Back Cast

I have one jackrabbit in the freezer, but the sum of its lean, dark, vacuum-sealed meat isn’t enough for a dish I’ve been stewing on in my head. This fussing over a meal that may or may not come to play isn’t uncommon for those of us searching for a distraction this late in winter as we lean into February with only a rumor of spring.

The white-tailed jackrabbit my son rolled in the snow with upland loads while pheasant hunting looked impressive back at the pickup hanging by its back legs from his right hand compared to the rooster hanging from his left. While it’s said these hares can weigh up to 10 pounds, this one wasn’t that big, but notable, nonetheless.

I know that jackrabbits are in truth, hares, because scientists tell us their young are born above ground and covered in fur, while rabbits are born underground and are naked at birth. Yet, we still call the long-legged, long-eared critters rabbits because it’s in their name and who shouts “hare” when you bust one from a tree row to make sure your hunting partner is ready?

You’ll get some pushback from some about eating jackrabbits but not from me. I’d prefer a mess of cottontails in the Dutch oven, but jackrabbits work if you cook them low and slow and the meat is easily picked from bone.

When I was a kid, sometime in the early 1970s, I ate my share of jackrabbits skewered on a stick and roasted over a campfire because that’s all I knew. Potatoes were fried in small, silver mess kit frying pan off to the side and eaten out of the pan with the pocketknife used to clean the rabbit and slice the potatoes.

While I remember hunting jackrabbits through the sagebrush and junipers, I don’t remember if I enjoyed what I ate but gutted it out because I was taught to eat what I shot without complaint.

That was a different time and some of it has faded. I know I could walk across town, population 2,000, wearing a backpack and a .22-caliber rifle thrown over my shoulder without being hassled or barely drawing second looks. Then again, no one ever offered to give me a lift and shuttle me to the outskirts of town where small homes gave way to sage, high desert, jackrabbits, mule deer, coveys of quail, coyotes and the occasional bobcat.

While still in need of a white-tailed jackrabbit for my dish, I leaned in the direction of what I know, familiar places where I remembered bumping rabbits while deer hunting or chasing sharp-tailed grouse — mostly open country with patches of knee-high, dark brush and the random buffaloberry patch where deer and other animals had flattened the understory to bed and get out of the wind.

In one such patch on the south side of hill where the sun hits nicely and brown vegetation pokes through the snow here and there, I cut a confusion of rabbit tracks and kick with the toe of my boot frozen, dark, round droppings.

I don’t know if the tracks were made by just one jackrabbit or many, but what’s apparent in this out-of-the-wind buffaloberry hideaway is that nobody is home.

Which, if someone drove by and knew for certain what I was doing, is how they would likely describe me.