Life is hard when everything wants to eat you.
From winged- to four-legged predators, gardeners with little tolerance for freeloaders, and hunters with pockets heavy with .22-caliber long rifle shells, cottontail rabbits are seemingly always on the dodge from something.
Wildlife biologists tell us that a young cottontail has about a 10% chance of making it through its first year and only a 1% chance to make it more than two years.
Those are tough numbers if you’re a rabbit.
Odds of hitting a cottontail – with an open sight .22 – caliber rifle – flushed from thick cover and quickly heading to equally dense escape cover are seemingly as poor, it turns out, as the animal’s reputed survival statistics.
Good thing we’re packing plenty of ammunition.
When I was a kid, I cut my hunting teeth on cottontail rabbits and the bigger jacks. While many hunters can say the same, I’ve never fully retired from the pursuit and get excited when cottontail numbers are up because, weather permitting, I know what I’m going to be doing once the deer, sharptail and pheasant seasons are closed.
My two sons and I are hunting on land North Dakota historians say was once, in the early 1900s, the largest underground lignite mine in the world. By the early 1930s, the operation shifted to open pit stripping done with big machines. What remains today, is a wealth of wildlife habitat and spoil piles that are so steep in spots, the only way to the bottom as I see it is to unload my firearm and slide down the snow on my backside.
It's one of those winter days that you appreciate. Big, blue skies, temperatures above freezing and no wind. When it’s like this, when you’re gifted even the shortest of reprieves, it’s easy to fool yourself into thinking that getting through winter isn’t going to be the grind you anticipated.
An hour into the hunt, the snow has gone soft in the rising temperatures and the seat of my pants are wet. While sliding down these hills wouldn’t be my first choice of a mode of descent, I’m a long way from hating it, no matter how ungraceful I look doing it.
Between ducking under low-hanging branches and stomping around patches of brush littered with tracks and rabbit pellets, I hear the occasional crack of a .22 and random scraps of elevated conversation that suggest, if nothing else, that my boy's are having fun.
When we meet up, they say it’s best to have one hunter walk the tops of the hills, and there are many, while the other hunts from down below. Then repeat.
I fall in line behind them as we hike to find another likely looking spoil pile hilltop and brushy slope to hunt that will lead us back to where we parked.
I notice the backs of their hunting pants aren’t wet like mine, but I’m not surprised as I fall a little farther behind and keep my mouth shut. I’ve got 30-plus years on the oldest of the two and it chaps me, only a little, that some things are getting a little harder.
But I do want to give them some grief about making the old dude in the group carry their three cottontails but hesitate because they’ll quickly point out that I’m the obvious choice since I’m the only one wearing a backpack.
