
FOREST 
Vol. XCIV No. 3 


STREAM 
March - 1924 
Tales of Rabbits 
Stories by Men Whose Boyhood Memories of Bobbing Cotton Tails 
and Voices of Hounds Have Followed Them Down Thru the Years 
Their First Rabbit 
By WALTER D. EDMUNDS, JR. 
ITTLE JOSH leaned on his shot- 
L gun and stooped to peer beneath 
the heavy balsam bows that swept 
the ground all about him. The moon 
and the new-fallen snow combined in a 
ghostly, shimmering whiteness. that 
made the boy feel very much alone. 
The fir trees that hemmed him in were 
full of moving shadows which crouched 
as if to spring on him from behind or 
stalked openly upon him from in front. 
Josh’s eyes were fixed upon the indefi- 
nite white line of the old lumber road 
on which he stood. He bent his brows 
in fierce determination, for he felt a 
nameless fear which he dared not ad- 
mit to himself. 
The full moon, rich and mellow and 
placid, cleared the spear points of the 
balsams and sailed serenely into the 
concourse of waiting stars. The shad- 
ows about the boy retreated slightly 
and he breathed more freely. He threw 
his gun to his shoulder and aimed at 
| imaginary game. Seriously, as if the 
pantomime were real, he _ hurried 
through the motions of reloading, put 
the gun under one arm, and trudged 
heavily on through the snow. 
He should have been home long be- 
fore; but the jibes of Hank, the hired 
man, had become too much for him, and 
his father’s remarks were nearly as 
difficult to bear. Ever since he had ac- 
“nocke Dandy he had heard nothing but 
A 

mockery of the puppy’s ability and of 
his own. If he could only have brought 
‘back a cotton-tail or a year-old hare, 
‘they would have had nothing to say. 
But Dandy had not been able to hang 
to the trails of the rabbits long enough 
to make them circle back to Josh. 
| OF course, Hank had reckoned Dandy 
a “right smart little beagle-dog,” 
but the hired man had refused to give 
him the coveted epithet of “beagle- 
hound” until he had had one rabbit shot 
over him. In vain had Josh wept and 
Drayed to all the gods he knew. The 
Page 133 
rabbits had refused to be seen. He had 
told tremendous tales of the puppy’s 
runs, but they were not believed, which 
was to be expected, as Josh, in his en- 
thusiasm, endowed Dandy with all the 
virtues of a paragon of full-grown 
beagle-hounds, and Dandy was but five 
months old. 
That afternoon, in desperation, little 
Josh had taken the shotgun—an an- 
cient weapon, with a prodigiously long 
barrel, almost as heavily built as that 
of a rifle, and with a second trigger, 
with which to break the gun, half way 

FLEET OF FOOT AND SURTIVE, THE 
RABBIT FAMILY ALU, FROM SHY 
MOLLY COTTON TAiL TO GREAT 
BOUNDING HARE, HOLDS THE 
SPORTSMAN’S ADMIRATION 
down the stock—had whistled Dandy 
to him, and had sailed into the woods. 
The first heavy snow of the autumn 
was on the ground, and Josh’s hopes 
were high. 
All afternoon they had hunted with- 
out success, despite the many tracks of 
the preceding night that stared them in 
the face. The sun had set before they 
knew it and now they were coming 
home in the dark. Though he would 
never have admitted it, Josh was un- 
easy. That afternoon at dinner Hank 
had said there were bear-tracks in the 
wood-lot and had warned him about 
staying out after dark, and Josh, all 
agog at the thought, had drunk it in 
word for word. Therefore he gazed 
alertly about him as he passed through 
the thickest of the balsams and held the 
old gun ready. 
HE points of the balsams stood out 
piercingly in serried ranks against 
the star-strewn panoply of the sky, hal- 
lowed by the glory of the moon. The 
bare alder tangle, awful and gray as 
the “third spectre,” emphasized the 
weird sense of stillness that filled his 
very soul. He felt alone, defenseless, 
in the presence of he knew not what. 
For a moment he wanted to run for 
home. 
Far to his left, deep in the heart of 
the swamp, rose the bark of a dog. He 
glanced quickly behind him and caught 
his breath. Dandy was gone. Again 
he heard that bark—again. Then, for 
a moment, the silence remained un- 
broken. 
Without warning a_ high-pitched 
slither of jumbled notes broke out and 
a wild hullaballoo rose in the face of 
the moon. Josh could hardly believe 
his ears. With a suppressed whoop he 
ran back to the clump of balsams, 
through which he had just passed, and 
gazed along the road, down which, he 
felt sure, the rabbit would run. 
The first deep bark of Dandy had 
changed to a childish treble pipe—in- 
coherent and pitifully thin, but terribly 
determined. The cataract of sound 
grew fainter and fainter in the dis- 
tance and at length the silence of. the 
night swallowed it completely. Little 
Josh stared up the trail with all his 
eyes, though he knew he need not expect 
a sight of the rabbit for some time. He 
feared the puppy would lose the tracks, 
he doubted his own ability to kill. 
HE aimed at a shadow, yet when he 
saw the barrel before him, the 
shadow was gone, and when the shadow 
reappeared, the barrel had vanished. 
He had heard Ack Andrews say time 
and again that a man can see but one 
thing at a time in’ the moonlight, 
Contents Copyrighted by Forest and Stream Pub, Co, 
