Up on A Stump

THE BELOVED COTTONTAIL

By Horace Gore

Igrew up rabbit hunting in Bowie County, Texas. My grandmother gave me a $6.15 Sears Roebuck single shot .22 for my 12th birthday, and one of the first things I brought home with it was a cottontail rabbit. Joe Ed Scudder and I went hunting in the flat woods north of Hooks where I tried out my new .22. My English cocker pointed the rabbit, and when it broke the brush, I got a clean shot.

Joe Ed and I took the rabbit home, skinned it, and cut it up to fry. My mother turned the kitchen over to us, and I fried the cottontail to a golden brown. The trouble came when I made the cream gravy, one of thousands of batches I’ve made since. I did everything right—put grease in the skillet, put flour in the grease, added a little salt and pepper, but when I poured the milk, I didn’t get it right and the gravy was so thick it wouldn’t come out of the spoon. But it was no problem for 12-year-olds, and we enjoyed a fine cottontail dinner. I have killed and eaten many cottontail rabbits since that first one, and I’m here to say cottontails are some of the finest eating in the wild.

Like squirrel hunting, rabbit hunting is a thing of the past. Today’s teenagers have their cell phones and iPads, and by the time they turn 16, most are driving a car or pickup and chasing girls. They don’t have the time, or inclination, to go rabbit hunting. The rabbits are still there, and if the time comes to go back to basics, rabbit hunting will furnish a lot of

Brooke and Hunter Shipman with “eating” cottontails.

Jason Shipman photo

thrills for young people.

Jerry Barrow, a friend who lived on a farm north of Hooks, had an old Army Jeep that we drove to go rabbit hunting at night. We would drive around on the farm and down the gravel roads, shooting every rabbit we saw. Most of the time we used a 16-gauge shotgun, and some of the rabbits were big swamp rabbits that weighed 3-4 pounds. It was a financial deal because we would take the rabbits to “Black Bottom” and sell them to the folks for 50 cents for cottontails and $1 each for swamp rabbits. On a good night, we might make $4 to $6, which paid for Jeep gas and more shotgun shells.

Cottontail rabbit and swamp rabbit have white meat with a rather sweet taste. Fried rabbit, cream gravy, and a side of cut green beans seasoned with bacon grease is hard to beat—especially if topped with hot biscuits. Such a meal was regular fare for a lot of people I grew up with in East Texas. There are other good recipes: rabbit stew, rabbit mulligan, baked rabbit and sweet potatoes, broiled rabbit, and when camping out—rabbit on a stick, over an open fire.

Back in the 1990s, when I lived on the Kokernot Ranch in Gonzales County, Al Brothers and I went to a QDMA Convention in Athens, Georgia, on several occasions. Our good friend, Dr. Larry Marchinton, was a rabbit hunter par excellence, who had a pack of beagles. While we were there, Larry took us on a few cottontail hunts I still remember. On one occasion, with snow on the ground, we hunted in some timber-cleared country. In all my years, it was my first time to hunt rabbits with beagle hounds. Like a lot of rednecks, the sound of dogs chasing their quarry raises the hair on my neck.

On another occasion, we hunted in an area near a creek bottom strewn with blackberry vines so thick you couldn’t walk through them. We put on coats to keep the briars away, and hunted in the blackberry thickets. Cottontails were plentiful, and we—and the dogs—ended up with four or five cottontails that eventually went into a 5-gallon rabbit mulligan stew, which fed a crowd of Georgia Bulldog fans back in Athens.

On the hunt with the dogs in the blackberry thickets, I learned something about dogs and cottontails. The beagles never give up, and the rabbit either finds a hole in the ground or a hollow tree for escape, or finally runs out of gas. When the rabbit can’t run any more, he will lay there and squeal, knowing the dogs are coming. I didn’t like that.

There have been a lot of arguments about eating rabbits. People talk about “rabbit fever,” and I guess some of it may be true. I have killed and eaten many rabbits in my time, and have never seen a rabbit with fever. The old wives’ tale of eating rabbits during months with an “R” seems practical, because the eight months with an R are in fall, winter, and early spring, which is the best time to hunt and eat rabbits. I always figured if a rabbit ran fast to get away, it wasn’t sick with anything.

Distribution of cottontails is wide. Several species of cottontails, exist, but our Eastern cottontail can be found from the East Coast to the Great Plains. Cottontails are rather secretive, hiding during the day and coming out at dusk. Weather patterns control populations, and wet years mean more rabbits all over Texas. While studying bobwhite quail in my young days as a wildlife biologist, I discovered rabbits and bobwhites follow the same patterns with rainfall. The more rain, the more quail and rabbits, but with drought you’ll have fewer.

It’s safe to say the days of rabbit hunting in the U.S. have come and gone. The interest isn’t there, the need isn’t there, and more people are urban, and not associated with rabbit hunting. You’ll hear a few rural kids talk about hunting rabbits, but they hardly ever talk about eating rabbits. My thinking is rabbit hunting could keep a lot of kids off the street and out of trouble. If I could, I would declare a national rabbit hunting day, where all high school kids had to go rabbit hunting somewhere one day each year. I would even name the beagle hound the national rabbit dog. What do you think?

author photo

Dr. Larry Marchinton (right) releasing the beagles for a rabbit hunt near Athens, Georgia.