“Only Boy, were at the cable blocking the yard of the abandoned farm house waiting on us. Now “Only Boy” is 5 years old and kind of scrawny. Right now about the best I could expect would be for him to carry one smallish buck rabbit or maybe two small sage’ers. You understand, there are dues to be paid in return for me imparting my vast store of woodlore.

Well, Middle Boy didn’t lie, djmed.
If anything the briars were tougher and meaner and taller and sharper and thornier and thicker than your hunt there a couple of years ago Usually we hunt the 100 acres of clear-cut un-replanted briar infested red Alabama clay near the former site of the Salem-Shotwell Covered Bridge in a clockwise fashion. This time we worked counter clockwise. The change was because on other trips to Mr. Murty’s, we had jumped in a relatively clear bottom only to have the rabbit head straight to the worst bowl of briars in the southeast at the other end. The theory was to force him to run a gauntlet of shotguns by interposing us between him and the briars. And the theory remains a theory since we didn’t jump or get a race going

There are good points about the briars being so… so, well, plentiful.
If you tripped and started to fall forward with your feet firmly held in place by the ground briars and honeysuckle vines, you merely dangled in the embrace of the long cane briars.

Or you would break into the relative clear of a swampy area that you walked using thick clumps of grass, like stepping stones through the water. The briars were still present though thinner and thankfully the low lying vines were not there to trip you up. I was trying to get to from one clump to another that was in the “give a little jump” distance range. I eyed the space and then gave a little hop to cross the red mud water whose depth was uncertain. I really should have thought about the cane briar that had a firm grip on the shoulders and back of my shirt. The foot cut short in it’s journey went in for a landing. The water rose in the snake chaps, topping my lace loosened boot which quickly filled with the stagnant water. The other foot, perhaps feeling left out then plunged in. Trying to extract them merely resulted in a churning of the mud, the briars in front and behind holding me in place. Rye, after the hunt said I looked like a man who had tried to give a cat a bath.

It’s easy to keep up with Rye. Just listen to for the “snip”, “snip” of what he calls his key, a set of pruning shears. He said the next time that I talk him into coming back here to hunt he wanted a gas powered hedge trimmer.

Cuz was on his very first hunt out here and by the time he got back to the trucks for the second time probably his last hunt out here. Told me that I was henceforth banned from any of the planning or selection of hunts since the last two had yielded not one single solitary race.

Now as to the dogs, Lucy needs some serious correcting. Brag hit her on level four but she kept getting back on the deer trail. Judy, Julie, Dixie and Maizie all gave at least the appearance of hunting hard and didn’t take off after any trash other than Maizie who smelt something in a hole that would accommodate her up to her hind end. It was a constant muffled bark broke up only when she exerted herself to frantically dig, trying to reach whatever enticed her before breaking into a furious muffled barking again. The other dogs checked out the nearby area and finding nothing of interest passed on down the hardwood bottom.

I heard a whimpering as I went up what Middle Boy laughingly call a road and found Lacey, Cuz’s dog, by way of Uncle NoPass, with a front paw hung under her collar.

In closing, I would like to put in a plug for the Red Cross and ask everyone who can to donate blood. Rabbit hunters on Plavix and aspirin thank you.