Urban Rabbits

There were lots of rabbits near our house on 51st Street, but you wouldn't see them often unless you knew where to look.  You might see one occasionally on a lawn at night, but their home turf was in the big prairies along the railroad tracks behind Central Steel and Intag.  Actually, that territory stretched from Seven Swamps, just across California Avenue, all the way to Midway Airport.  We weren't allowed to hunt there with guns, but I did manage to shoot a rabbit with a bow and arrow once.  I guess we were technically trespassing on railroad property, but nobody cared what kids did in those days.  I didn't count it as real hunting anyway, it as mostly about training my two beagles so they would be ready for the few times a year when my dad took me hunting for real out in the country.

I knew about those prairies because my dad and I used to take our two big collies over there on Sundays to give them some exercise when I was quite young.  They always flushed out a rabbit or two, but they didn't chase them very far, and they were no good for real hunting because they were gun shy.  We got a beagle when I was maybe 10, but we never did anything with him until I was 12 or 13, after our two collies had died.  Old Duke never did amount to much, but he was responsible for teaching me how not to train beagles.  You can't really teach a beagle to hunt rabbits anyway, they either have the instinct or they don't, but they will get better at it the more practice they get.  Rabbit season runs for six months in Michigan, but it was about half that long in Illinois, so I decided to start training Duke in the summer to give him a head start on hunting season.

I kept Duke on a leash until we got across 51st Street and down to where Whipple Street petered out by the railroad tracks.  There was a brushy ditch that ran between the sidewalk and the tracks, and I was sure we could flush out a rabbit there.  I released Duke and invited him to follow me down the bottom of the ditch, but he preferred to walk on the sidewalk, I suppose so he could better see where the rabbit went after I flushed him out.  When I did flush a rabbit, Duke just stood there on the sidewalk watching it go, so I somehow had to teach him that he was supposed to chase it.  I put the leash back on Duke, drug him down into the ditch, and shoved his nose at the rabbit's trail but, as soon as I released him, he just went back up and sat on the sidewalk again.  Thinking that he might learn by example, I dropped down on my hands and knees, sniffed the ground and bayed like a hound in full cry.  I thought this might inspire Duke, but he just sat on the sidewalk watching me make a fool of myself.

When I looked up to see what Duke was doing, I saw this lady standing next to him, watching me as well from the sidewalk.  I thought I recognized her from my dad's store, so I said hello, but she looked away, pretending that she hadn't seen me, and hurried off before I could explain to her what I was doing.  I found out later that the lady had gone to my dad's store straightaway and told him, "Charlie, I always knew there was something strange about that boy of yours, and now he has finally gone over the edge."  In telling me about it later, my dad requested that I do my dog training out of sight of the street from now on, since he had to live and do business in this neighborhood.  That turned out to be for the best, because it caused me to explore the other prairies, and I found lots of better places to train my dogs.