Often as a kid growing up in N.E. South Dakota, my buddies and I would pursue what we thought was big game that inhabited the thickets and woodlot along the river, the Wily Wabbit.
With BB guns in hand, off we’d go, heading down the Sioux River out towards Lake Pelican.
Didn’t matter much what type of rabbit it was, we were just after rabbits, it could have been a black-tailed or white-tailed jack rabbit or a cottontail, we just wanted to say that we’d bagged a rabbit.
We knew there were a lot of rabbits around as we’d seen their tracks in the snow, so it was only a matter of time before we came across one.
Well, after numerous trips we had yet to see anything but tracks, pure frustration brought our Great Rabbit Hunt Expedition to an abrupt end.
Like many things that one tries that doesn’t work out, rabbit hunting became something that I was willing to forget about, to bury deep in my subconscious hoping to forget.
Several years later Shorty, a friend of my Dad, Cal who worked with him at Sanders/Sharpe Chevrolet asked if I and my brother A.J. would like to go along and do some rabbit hunting with him.
My first thoughts were, nope, been there, tried that, didn’t need it until he mentioned that we’d be hunting them with beagles.
