Most of the time I’m on the woods, I’m following a pointer and looking for grouse and woodcock. But I’ve also hunted snowshoe hares a couple time up in northern New Hampshire and Maine. It’s was a great time.
When I read this piece in Garden & Gun, I could understand why one man was going such lengths to keep this kind of hunting alive.
“Megan will figure it out. She’s the one. A minute ago the rabbit pulled some rabbit trick as rabbits are wont to do—maybe it doubled back on its trail to confound the dogs, or jumped to the side, or ran a hollow log—but Megan went to work. When the pack loses the trail, she gears down, nose to the details. A good check dog will do that. Work a track that’s gone cold, or gone dry, or is just plain gone. The whole pack went silent when the trail vanished, but somewhere in the brambles that little beagle is doing her best to suck that track right out of the ground.
When she hits the scent, she opens up and they all know it, all the others in the pack, and in an instant they’re at it again, bedlam in the river bottom, an arioso chorus of bawling barks and yowls. Suddenly it’s like it once was in the North Carolina Piedmont, with frost in the fields and a rabbit on the run…”
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