Hunting Season: Rabbits 1, Hunters 0

I might be the only male resident of Michigan who is not spending these early days of November stockpiling ammunition and Slim Jims in anticipation of deer season. It’s not that I object to hunting; I just don’t care to do it. And I don’t have anything bad to say about hunters. Of course, this is partly because I make it a rule never say anything bad about people with guns.

I think most of my reluctance to blast woodland creatures goes back to when I was about twelve years old and my dad, also not a hunter, decided to take me out to shoot some rabbits. Two things made him decide to do this:

1.     He had inherited a single-shot 12-gauge shotgun from his Grandfather, who had told him that it was good for rabbit hunting.

2.     He believed that that we could probably figure out what to do with some rabbits if we happened to get any.

So one bright Saturday morning my dad handed me a burlap bag for “the kill” and a small red box of shotgun shells, A.K.A., “the bullets”. Then he piled me, the shotgun, and our dog, a plump little brown female mutt named Scamp, into his white Volkswagen Beetle and we headed out. Scamp kept watch with her head out the window, alertly smashing bugs with her nose and forehead.

We were going to hunt on land belonging to a man my dad knew, a place reportedly so rich in rabbits that, “…you can’t throw a stick without hitting one.” We were bringing Scamp along to “flush” rabbits, and the gun just in case we couldn’t find any sticks to throw.

It had not occurred to my dad that most hunting dogs receive some sort of training, and that Scamp might not have any idea how to “flush” anything more cunning than a French fry. As soon as we opened the car door, the dog bolted out and vanished into the waist-deep weeds. We stood there expectantly waiting for her to reappear. Nothing. Not a whisper of movement. Not a bark. Nothing.

“Maybe she had a heart attack,” I said.

“She’s sneaking up on them,” my dad replied authoritatively. “She’ll be flushing them any second.” Then a look of panic came over his face. “Hey, there’s no bullets in the gun! Quick, get me a bullet!”

I dove into the car and lunged for the box of shells I had left on the dash, launching it in an arcing trajectory onto the floor, so that the lid popped open and the shells scattered under the driver’s seat. As I flopped around the car fishing for ammunition, my dad provided words of encouragement;

“I gave you the bullets and said ‘hang onto the bullets’ didn’t I? I don’t remember telling you to dump the bullets under the seat. Do you remember me telling you to dump the bullets under the seat? Now we’re going to be up to our butts in rabbits and all the bullets are under the seat…”

He froze at the sound of violent rustling in the weeds, a sound that might be made by hundreds of rabbits being “flushed” by a fat little brown dog. At the same moment my hand closed around a shell. “Here you go,” I shouted, lobbing it in his direction. The shell sailed past his ear and into the weeds.

“Ok, I missed that one,” he said. “Next time you find a bullet, hand it to me.”

I located another shell under the floor mat, ran over and slapped it into his hand. He cracked the barrel of the gun, rammed the shell in place, snapped the barrel shut, aimed and fired.

You know, a 12-gauge shotgun is a lot louder than you might think. My father was a large man, and physically strong, but the combination of recoil and surprise knocked him off his feet and onto the seat of his pants. As for me, I just threw my hands over my head and fell heroically to the ground. After a few stunned seconds my father said, “Are you shot?”

“No. How about you?”

“I don’t think so.”

We got up and looked in the direction he had been aiming, to see a sort of crater torn into the weeds. We walked tentatively toward it, expecting, I suppose, to find a bunch of little rabbit pot roasts all bundled up and ready to cook. Instead, we found Scamp lying in the weeds.

“Oh my God, I shot the dog,” my dad said.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “There’s not a scratch on her.” We discussed my earlier heart attack theory for awhile, and were just wondering just how much dog we could jam into a burlap body bag, when she seemed to revive. She was pretty annoyed, but in perfect health.

After a lot of debate on the way home, we decided that all the noise was just the dog prancing through the weeds, and that she had simply fainted when the load of buckshot whistled over her head.

Scamp went on to live a long and increasingly corpulent life, never again stalking anything larger than a cricket and spending thunderstorms and all holidays involving fireworks hunkered down under a bed.

The “bullets” were all eventually recovered from the Volkswagen, and they now sit, more than thirty years later, safely back in their red box on a shelf in my basement. I’m not real sure where the shotgun is.

And the rabbits of the world are safe - at least from me.

Copyright © 2009, Michael Ball

What I've Learned So Far... by Mike Ball is a syndicated weekly feature. If you enjoy this work, please contact your local newspaper's editors, give them a link to What I've Learned So Far... and ask them to carry it.