce load of number sixes. It’s a dirty job, but ...
Twice I have seen Bryon and his son Jacob arrow rabbits that were
running full out. You don’t forget things like that. It puts me to imagining
what a young boy Comanche might have been able to do by the time he had
graduated to shooting running buffalo from horseback.
People living very close to you raise and sell domestically produced
rabbits. There’s a reason for you not knowing: It’s illegal. That kind of
operation is both not controlled by the Health Police nor the City Code. To
find a city rabbit, you’ve got to ask around, just like in the old bootlegging
days. Don’t tell anyone I told you.
There’s a reason it goes on anyway: There is not a better tasting, nor
more cheaply acquired piece of protein, than a backyard rabbit. The price of
backyard rabbit beats all to pieces the cost of store bought beef and pork
which continues to rise in spite of the decline in fuel prices, that last being
the usual excuse given for the rise in meat prices.
I saw at a local steak house recently a $45 steak on the menu. I
declined, and asked if they offered rabbit. They sniffed, and said they did
not. I sniffed back, fighting the machine as it were, and ordered a hamburger.
We will all have died and disappeared from the surface of the earth the day
rabbit reaches $45 a serving.
Long before he died last February at the age of 92, Dad had told me
that as a boy growing up on the farm up in winter-cold Nebraska, that he used
to pick up his favorite barn cat, Lucky, tuck him under his right arm after
chores, and on the way to the house and above zero temperatures, hunt rabbits
all the way back to the house.
In all that cold and snow, the rabbits would huddle in their “forms”
and wait until dark to get out and search out corn and such around Grandpa
Harry’s granaries. In their “wisdom”, the rabbits believed that they were just
as invisible in a snowbank as they were in brown grass clumps. Not so, and Dad
and Lucky knew it.
Dad would launch Lucky airborne from as far away as ten feet once the
rabbit was spotted. Lucky wasn’t perfect, landing on top of the rabbits only
about fifty percent of the time, but except for the short, bloody fight, Lucky
amid your backstrap was almost certain death, and became one of Grandma
Vollertsen’s excellent rabbit hasenpfeffers which beat the regular salt pork
this ‘n that all to hell and gone.
Oh, yeah. What about Lucky. Dad would gut the rabbit out there in the
snow, and give the heart and liver, and whatever else she wanted, to a
wonderful cat you never heard about. Dad would clean his hands in the snow
while Lucky licked clean her whiskers, as cats are wont to do.
Over the years, once having heard dad’s story, it occurred to me at
some point that just as deadly as coyotes, hawks, and foxes to a rabbit’s
future, was my grandmother’s cook book, all written in German.
Look closely, and you will see that this piece was all about rabbit
tracks. Nothing else.
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