Rabbit Hunting with My Boys Every Day of Christmas Break

This story originally ran in the December 1963 issue of Outdoor Life under the title “Christmas Hasenpfeffer.”

Some mornings are made for hound-dog music and this one in late December was as perfect for it as any I can remember. Snow covered the central Ohio countryside so that it resembled a wintry scene straight out of Currier & Ives. And it was cold enough to make a man appreciate his insulated boots and fur-lined mittens. But the scene, the cold, and the snow were forgotten when our dog Homer suddenly found a red-hot rabbit track and started excitedly to chase the bunny in our direction.

“Pick out a stand,” I shouted to my sons, Park and Bobby, but the advice wasn’t necessary. I saw Park shift to his right to take a stand beside a thick multiflora rose field border. At the same time, Bobby climbed onto the trunk of a fallen elm tree which afforded him a good view of the black berry thicket all around him.

Homer was pouring on the fuel. The rabbit decided to run rather than dodge into heavy cover, and it sounded as if the little beagle was breathing right down its neck. Finally the rabbit had to break out within range of one of our guns, and the next thing I heard was Bobby’s 20 gauge crack once … twice … and that was it.

“Did you get him?” I called.

But before Bobby could answer, Homer opened up again and I knew that the bunny managed to squirt past Bobby and now was heading toward the next county. What followed, though, was the kind of chase to make a beagle owner proud. The rabbit changed it stactics. Instead of running at high speed, it turned into a dense plantation of Scotch pines and dodged about until the dog was completely confused. Then it zipped out into the open again.

Homer had a tough time of it for a few minutes. Besides the rabbit he was following, the ground beneath the pines was a maze of tracks made by other rabbits earlier in the morning. But somehow the little beagle sifted out the fresh tracks and soon was in full cry again. In the language of hound-dog men, Homer is a blabbermouth. That means he has a sort of hysterical, high-pitched yodel on the trail that you can hear from far away. This morning, you could hear Homer all the way to the end of the thicket, at which point the rabbit turned north and the dog followed like a shadow at long range.

At first it seemed the rabbit would have to pass near me because I saw it coming while still far out of range. But suddenly it swung to the left, switched into high gear, and ran right toward Parker. I saw the boy raise his Browning over-and-under, hesitate, and then fire the 12 gauge. A minute later he was holding up the bunny while Homer, excited as a puppy, jumped up and tried to reach it.

“Here’s your hasenpfeffer,” Park called to me.

That same happy scene was reenacted several times before the day was over. We found enough rabbits and we had enough shooting to make it an occasion we wouldn’t forget for a long time. It was also the beginning of a wonderful week of hunting which I’d promised the boys on Christmas, 1961, when Bobby was 12 and Park was 15. Bobby had received a three-monthsold beagle pup as his Christmas gift. He named the dog Homer-Hungry Homer is his official name in the registers of the American Kennel Club—and announced that he personally would train the beagle.

“By next Christmas,” he promised, “Homer will be the best rabbit dog in town.”

“If he’ll just run rabbits at all,” I answered, “we’ll hunt every day of the Christmas holidays next year.”

I’d made the promise for two reasons. For one thing, with open seasons as short as they are, a father doesn’t get to hunt with his sons often so long as they’re still in school. For another, I like rabbit hunting. I’ve been lucky enough to hunt around the world, from Texas to Tanganyika and back, but winter cottontail hunting still gives me a big thrill. Maybe my love for cottontail hunting is part nostalgia because I can remember my own first hunting trips. At that time, we could find rabbits at the ends of the electric streetcar lines in Cincinnati. After the hunt was over, my mother, who was German, would plunk the bunnies into a rich spicy liquor and later cook hasenpfeffer-spiced rabbit and dumplings. I never could get enough of it. Even though we have to travel a bit farther to find game nowadays (the rabbits around my suburban Columbus, Ohio, home are protected by a city ordinance), I promised the boys that the hasenpfeffer would be the same.

Read Next: A Christmas Gift, From the Archives

All summer and into early fall, Bobby worked with his puppy. First, he tied a duck wing to a practice casting plug, then he would cast the whole thing across our lawn and encourage Homer to chase it as he retrieved it. I’m convinced that this greatly stimulated the pup’s desire to hunt at a tender age.

Next, Bobby would run a barefoot path through the neighborhood and encourage the dog to track him. It was a strange sight to see a beagle running and howlingafter a boy, but it worked. The first time he jumped a live rabbit one day in early fall, he ran it like a veteran beagle. Many evenings after school, Bobby and I would also take the dog to a nearby thicket where we would enjoy a chase or two before dinner. This was the best experience of all.

But the most carefully laid plans can go awry. On November 8, a week before the opening of our Ohio rabbit season, Bobby and I drove to a woodlot north of Columbus for a practice run. But a couple of hunters were jumping the gun-hunting before season and one of them mistook Homer for a rabbit and shot him and then deserted the scene. When we found Homer, he was a sad, bloody mess.

Bobby was crushed, and there’s no describing how I felt as we carried the whimpering dog to a veterinarian. But it was a tremendous relief when we learned that the wounds were only superficial. By shaving Homer’s rear end, much against his wishes, the vet found that one pellet had passed through his leg and six others were embedded in his rump.

“He’ll probably be O.K. in a week or two,” the vet said. “But I doubt if he’ll do much hunting. I figure he’ll be gun-shy.”

A Beagle’s First Season

Both of us were happy enough just to have Homer alive. And when we dressed in the familiar boots and canvas hunting pants on opening day, we got a great surprise. The dog was wild to go along. When we left him behind, he whined pitifully and tried to claw his way through the door. Finally I relented.

“Let’s take him along,” I told Bobby, “and see what happens.”

What happened was a heart-warming experience. The dog’s performance was limping and slow, but he hadn’t lost a bit of his enthusiasm for chasing cottontails. And I doubt if he even heard the considerable shooting we did over his head that day. Except for being very tired and sore, he was as good as ever. Christmas morning, 1962, produced another surprise for Bobby. He received his first gun, a Stevens 20-gauge double-barreled shotgun, and I got the impression he couldn’t have been more pleased with $1,000,000.

“Santa Claus must’ve been reading my mind,” he said.

The day after Christmas, as I said before, was made to order for beagles and rabbit hunters with rabbit-hunting sons. We had a great time of it. But whereas I was tired after a whole day of tramping across Franklin County’s snow-covered real estate, the boys weren’t really warmed up.

“Where are we going tomorrow?” Bobby asked on the way home.

“Let’s try that spot in Morrow County,” Park suggested, “where we found all the rabbits last year.”

“This week is on me,” I answered wearily. “You just say where.”

Morrow County is a prosperous agricultural country with neat, cozy farmhouses, and it’s out of that portion of Ohio which is so intensively developed. Fertile croplands are interspersed with farm woodlots, and here and there some of the old buttonbush swamps are undrained. I’ve hunted several locations in the county, but one of my favorites is Hobe Sanderson’s farm. That’s where Park and I had discovered a good concentration of cottontails in a 100-acre sugar maple and blackberry thicket. It isn’t easy to hunt-the briers clutch at your clothing and trip you up—but I’ve found that some of the toughest rabbit habitat is also the best.

It was even colder than the morning after Christmas when we parked my station wagon beside an old cattle gate, filled the pockets of our hunting coats with shells, and started out on foot. I was using a Remington Model 870 12-gauge pump. The car radio announced it was 10°F , and it felt like it. But Park, Bobby, and the dog didn’t seem to notice it at…