I'm going with 2 to the BassPro Shop and Boats US stores in Atlanta, this morning.The pucker factor should reach new heights today as 2 does the driving in Atlanta. Talk to ya'll later, I hope.
I'm leaving you with another rabbit hunting update. Try to hold down the excitement

Yesterday’s rabbit hunt near the old wooden Salem-Shotwell covered bridge near Bleeker, Al was a success despite only taking two rabbits.

I pulled into Rye’s front yard at 10:50, ten minutes before the agreed on 11:00 am. Across the highway, I could see Brag and Uncle NoPass near Cuz’s dog pen down by the lake. With the goat supervising Brag as he tended to last minute matters, Uncle NoPass was waiting as patiently as his eighty two years and limited rabbit hunts left would allow.

We loaded Judy into a box with NoPass’s dogs, Kate and Lady. and stopped by Mr. Murty’s place out past the bridge. I had to drop off the hunting lease payment for my son. He has one of the better payment plans that I’ve seen, a fifth of Lord Baltimore Gin , and a pack of USA light shorts. The gin was less than six bucks.

I pulled up to the entrance of the property and Rye got out and undid the chain to allow our two truck convoy to enter the mud yard of the decaying abandoned house. A single set of rabbit tracks crossed into a thicket growing in what was the front porch. A good omen?

The closest thing to “Papers” our dog have is the ones we swatted them with when they were puppies. Beagle mixed might be the most apt description of them. Little short legged Judy was the Grande Dame of what passes for our pack while Uncle NoPass’s dogs, Kate and Lady were just one season into adult hunting and still committed the occasional faux pas of chasing deer, although you’ll never convince NoPass that one of his dogs would do such an unforgivable sin. Uncle NoPass’s Last Chance had his last chance and was given away as a child’s yard dog. A suitable job position for a dog with his disposition and general dislike of anything that appeared to him as work--like chasing rabbits. We were down to a total of four dogs, not counting Fat Maggie who was resting on past laurels.

We put the dogs on the ground and they nosed over the tracks, totally ignoring them. Going around the house, the dogs nosed their way into a thick stand of sweet gum saplings at the back of the “yard”. Lady began to talk and Judy joined in. Soon all three dogs were in full cry . They circled Uncle NoPass, who often said that he couldn’t hear himself fart, three times in a tight circle through some incredibly thick cover. He heard this because I thought he was going to corkscrew himself into the ground as I watched him pivot around looking ahead of the dogs.

The rabbit peeled away into or across a deep gully. The dogs completely lost the track and couldn’t pick it back up, so we moved on with Brag, the youngest in the thickest of the briars, me , next on the fringes with Rye on the clean hillside and NoPass on the logging trails.

I had joined Brag in the sea of “wait a minute” stickers as we cut across to a ridge that stuck out like a finger between two of the briar filled bowls when Lady started barking as a trail heated up. Judy confirmed it and then the chase… “Boom”… ended. Brag had shot him as he passed by his feet. The rabbit hadn’t moved until the tension became intolerable.

A few minutes later, in the same bottom, the dogs started sounding off at our feet again. I only had time to yell for Rye to watch out as the flash of white burst across the slight opening I was in. The rabbit instead hooked up the facing hill before curling around past Rye. Having plenty of time, the old Sweet 16 fired a single shot and a few minutes later the dog’s went quite. Again the rabbit hadn’t moved until it was literally kicked from it’s bed.

As we worked our way up the hills, out of the bottoms, heading vaguely toward the trucks, I paused to kick a hollow hump of pine straw at the base of a small pine. The humps are formed by pine straw lodging over a skeleton of small dead limbs that have dropped to the ground. Pines tend to grow straight and clean, with the lower limbs continuously dying and falling off. I kicked the hollow hump with no results and went to kick it again. As my foot started forward, I lost my balance and my foot crashed through the top. Out squirted the rabbit, zigzagging madly into the next tangles before I could catch my balance much less think about getting a shot off.

Judy who had been ran the day before, came tiredly to my excited calls and quickly, although with what I took to be a remarkable lack of enthusiasm picked up the chase. The rabbit hooked sharply back toward the bottom that I had just climbed out of and into the sea of briars. Judy was not far behind and I heard her as she hit pools of water that had collected from the previous rains. She tried, but couldn’t pick up the trail through the swampy bottom.

The gummy clay built up in the treads on the sole of our boots adding unneeded weight for our tired body’s to carry. We hiked up a bare clay slope to the trucks waiting in the muddy turnaround while we told story’s about how bad the briars were, how steep the hills, how treacherous the rotted out stump holes were, how full of water the bottoms were, how you had to step on the rabbits to get them to run, how sticky the clay.....

It was a long hill and the story’s got shorter and shorted, till they were only two words long. "Dang mud", or "dang holes" or….

Still, there was the sweet satisfaction of being tired from a sport that you love despite or maybe because of, the story’s that will grow over the years about the height of the briars or the deepness of the holes or even the number of rabbits as the years and hunts pass. I could see it just as well on Uncle NoPass’s eighty two year old face as on his grand son Brag’s.

Four runs, two rabbits. None of the four would run before being literally kicked out of their bed. We decided the property would need our attention at least twice more before the end of rabbit season, next week