I’ll shoot you and swear I thought it was a burglar breaking in after you went rabbit hunting” GF said about six in the morning after the eleventeenth time I came back in to rummage for a missing piece of rabbit hunting equipment.

Who knew that you needed so much stuff to just attempt to kill a rabbit? The resulting threats had occurred after I had to turn the car around, shining the lights through the bedroom window and go back to get my 16ga bunny gun.
I was at the gate…again, when I remembered my boots at the back door. Thinking about GF’s last warning I decided that it had been dry and warm enough to get by with my tennys.

It was a hunt set up at the last minute and like most last minute hunts, you forget a lot of things, like telling people about the hunt and calling others back to confirm the details.

It ended up with just Brag, me, The Rabbit Journal pack and Cuz’s grandson, former teat, Dustin with his two dogs. And two of his friends he decided to invite. They brought four untrained dogs.



Having nine untrained dogs made for quite a morning. In retrospect, those who didn’t make the hunt were fairly lucky.

We had a couple of quite sorry races. One of them I saw a rabbit race down the trail from the direction that Lucy was cold trailing. I called the dogs with a “Rabbit Rabbit, there he goes there he goes Rabbit Rabbit here here here.”
Then the dang dogs couldn’t get the scent. It was a small rabbit so maybe that was the problem.



A bit later one of Dustin’s guests saw a rabbit and we put the dogs on the trail. This time they struck and stuck. The scent was strong and Lucy, Katie and Susie hung on to the trail for about an hour. The beautyberries and underbrush was thick and no one could get a shot at the rabbit. Heck, nobody could get a glimpse of him



The good thing about our pups, Sammie, Sissy and Sallie, was that they packed up with our dogs when the going got good. They still might not know exactly what is going on, but they did what we wanted them to.
The only thing missing from the day was that no one busted a cap on a rabbit. Brag and I wanted to kind of show the pups what they were supposed to be chasing and give them a good snoot full of the scent.

We quit before lunch when the heat started to build.

Next Saturday, the plan is to hunt Mr. Murphy’s place near the old site of the Salem Shotwell Covered Bridge.