Many of today’s hunters got their hunting careers started hunting rabbits, or more correctly cottontails.
The style of agriculture with family farms with wind rows and shelter belts created ideal habitat for the rabbits to proliferate, not to mention their procreative tendencies. It was a match made in heaven … little boys with single shot 22s or similar shotguns after school roaming the back 40 pursuing what for them must have seemed like big game. Much of their efforts ended up in the family stewpot.
As we grew up, larger more exotic game such as turkeys, doves, squirrels, ducks, and geese and eventually whitetails took over as the object of desire and the lowly rabbits took a back seat for a while. Growing up on the East Coast in Connecticut, I always wanted to pursue rabbits as I would see them frequently on neighbor’s lawns and unkempt wood lots. Other game was very thin and rarely seen, let alone harvested.
Alas, my dad was not a hunter, well not a real hunter. He proudly showed us kids a 16mm film of his buddies hunting black bears in Maine, of all places, but what I took away was my dad was a “slob hunter,” too much adult beverages, shooting contests in camp that resulted in damage and debris, and the hides of cubs that he had salted and brought home for us to see.
Rabbits became a target species for me during my first operational assignment in the Air Force stationed at Elmendorf Air Force Base Alaska. The guys in the fighter squadron I was assigned to were real hunters and we talked about flying and hunting almost exclusively. While I would eventually work my way around to most of the species discussed, initially the talk of rabbits and snowshoe hares really perked my interest and I listened intently to how and where they pursued them. It was not an accident that rabbits and snowshoe hares came into season when other species were not available. Big game hunters were not opposed to chasing the wily rabbit when other game was not on the menu.
Cottontail rabbits breed in yearly cycles. Some years you have very few, other years it seems as if the country is overrun with them. On the highway that ran down the Kenai Peninsula the rabbits would come out on the blacktop at night to take advantage of solar heating. If you drove down the highway in the summertime after dark, you could almost use their eyes, that would reflect your headlights, as road markers.
I made one of my biggest mistakes while hunting rabbits. My wife was never keen on my hunting, still isn’t, but she tolerates it. In the early days she would accompany me and follow around behind me as I coursed through the willow breaks and spruce thickets looking for rabbits.
Where we lived, we were blessed with both cottontails and snowshoe hares. We were hunting this day after a recent snowstorm and there was about six inches of new snow on the ground. We had been hunting for a couple of hours and I had managed to collect a couple.
We were in a horseshoe bend of a slough covered in ice when we entered into a willow thicket that had several trees that had blown down. I was looking pretty far ahead because you could sometimes see a rabbit before they jumped offering a decent shot, when she whispered to me, “What about that one?”
She pointed to a blow down about 10 yards away that bowed over and was covered in snow except for a shallow depression where the snow had been scoured out by the wind. Sitting in the depression, perfectly camouflaged in his white coat, was a cottontail. I would not have seen him without Sue’s help and without his coal black eye staring back at me.
I had been shooting a 12-gauge shotgun for the longer shots, but he was much too close to hazard a shotgun shot. I was carrying a larger caliber pistol as we all did, more for bear protection than actual hunting. With slow deliberation I drew my revolver and aimed at the quarry. I never for a minute considered what the aftermath of my shot would be, not once.
At the shot a huge puff of snow kicked up, the rabbit only went about 5 feet, but the snow behind where he sat turned a brilliant shade of red against the snow. As a hunter, I knew what to expect and was prepared for it as part of hunting. My wife was not. I looked at her and tears were running down her face. That was in 1975. She has not hunted with me since. <
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