The sporting side of the Messer household boasted, to the eternal vexation of the perpetual busybody who insisted on dubbing herself “Caring Karen,” ownership of a veritable bevy of hunting dogs. There were pointers for dealing with quail, a Lab to handle retrieving duties when doves or ducks were being hunted, and always a brace or more of beagles. The man of the house may have been a bit of a pantywaist at times and the subject of often derisive verbal henpecking pretty much constantly. But his good nature and extraordinary patience had their limits, and the matter of hunting dogs was well to the forefront in that regard. His acid-tongued wife had long since learned her boundaries in that regard. Questions about or objections to the ownership of staunch canine companions was a subject she realized, early in her marriage, was off limits.
For his part, young Mollygrubs thoroughly enjoyed venturing afield with all members of the family kennel, but for all the stylishness of the English pointers and the good-natured enthusiasm of Labs, beagles were his favorite. Maybe he liked the fact that their rabbits were plentiful and predictable, or perhaps he enjoyed the “common man” nature of taking to the cottontail trail. He definitely identified with the humble nature of beagles and even mirrored their good nature and tolerance in his own approach to life. Perhaps most of all, Mollygrubs realized that beagles were, like him, sort of perpetual underdogs.
From the point when rabbit season opened on Thanksgiving weekend right through until its end on the final day of February, he hunted cottontails at every change. Sometimes it was with buddies from school, sometimes just him and a brace or trio of dogs, and on weekends larger parties that included not only his hunting friends but the senior male Messer and one or two other adults. Snow days, when roads were too treacherous for bus travel, were always a blessing, because that meant freedom from classroom tedium and the opportunity to wander, from dawn until dusk, over ground within walking distance of home.
There were banner days with some frequency, ones where scenting conditions were optimal and the dogs performed admirably. Collective bags of a dozen or more rabbits were fairly common when a large group of hunters to the fields and woods, and once in awhile the part would bag as many as a full score of cottontails. On other occasions, usually after a dry spell or wind adversely affected the dogs’ ability to trail or when it seemed almost every rabbit jumped almost immediately ran to a convenient groundhog hole or, once in awhile, actually “treed.” Rabbits may not be able to climb, but they can work their way up a hollow tree for a distance of several feet.
Usually rabbits that took these escape routes were left to live another day and run another race, but on one particular hunt involving Mollygrubs and three of his school buddies, things took a different turn. With the sole exception of one rabbit “killed on the jump,” every cottontail almost immediately ran into a groundhog burrow. After this had happened a half dozen times or more, Mollygrubs decided the situation demanded drastic measures.
On two occasions he had seen adult hunters “twist” a rabbit out of a hole using a long, slender sapling with just the right balance between flexibility and rigidity. The idea was to poke the stick down the hole until there was contact with the rabbit and then exert a fair amount of pressure while rotating the end of the stick against its fur. Once an amount of twisting sufficient to hold the stick’s tip in place, the stick was slowly pulled out until a hunter could run his arm down the hole and get a grip on the cottontail.
He was the procedure Mollygrubs followed, and it worked well at the outset. He was able to reach the rabbit, knowing from the sense of movement conveyed up the stick that he had done so, and he twisted away with a will. Moreover, when he began to pull the stick out the struggling rabbit left no doubt there was a firm connection. When the seemingly clever Nimrod felt the rabbit had been pulled far enough for him to reach it, Mollygrubs handed the twisting stick to a buddy so he could run his arm down the hole and grasp his quarry.
The position was an awkward one, since the hole was underneath a large tree that had fallen over, and Mollygrubs had to crawl beneath the trunk in order to run his arm underground. It was at that point things went awry. He managed to reach the rabbit and was struggling to get a good hold on it when the panicked animal, normally the essence of timidity, bit him. In fact, it didn’t merely bite; the cottontail used the teeth normally employed in stripping bark from bushes in plum thickets or cutting off small sticks at a 45-degree angle to telling effect. It chomped down on the hapless lad’s index finger in telling, painful fashion, and Mollygrubs’ reaction made things worse.
He recoiled in pain, yelling as he did so, only to give his noggin so a solid a whack on the trunk of the downed tree beneath which he had crawled that he almost knocked himself out. Staggered to his feet in a daze condition, he incredulously yelled: “That rabbit attacked me!” Of course the episode, suitably embellished by his companions, was THE topic of conversation at Stony Lonesome High School when classes resumed on Monday. Poor Mollygrubs had a knot on his head, a bandage on his finger, and a tale of woe that would trail him as surely as a talented beagle on a cottontail’s trail for years to come. One suspects that, long after he reached adulthood, the woebegone lad grown older found little if any consolation in the spring, 1979 incident involving President Jimmy Carter the press labeled “the killer rabbit attack.” Maybe he took some small degree of solace in being in the rarified company of those who had seen a decidedly different side of Br’er Rabbit.
Jim Casada is the Editor at Large for Sporting Classics. To learn more about him or sign up for his free monthly e-newsletter, visit his website at www.jimcasadaoutdoors.com.