Or
"Who are those guys?"

Puppy power, was what the lovely GF, my bride, had to say while watching Abbie bounce around the pen after the “girls” and I had spent the morning on a pre-season exercise chasing rabbits on a pine plantation near Seale, Alabama.

“Puppy power, our butt” was Abbie’s aunties reply. Dixie, Julie, Lucy and Kate were sprawled out in their favorite spots trying to rest up from the morning run. Julie, from her perch atop one of the dog houses said “I’d have some energy to if I’d spent the morning sleeping underneath Boss’s feet”
Lucy agreed though she was only a year away from her own naps during our Saturday morning exercises having forgotten that rabbit hunting is such hard work.
Dixie and Kate just kept snoring, their delicate lady like snores rising from the hole leading into the chamber they had dug underneath the houses. "Who are those guys?"
Reminiscent of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, as they ran from the relentless postal inspectors, the first rabbit of the morning just couldn’t shake the determined hounds for over an hour and a half.
Lucy found him first near the edge of the property along the neighboring clear cut. I thought for a minute, it would be a repeat of a similar race a few Saturday’s ago with the girls running all morning where I wasn’t supposed to go. Instead, the rabbit stayed on our property, racing up and down the line and big circles around the pathfinder.
Abbie would listen and watch as she smelled around at all the new and interesting smells, but staying close to me. When I walked close to her Aunties, she would run to them, then stop and see where I was. She’s still young.
There were two brief pauses when the dogs lost the trail. Both times it was Lucy suddenly yelling “It went that way” and the race would be on again

After the girls lost that rabbit, Abbie bounced from aunt to aunt as we walked to where I wanted to check out a deer stand while looking for another rabbit.
Lucy found the second rabbit to. Abbie ran with them without a clue of what they were chasing for twenty yards or so before stopping to see if she could see me. She couldn’t so back she came down the trail whining.
This race wasn’t nearly as long, twenty minutes at most, before they lost him.

The third race wasn’t started by Lucy, but by Julie, Dixie and Kate, almost simultaneously, when a rabbit exploded from a clump of bushes only feet from us. Lucy, who was checking out a area a good distance from us, had to play catch up.Trouble is she starts barkin like she is on the trail a long time before she gets there. It's kind of confusing

The rabbit had been bedded at the end of a long log pile made when “they” had bulldozed a acre or so of pine beetle killed pines. Djmed, Brag and I had hunted this area last year.
This race was really short. One circle and back into the log pile. I could hear Lucy digging at the rotten wood where the rabbit had vanished.

Top dog? Lucy, without a doubt.


But, they all ran well