By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, October 27, 1934.
“These bear rugs,” said Jimmie Frise, “make this open job of yours a very nice little car.”
“Yes,” I admitted. “Considering it is four years old. But an open car is the only car for a sportsman.”
We were headed out for the country on a rabbit hunt. Our friend Eddie, who owns hounds, was to meet us at one of those big swamps beyond Fergus.
“A sportsman,” opined Jimmie, “has a pretty comfortable life, take it all around.”
“Yet it has its dangers,” I pointed out. “To the casual spectator, seeing us bowling along comfortably smothered in fur rugs, and in our snappy mackinaw clothes, it might look like a life of ease. But consider the hard work we do, the tramping for miles across fields, the struggling through dangerous swamps, and then the guns. Don’t forget the guns. The dangers of carrying firearms and shooting them off, that’s the peril.”
“Sport is not sport,” said Jim, “if it has no element of danger or risk in it.”
“Is golf sport?” I asked.
“Well, you might get hit by a golf ball.”
“Sport,” I said, “in its truest sense, is doomed. You can’t shoot live pigeons any more. As a little boy, I recall attending live bird shoots and seeing my uncle bang down a hundred pigeons without a miss as they were released from a trap. We can’t enjoy that any more. Little by little, all the sturdier forms of sport are being slowly strangled. When I first went deer hunting, we could kill two deer each, and we had a month open season. Now we have twelve days to kill one, and we aren’t allowed to use hounds to chase them to us.”
“The world is getting more humane,” said Jim.
“But all the time it is becoming more humane toward wild animals,” I protested, “the more cruel the world is becoming toward men. More human beings have been shot, murdered, mangled, tortured and gassed in the past twenty-five years of the reform of sport than in the previous thousand years of stag hunting, bull baiting and cock fighting. It looks to me as if man, being denied the outlet of killing animals and birds, has turned his attention to his own species.”
“You’re a swell theorist,” admitted Jimmie.
“A man is entitled to a little danger, a little violence,” I continued. “You can’t suppress it. You can’t cut it out of him with a surgical instrument. Sooner or later, we are going to have to go back over the past five hundred years of reform and do it all over again by taking into account the true character of human nature.”
“Well,” said Jimmie, “we still have a little rabbit hunting left.”
“Sure, but now you can only get a gun license from September 1 to April 30,” I corrected. “And every year the farmers are putting more restrictions on us. You wait. Inside of a few years, we won’t be even allowed to hunt rabbits.”
Just a Few Sports Left
“We will still be able to play golf, tennis, bowls,” said Jim.
“We will still be able to play these games that meet with the approval of the reformers who rule us. People,” I said, driving more rapidly, “who have no hunger, no urge, no fire, no blood in themselves, and who go about enviously depriving their healthier and more natural fellows of a little action, a little excitement.”
“Rabbit hunting,” said Jim, “sometimes has a lot of excitement in it. I love the music of the hounds, the sight of them, all brightly colored, coming streaming through the woods or across the fields. The shooting of the rabbit is only an incident in the whole adventure. It’s the chase that counts.”
“I feel ashamed, every time I go rabbit hunting,” said l. “When I think of my ancestors hunting stags and wild boars, bears and wolves.”
“Did you get these bears?” asked Jimmie, fondling the glossy furs we were cuddled in.
“No,” I admitted. “One was sent to me by a friend in the bush. The bear got its head stuck in an empty jam pail out on the garbage dump, so my friend had to put it out of its misery. The other one I bought from a gentleman who peddled it around the office.”
“Very romantic, both of them,” agreed Jim.
“They make a snug article to go rabbit hunting in,” said I.
“They give you a sense of adventure anyway,” agreed Jim, settling back and inhaling the chill October air as we skimmed northwestward toward our tryst with Eddie and his pack of rabbit hounds.
We took turns in driving, and Jim had the last lap that bore us through Fergus and out some lonely autumn roads to a region of far-flung black swamps, where the bright swamp hare was numerous in his coat now changing from brown to snow white.
We met Eddie at the prearranged crossroads. He had a small truck, the back of which is for holding the hounds. He led us down some narrow swampy roads, turning right, and then left, as he penetrated deeper and deeper into the gloomy depths of cedar and spruce. The swamp was very wet, the road treacherous, but at the end of twenty minutes we came out on a stoney pasture, lonely and bleak in the gray weather, and all we could see on all sides were vast areas of silent brooding swamp.
The hounds were crazy to be let loose. Six of them, they raced about, excited and whining, watching us set up our guns and donning our hunting coats. Then they began sniffing about the edges of the pasture, and before we had got the cars half parked in the pasture, one of them, Dainty, let loose a deep belling song and all of the six fled into the swamp with a music that has been thrilling the heart of men for thousands and thousands of years.
“Let’s get going,” spluttered Eddie. “You take the right side of the swamp, Jim, and you head straight in there. You’ll come to a ridge, about two hundred yards in. Stay there. That’s where most of the rabbits cross.”
Jim went one way. Eddie the other, vanishing into the dark impenetrable cedars, so I set a true course and followed Eddie’s directions. I found the ridge, a stoney mound, and there I took my stand, while far off the hounds made music.
It is lovely being alone in a swamp. The mystic silence, broken only by the tiny chirp of little autumn birds or the startled scurry of a squirrel. The sweet aromatic smell of the cedars and balsams. I picked a good spot from which I could watch in all directions, and then, gun ready across my arm, I waited for the hounds to bring the hare across my path.
