GWTW
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Gone with the wind...
My MIL was one of twelve children, seven of them boys. A long-standing tradition in that family was the Christmas morning rabbit hunt. It had been going on for so long, that when I married into the family, there were a passel of the brother's kids and in-laws that all made the rabbit hunt. And you better know nick-names, because few of those guys went by their real names. Popeye, Feller, Boideaux, Big Billy Goat Gruff (Big Billy for short), Pookie, Caboose for a few of them.
Festivities usually started at 8AM sharp, at a predetermined site. That gave all the daddies and grandpas a chance to see the little ones open up their gifts from Santa, then throw on their hunting clothes and grab a shotgun. Popeye used his dogs, a pack of seven or eight beagles, and that made him the master of the hunt. We went where he said, and we did what we were told. A lot safer that way.
We always made accommodations for Boideaux (boy-doo). He'd gotten his back broke, falling off of a light pole, so he was confined to a wheelchair. Can't run a wheelchair through the woods, and this was before the day of ATV's, so the boys had rebuilt a Wheelhorse and put little tractor tires on it. With that many guys, we just horsed it on and out of the pickup (who needs ramps?). At least he had a scabbard for his shotgun.
We'd usually hunt thickets, maybe in a cut-over. Sometimes we'd hunt old homeplaces, with their growed-up fence rows and little patches of woods between fields. It was usually a sight to behold...A bunch of pickups parked along side a road, the beagles boiling out of their cages and milling around everybody's feet, somebody building a fire and boiling coffee grounds in ancient old blue graniteware coffeepot. We've had days when it didn't feel like Christmas, the kind of days in the Gulf South when a warm front rolls in and everybody can hunt in t-shirts. Other days, it would be crisp and cold, with a blanket of frost making the thickets look like they were topped with a coat of diamonds in the early morning sun.
The beagles would work their way through those thickets and briar patches, tails wagging in the wind like the semaphore signals on a ship and you could tell when they'd hit a hot trail. The yips would get more excited and you could tell which way the rabbit was headed, by which way the dogs turned...yip, yip, Yip, YIP, Oorhh, OORHH!...Boys, get ready, h'yar he comes! Look fer him! BAM! Or maybe, BAM!, BAM!.
Lord help you if you missed. Standard rules applied. You were getting your shirt-tail cut off, just like on a deer hunt. Worse, shoot your rabbit too close, especially a gut-shot. You would be pilloried for your poor marksmanship, deemed unfit for association (at least for the next five minutes) and you'd be forced to hang your rabbit in a sapling for all to see. Game laws were strictly ignored. If you saw a deer, you shot it. If you had a chance at a wood duck, you killed it. We'll worry about how to sneak it home after the hunt.
We might work one side of the road and then cross over to the other side. We might make a big loop if we were hunting a bigger tract. The only constant was the yammering of the beagles, the calls of one man to another, the sound of the old Wheelhorse making its way through the woods and the sound of Popeye blowing on his old cowhorn, trying to call his dogs back in.
We'd shut down about 11 o'clock. It gave us time to skin the rabbits...Again, God help you if you "haired" one up. Your knife skills would definitely be called into question...and drink a cup of hot coffee. Talk was typically what you'd hear country men talk about..."Junior, you gonna have enough hay to make the winter?". "Pookie, how big was that barrow you killed this week?" "Did y'all hear about that 14-point that Ephraim killed down in the swamp? Now, THAT was a deer!" And what not. After the rabbits were skinned, they all went to Popeye, since he provided the dogs and scouted out the place to hunt.
Good times, good people. Ain't nobody left from those days less than their late 40's. Some are in their 80's. Several have done gone on...Feller, BBGF, Boideaux, to name a few. The Christmas rabbit hunt is no more. Harder to find a place to do that kind of hunt, anyway. Too darn many people.
But sometimes...Sometimes I prop up in my old Lay-Z-Boy this time of year with a cup of fresh-brewed coffee in a battered old tin cup and I think I hear the excited sounds of that chop-mouthed lemon beagle of Popeye's, or hear him tooting away on that stubby old cow horn of his, trying to round his dogs back up. And I can see in my mind the brothers laughing at Boideaux, because he'd gotten the Wheelhorse stuck and him cussing a blue streak, while his brothers let him stay there until they got good and ready to push him out. Or the time we hid a doe behind his truck seat, since no game warden would make a crippled man drag himself out of the truck cab just to check behind the seat.
Those were good times. Good times, indeed.
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“I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.” ~Winston S. Churchill
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Great stories well told. I think of the meadows and hills and ponds and creeks we had to roam and fish in as a kid, to play baseball in. I do not envy today’s children who seldom if ever have that chance to roam free.
When my MIL was canning or working on something meticulous like sewing, she'd lock my wife and her brother out of the house in the morning. Go play, and don't bother me until dinner (that's noontime down here).
So they'd play in the woods, swim in the pond, fly a homemade kite or maybe wander over next door, because the neighbors had horses. My wife would have stroked if our kids had been out of pocket for three or four hours, doing God-knows-what.
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Great stories well told. I think of the meadows and hills and ponds and creeks we had to roam and fish in as a kid, to play baseball in. I do not envy today’s children who seldom if ever have that chance to roam free.
Great stories indeed.
We moved specifically because we wanted our daughter to grow up this way. To modern family lifestyles I say fuck 'em, they suck. Fuck the supervised playdates, the appeasement Carplay apps and the damn tupperware playgrounds with police presence and callboxes.
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“I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.” ~Winston S. Churchill
