Hunting Rabbits

Although my Dad used to hunt with the musket as a kid, he used more modern guns later on.  When I was growing up, he had a .22 caliber rifle and 12-gauge double-barreled shotgun that he used when he took us hunting; mostly, he used the double-barreled shotgun to hunt rabbits and squirrels. 

We had a beagle rabbit hound named Caesar that we took rabbit hunting with us, but he wasn't ever fully trained, so he wasn't a very good rabbit dog.  Sometimes, my Dad would borrow a “real” rabbit dog from his friend Merritt Young to take with us hunting to try to train Caesar.  At home, Caesar was always trying to dig his way out of his pen in our backyard so my Dad put a couple rows of bricks under the fence to keep him from digging out.  Eventually, however, Caesar did get out of his pen and immediately got hit by a car and killed in front of our house on our busy street, Chestnut Street in Coshocton, Ohio.

We went hunting many times and my Dad usually got one or two rabbits, but mainly by “jumping” the rabbits; that is, by walking until around the country-side looking for likely locations for “sitting” rabbits, surprising them into running away, and then shooting them.  They sit under little clumps of grass or bushes or brush piles where they have a little protection from the elements and from predators.  If you can’t shoot the rabbit or you miss it after jumping it, the theory is that your rabbit dog will follow its scent by its nose, and the rabbit will eventually circle back around to his home territory and you have a second chance to shoot him.  Each dog gives a special recognizable bark or howl when it is running the rabbit; and it is pleasing experiences to just stand in the woods and to listen to the dogs run the rabbit.  I remember one time this strategy actually worked for us.  I was standing perfectly still in the woods several yards behind my Dad and listening to the dogs that were still very far away, and the rabbit silently and almost leisurely ran right by me within a few feet of me; it was completely unaware of me.  I didn't have a gun so I couldn't shoot it; and I didn't want to yell to my Dad because it would scare the rabbit away, and he wasn't in a position to shoot it anyway.  (I have always been able to quickly think of and evaluate the possible options quickly in such quick-reaction-needed situations.)

We had a family tradition of going hunting on Thanksgiving morning while my Mother was cooking Thanksgiving dinner.  I remember I was freezing cold oftentimes when we went hunting.  Sometimes, there was snow on the ground.

We hunted on the grounds of the North Appalachian Watershed District Research Station where my Dad worked.  The U.S. Department of Agriculture uses the “station” to research the underground movement of water in North Appalachia, and my Dad was an Engineering Technician who designed and built some of the measuring equipment.  The station had about 1000 acres of meadows and woods.  It is about 10 miles northeast of Coshocton, and is still there today.

My Dad would field-clean the rabbits, and then would freeze the rabbits in the freezer when we got home.  My Mother would make rabbit stew or fried rabbit for dinner sometime later.  When eating it, you would have to spit out the lead-shot from the shotgun.  One rabbit split among five people was not very much for each person, and with two hungry brothers, you had to eat fast to make sure you got your share.  One time, I made a rabbit stew using red wine gravy with a recipe that I found in one of my Mother’s recipe books.  The only other time I saw rabbit stew on the menu was in restaurants in Europe in Utrecht Netherlands and in Greifensee Switzerland where it was called hasenpfeffer; but I never ordered it; I should have.

When I was a little older, I got my own 20 gauge shotgun and a hunting coat one Christmas.  I actually got one rabbit and one squirrel with that shotgun while I was still a kid; that was all I ever got while hunting with my Dad.  Much later, when I was grown and married, we owned a five acre lot in the country just outside of Cambridge, Ohio; and we had an excess population of rabbits for few years until the coyote and fox population also caught up and cleared out the rabbits.  On one occasion, after I came home and saw a bunch of rabbits eating in my garden, I immediately got my shotgun and shot five of them, but a couple rabbits got away.  I buried the rabbits in a shallow hole in my garden because I didn't want to learn on-the-fly how to clean them and to deal with mess.  Some wild animal came later and dug them up and took the dead rabbits away.  There was no trace of them anywhere. I also used the shotgun to shoot at crows that were ravaging my garden and apple trees; but I was never able to get close enough to actually hit one because they were too clever and wary.  Later, my wife Sharon got rid of the shotgun unbeknownst to me when she was cleaning out a closet; she doesn't like guns.