By the time you read this, the snow will likely be gone, and I will have eaten the last fried rabbit of the winter. If you don’t eat a fried rabbit or two each winter, you aren’t living right. There were so many of them when I was a kid, and from December until February, rabbits and quail kept many a farm family well fed. Eating rabbits makes you sharp-eyed and hones your reflexes. Rabbit meat makes you more resistant to the cold, and it makes your legs stronger. We were watching a college basketball game the other day and you could tell that those players descended from rabbit hunting families. If you see really short-legged people who can’t take the cold it is because they haven’t hunted rabbits enough.
I can’t see as well as I once could, and can’t walk nearly as fast or as far, and my reflexes aren’t as good. I blame that on the fact that each year I hunt and eat fewer rabbits. Correspondingly, I think eating more fish, as I seem to be doing as I get older, gives a person arthritic elbows and sore shoulders. The fish I catch are awfully big! I have noticed something about my fishing buddies… the more they fish, they more they stretch the truth. I think eating fish causes that too but it hasn’t happened to me yet.
Up here on Lightnin’ Ridge, where I live, there is a little rough-edged road coming up to my house. As I drive up that little rocky hill, I have a garden off to the left of the drive, about the only open place on this whole oak-hickory ridge-top. At night this time of year, especially when there’s some snow, I often see four or five cottontails cavorting and playing around my garden, getting ready for the mating season. In the moonlight, I sometimes watch them running and jumping over one another. That isn’t necessarily because they know they’ll be eating my green beans in a few months. That leap-frogging is a mating ritual, indicating how close spring must be.
There are more rabbits here because of my Labrador, keeping coyotes and foxes and bobcats away from my place. A great horned owl is not so leery, and he quite often roosts in a big oak right beside my office. I lose a rabbit or two to that owl and his mate, and they get some flying squirrels too. But it is the way it is. God created all things, great and small, gentle and fierce, and he sees value in all wild things. That gives me hope, as I use to be a little wild. But not anymore… I have quit howling at the coyotes and shooting at house cats and I haven’t been out running and jumping in the snow in quite a few years. I envy those rabbits!
On a poetic note… Soon the wicked winter will slide from the budding limbs of redbud and wild plum and fall gently into the warm crevices of March, as blooming forsythia and jonquils herald its welcome demise. Sometimes I get to writing stuff like that and feel like Carl Sandburg! I hope I am right about all that. There are things I can’t figure out, and some of them are important. How does the road-runner bird I saw recently survive our winters up here, when he is carnivorous, and never known to eat an acorn, and how do people who sell propane gas in February for those kinds of prices get a good night’s sleep?
I don’t think about things like that much when spring comes, as I am too busy hunting turkeys and morels and fishing. It is winter that makes you know if you are independent. I don’t need the things city people need. Here on Lightnin’ Ridge I have a crosscut saw and a fireplace and canned goods from the garden and a spring for water. I don’t need electricity or gas or a super market. But I sure as heck do need April! I can’t wait to grow tomatoes and cucumbers and green beans, and fill the freezer with wild turkey and fish. And Carl Sandburg couldn’t do that, even if he was a better poet!
I received this letter from a reader, Lyndell Williams. It is a chance for all of us to help a young hunter wrongfully accused…and robbed!
My son Wiley, an 11-year-old who loves the outdoors, shot a massive 421-pound black bear on our family land in Missouri. The Department of Conservation seized Wiley’s bear, accusing us of wrongdoing despite no charges against him. We fought back, but the judge ruled against us. Now, we’re seeking to appeal this decision, but the legal costs are overwhelming. We need your support to help us reclaim what’s rightfully Wiley’s. Any contribution, no matter how small, will bring us one step closer to justice. Thank you for standing with us during this difficult time. We have set up a gofund me account to help with the thousands of dollars this appeal will cost. If you want to help contact me at …lyndellwilliams49@gmail.com
