Fencerows: Rabbit Rendezvous

By John Luthens

Dennis said there was one in there. “One of the locals, but he’s hiding pretty deep.  Jump harder!”  Dennis was a big guy, and holding a double-barreled shotgun to boot; two good reasons to bear down as ordered.  It was a January morning in the fields of Wisconsin, and it was the first brush pile of the day.

Snow flurries from the west crashed into the east-rising dawn as I crashed into the brush pile.  For a moment, it was sunny and snowing at the same time.  One more stomp for good measure, and a solitary rabbit darted from its night cover and headed through the trees like an open-field running back.

A single shotgun blast rang out.  It was either Shawn or Tom.  It wasn’t Dennis.  He hadn’t even lifted the double-barrel off its marching position over his shoulder, not that it kept him from being the first to comment on the situation.

“That’s the way to do it boys!   No use getting a limit too early.”  The cottontail kept running, everyone laughed, and we moved on to the next likely tangle.

Three of us had put miles on already that morning, coming from Grafton, Omro, and Appleton, bounding along the highways to meet in Kewaskum at the den of rabbit master, Dennis “the grizzly” Junk.  Dennis hadn’t put on any miles, but he’d been up early just the same, manning the coffee pot for his guests, securing hunting permission from neighboring farmers, and searching the fencerows for telltale tracks of two little feet offset in the snow behind the thumping big ones.

Come to think of it, I guess Dennis put on all the miles.  The rest of us just showed up with our rabbit shooters at the ready and our far-going boots on our feet and tracked snow into his kitchen.

Rabbit sign was scarce.  If you got down on your belly, you could see the winding trails beneath the deadfalls with the bark gnawed like someone was whittling with a dull pocket knife.   We all agreed it would be better if the sun was out to get the rabbits moving from their hidey-holes and along their runways. We worked out the thickets and grass lines, two of us driving and jumping through the brush, the others standing watch along the edges.

The snow was deep enough to make for heavy boot lifting.  The buckthorn, wild grape and raspberry vines grabbed at stocking caps from heads and held them hostage. It was jump shooting in a winter jungle, but without a dog to drive the rabbits back around, the shots were few and far between.

It was fine.  There were plenty other sights and sounds in the January forest to keep us occupied.  An owl gave ground from a hidden roost.  It either knew there were formidable rabbit predators afoot, or else it knew the all the action was about to hightail it out of the county. 

We jumped a deer along on a pine ridge.  As we examined the melted- snow bed, the biggest rabbit of the day jumped from beneath a fallen pine and bounded over the hill unscathed.  No one was too disturbed.  We were hunting, but shooting was really secondary.

The hunt finally drew to a close when one of us, who shall remain nameless, went up to his thighs into a spring hole of water along a snow-covered creek bed that didn’t look like it would hold more than a trickle in the wet months.

We stood to the side of a weathered John Deere bailer that was half-buried in brush and looked like it hadn’t that seen any hay field action since before any of us were legally able to hunt.  We debated the symptoms of hypothermia and told tales of hunting plunges past.  We decided that if you’ve never gotten at least mildly soaked on at least one hunting excursion, you haven’t tried hard enough.

We started limping back, so Dennis, I mean, so the one who remains nameless could dry out in front of the garage stove back at base camp. Shawn gave brush-buried bailer an errant kick on our way out, scaring a cottontail from the rusted metal beneath.  The rabbit must have got an earful of stories, because he was no more than 2 feet away from us the whole time we were talking.

Once again, no shots fired, until we got back to garage to toast a successful rabbit hunt with a dab of winter whiskey.  We proceeded to solve most of the world’s problems after the toast. We were so busy solving, in fact, that no one remembered to skin the rabbits.  Oh yeah, there weren’t any.  But that’s here-nor-there and not really pertinent to a successful rabbit hunt.

The rabbit crew lines up

Rabbit runway