heralded dawn as Brag and I pulled into the back fifty acres off of 39. That small plot butted up against the 1000 acre Seale deer lease where Brag and I spend many summer Saturday morning’s exercising the Rabbit Journals pack of beagles.
The “girls” were jostled in their "tiny built" summer box, a open wire, three compartment dogbox as Brag’s little city truck moved along the brick hard Alabama clay logging trail. The narrow truck ran one tire in the baked clay ruts made by the full-scale tracks of the deer hunters while the other road the center.

We decided to go as far as we could which meant almost all the way across the property, close to the Howard Road, a entrance that most everybody had stopped using due to the deeply rutted mud hole near the cabin’s sawdust pile.

In the dim pre-dawn light, I asked Brag “Did a tree fall or are they thinning the pines?” We had been hoping for a thinning, so that the sun starved under story could get some much needed light and grow the needed cover and food. The pines had reached the sterile stage. Carpeted with pine needles and only pine cones for nourishment.

The results of the thinning will be more in evidence a year from this fall as honeysuckle, blackberry briars and other desirable (as far as wildlife is concerned) undergrowth gets a foothold.

The girls were a little rusty from the two month layoff after Rabbit Season 06-07.
A little rusty?
Ok, keystone cop-ish would be more like it. I’m certainly glad we didn’t have any guests with us Saturday morning.
Maybe the dryness had something to do with it, in addition to the layoff, but the girls couldn’t seem to stay on track. They over ran, they would break off and race to another dog’s bark. They back trailed. The sputtering of the races brought to mind a lawnmower burning last years gas.

Finally, as Brag and I walked past the cabin, I spotted a small rabbit hotfooting it towards the outhouse. The dogs, responding to my calls, dove into the thicket.

The results were almost cartoonish. The dogs were in full cry, circling in the house trailer size clump of weeds. Heads would pop up as they got their bearings and disappear back into weeds. The little rabbit popped out, heading straight at Brag and me till he saw us and dove back into the thicket.
He must have ran between two of the dogs legs because I saw one of them almost flip over trying to get turned around.
The race from that point lasted about fifty minutes and covered a lot of territory before the bunny lost the “girls” near the old sawdust pile. I walked the girls over to the pond to cool off.


Not to bad….for a first morning. Still no puppy though I have a really good lead on one only a few blocks away