But the hounds went farther and farther, until I could barely hear them, even in the silence. Now and again I would hear them coming nearer and I would get set and half raise my gun and aim it at imaginary rabbits, just to get my eye lined up. But then the music would grow faint again.
Bang! Far away, a shot. For fifteen minutes I listened intently before I heard the hounds again. This time they started less than a farm’s width away, and around in a great circle they went in the other direction. I heard them grow faint and near, near and faint, and then – Bang, bang! – two more shots, followed by silence.
I yelled.
“Jimmmiiieeeee!”
But only silence answered my cry. It was chilly, so I walked up and down the ridge. I sat down and waited. A wind had risen. No hounds, no shots disturbed the great stillness of the wind through the cedar tops.
“Hang it,” I said, “is this hunting?”
So I decided to go for a little walk through the swamp and see if I could kick out a rabbit for myself, without the aid of hounds.
It is easy to go wrong in a swamp. The farther I went, the worse the swamp got. I came to a dense thicket of alders and small willows, and when I tried to go back out of it the worse it got. I came to a little stream flowing through the swamp, and I followed it for ten minutes looking for a suitable log to cross it. By the time I found the log I could see the stoney meadow through the cedars, the meadow where our cars were parked.
Some people can pop across a log as easy as walking along a pavement. I nearly always slip off. This time I slipped off and fell into the small creek. The creek was not deep, but one loses one’s balance and falls. I fell lengthwise in the chill little brook and before I could regain my feet I was thoroughly soaked from head to foot.
It was not three minutes out to the meadow and the car, but I was chattering with cold when I reached it. I removed my clothes in a twinkling and threw the bear robes about me. Then I reached for my car keys.
Jimmie had them. When he got out of the car he had just popped them in his pocket.
You can’t dry yourself on a bearskin lap robe. There was nothing else in either car. And I couldn’t start the car, to drive out to the last farmhouse we had passed to ask them to dry my garments at the stove.
“Boy,” I said, “you’ll catch pneumonia!”
I huddled under the bearskins, but they are stiff things that don’t lend themselves to tucking in. Gaps are always left for wind to blow up.
I tooted the car horn, long and loud.
No answer. No hounds. No shots.
I fired two shots rapid, a signal of distress if ever there was one.
A Grand Target
A blue jay laughed from a hidden tree. Far away in the direction Jimmie had taken I heard the sound of an axe chopping.
“Jimmm-eeeee, hoy!” I yelled.
But the distant axe went on chopping, so I figured there was a farm at the other side of the swamp and likely Jimmie would be there conversing with the farmer or even drinking cider in the farmhouse around the kitchen stove with the folks.
I spread my garments over the hood of the car and wrapped the largest rug around me. I pulled on my soggy hunting boots and started in through the belt of swamp in the direction of the axe. It would at least keep me from dying of goose-flesh.
As I pushed through the swamp I decided to keep up a regular call:
“Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” I repeated at every step.
The swamp was deeper and wetter the way Jimmie had taken. I crossed two creeks and each time I saw a clearer place ahead, I found on arriving at it, it was only a patch of impenetrable alders.
“Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” I repeated loudly, as I came from under each cedar tree.
Every fifty yards I paused to halloo for Jim. But the silence was profound, the day was grayer and the air more chill.
“Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” I called, with monotonous regularity.
Suddenly behind me I heard a terrible sound.
It was the sharp, startled bellow and bay of a hound.
Before I could turn to look I heard other hounds join in the chorus, and in an instant I knew I was the prey of the whole pack of Eddie’s hounds. There is something panic-striking about a pack of hounds on your trail. I should have simply dropped the bear rug and stood forth, in my human mastery, before the surprised hounds. But I did what rabbits do, and foxes, what Liza did with Little Eva in her clasp as she crossed the ice – I turned and ran like a rabbit.
It was all a matter of a few seconds. I could hear the hounds coming, the full terrible chorus of them, high ones and low ones, belling and baleful, a swift, inescapable choir of wild savage voices, frantic with excitement, and I did some leaps that would have credited an Olympic athlete.
Then came the shot.
Just a terrific bang amidst the cedars, and at its call I fell down. In another instant the hounds were on top of me, tearing at the rug I clutched about my shoulders.
“Help, help!” I yelled in muffled tones.
“Hold still,” came Jimmie’s breathless voice, “until I get him in the head!”
“It’s me,” I screeched. “And the rug! Don’t shoot!”
So Jim ran up and kicked the hounds off and raised me to my feet.
“Thank goodness,” I gasped, “you are a punk shot!”
We wrapped the rug around me and led the way out while the hounds and I slunk in confusion behind him. We drove out to the farmhouse and sat around the kitchen while my clothes were dried.
“You see,” said Jim, “there’s excitement even in rabbit hunting. I should say we have all the thrill in rabbit hunting any man would want.”
“Quite,” said I.
Editor’s Notes: Mackinaw coats were standard for hunting back then.
Bull-baiting was a blood “sport” where a dog would fight with a bull. Dogs were bred specifically for this, and that is where bulldogs come from. Bull-baiting was made illegal in the 19th century. Cock fighting (between roosters) was also illegal, but continued for some time anyway.
Liza was a character in Uncle Tom’s Cabin who escaped slavery with her son by running across the not quite frozen Ohio River. It was based on a true story. I’m not sure why Greg says Eva is Liza’s daughter, Eva was a different character in the book. Many of the plays and stage productions bastardized the original book, so his memory could be based on anything.
This story appeared in Greg Clark & Jimmie Frise Go Fishing (1980).
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