Hunting hares in the “old world”

 

“Small is beautiful,” preached E. F. Schumacher. And we, my father and I, followed this idea and have continued to follow it for many years, from my grade school years to our older ages together.

My neighbor, a quarter mile down the county road, is from the “old world.” We got to talking about snowshoe hares and rabbits and how he used to trap them back in the old world. I told him that when I was very young, I used to trap cottontails in the winters down in Wisconsin.

He smiled and said he wasn’t talking about snaring the occasional coney or two for mom’s frying pan. He was talking about stretching great long nets, a pitch in length, across the fields and across the heather, and how the men drivers would beat the shrubs and the fields and heather and bush and drive the coneys ahead of them! And then up the boys’d pulled the nets! Taut! And it wasn’t one or two bounding hares but dozens, and they weren’t for mom’s frying pan, but for the fancy restaurants in Paris and all of France.

And so I was put in my place, the scope of our rabbit snaring being so small, and our vision and reward so little.

In the summers, my father and I would go quietly into the pine plantation and cut popple with his grass machete from Vietnam and build a brush pile. We stacked the slashings in a small space between the fifteen-year-old pines. The following winter the cottontails would come and feed on the succulent green bark of our popple pile.

Or we’d go under the oaks in the oak savannah and build great brush piles of dead wood and fallen limbs. The cottontails would use the brush piles as warrens, protective mazes against the sly foxes and bandit coon and wicked, wicked farm cats.

Then in the winter, we’d go back in on our Michigan snowshoes and visit the brush piles, and on a well-traveled rabbit run in and out, set a snare or two of picture-hanging wire. My father called it “harvesting” – having sowed and now reaping.

We operated on such a small scale, and I hope that I still do. The cottontail, to me, is more beautiful than the jackrabbit.