Thanksgiving at the farm meant hunting for the men and visiting around the kitchen for the women. When I was small, my sisters were all very young and none of the older brothers were married, so Mom was about the only woman in the house unless we had visitors. She prepared large servings of meat for Thanksgiving dinner. We didn’t raise turkeys and our meats came from what we raised. Usually it was ham or other pork cuts. Along with the meat, Mom served pies and all sorts of vegetables. We had beans, Irish potatoes, baked sweet potatoes, canned tomatoes (that is, tomatoes from our garden canned in glass jars), and rice with rich brown gravy. During the holiday weekend the table was always spread like that of Chaucer’s Franklin. We wandered in all through the day after the initial holiday meal and helped ourselves to whatever we wanted. The snacking went on as long as anything was left; then Mom cooked something else for supper.
One of Dad’s favorite snacks in winter was baked sweet potatoes. He usually took a couple of them with him when he went out on the first hunt of the morning. Hunting season usually opened on Thanksgiving day for the game we hunted: rabbits. Squirrel hunting season opened earlier as a rule, around the first of September, and so did dove season. But rabbit hunting offered the best sport for Thanksgiving.
In the 1940′s Uncle Phar Litaker came to our farm to hunt on Thanksgiving day and other days through the winter when he was on a holiday or on vacation from his job in Cannon Mills. He brought his beagles in a dog box in the trunk of his tan 1940 Chevrolet. On the coldest mornings he came into the front room, warmed himself by the wood heater, and recounted earlier hunting trips he had taken with my Dad. These hunting adventures had occurred at our farm or on some other farm belonging to one of their friends. Uncle Phar smoked Camel cigarettes one after another as he talked. The smell of cigarette smoke was a sign that we had a visitor since none of us smoked. He usually came early, even before breakfast, and while he waited for us to eat, he would have coffee with cigarettes.
Finally Dad and the boys old enough to hunt would gather in the front room to finish putting on warm clothes and boots if the weather was really bad. At these times Uncle Phar began telling the stories of former hunts. Some of the hunts that he remembered were as far back as when he and my Dad were boys. He didn’t know the names of me and my brothers, maybe because there were too many of us to keep track of. So at times in his narratives he would point at one of us and say, “I wasn’t much bigger than that boy over there.”
“Remember, that time, Mack,” he would start, “we was over at Em Butler’s and had just two dogs, that little bitch-dog that was such a good jump dog. We had just started out and she was in the creek. . . .” The stories typically stressed an unusual or remarkable fact and often ended with laughter and some such expression as “That beat anything I ever saw!” The circumstances of a hunt that made it memorable and worth recounting could be the number of rabbits found in one field or the jumping of two rabbits at once. One of the stories that I remember was of a squirrel that– in attempting to jump from one tree to another– impaled itself on a sharp snag sticking out of the second tree. Dad usually didn’t say much at these times but laughed and acknowledged that he remembered the hunt Uncle Phar was describing.
There were particular rounds we made when hunting on and near our farm. One was to begin by going directly to the front of the house, across what is now Campbell Road and by walking the field on the far side of the apple trees. If the field had grown up during the late summer and fall, it was an especially good place to stir up a rabbit. If Uncle Phar was with us, we followed his beagles through the fields; if not, we examined each clump of straw or growth for a sitting rabbit. Then we angled south toward Uncle Will Allman’s pasture where certain gullies in the woods seemed to be favorite places for generations of rabbits to sit (we said “set”). We walked through these woods at a little distance from each other, and in one of these ditches, invariably it seems, we would hear Dad say softly, “There’s one over here against that maple.” If we wanted the meat, one of us with a twenty-two rifle would come abreast of Dad, who would point out the sitting rabbit. The animal is so well camouflaged that its eye was the first thing one was likely to see.
The rifle usually did the work, but those with shotguns stood ready in case the rifleman missed and the rabbit jumped up and ran. If we were hunting with beagles and were willing to risk losing the game, we jumped the rabbit and allowed the dogs to bring the rabbit around. Hearing the dogs run is one of the pleasures of the hunt. When being chased by dogs, a rabbit will instinctively run about a half-mile circle and, in doing so, return to the spot where it jumped. Maybe that’s the rabbit’s way to throw the dogs off his track– by crossing his own trail. Anyway, the hunters place themselves strategically in the best spot to see and shoot the rabbit when he makes that second appearance.
After searching the gullies of Uncle Will Allman’s pasture, we crossed over to Loyd Goodnight’s farm and hunted the open fields. Dad called this the Henry Smith place because that’s how it was known when he was a young man. Next we circled down by Outen’s farm before returning to the house. Sometimes we hunted the woods on the hill above Johnson’s shack which was a hay barn standing by the creek opposite the Ben Ewing and Kurt Herlocker farm. The abrupt hill behind this shack was cleared and had been under cultivation some years earlier although when we hunted there, weeds and scrub had grown up.
I remember one occasion when I sat with Dad at the top of that hill and looked down on the junction of the two creeks. One stream flowed from our farm pasture and by Uncle Clyde’s house. The other was the creek that began in Uncle Will Allman’s pasture and flowed through Uncle Will Outen’s pasture. The latter creek was the one we dammed in summer for our swimming hole. The two streams join in front of Johnson’s shack. As I sat there with Dad on this particular occasion, he told me about how his brothers and sisters and he rode down that steep hill on homemade snow sleds. He remembered on one occasion that one of his sisters–Aunt Ruth– rode the sled right into the creek and was scratched up going through the briar thickets that grew along the bank.
This typical round of hunting on Thanksgiving morning would usually take two or three hours depending on how good the hunting was. If it took most of the morning, we had dinner (the noon meal) before going out again. Another round that we made was to go down by our barn to our creek and cross the Upperside and hunt through the woods down to Ritchie’s bottom. Hunting along that creek was good sport when we had a good jump dog—that is, one that would go down into the creek and search the brush and thickets along its bank. We walked slowly along the banks on either side, allowing the dog or dogs to sniff out any hapless rabbit that had settled there the night before. When we heard the first yelps of the dog, we grew alert for a sign of the rabbit moving through the tangle of weeds and bushes on the creek bank. And almost invariably the rabbit came out one side of the creek or the other and ran across the open bottom. This run, most often toward the wooded hill, gave the hunters on that side of the creek a clear field of fire.
The Richie creek and bottom must have provided good rabbit hunting for years before I came along because Dad told of hunting there when he was a boy about ten years old. The following account was recorded on tape by Duane in 1962 when Dad was recalling an old double- barreled shotgun that had belonged to Uncle Will Allman:
It’s about the first breech-loading shotgun ever made. It had a lever under there, t’push and pull to breech and unbreech it. I shot the thing. One time–I was just a boy, I don’t know how old, I carried it huntin’. Walter Rodgers, Uncle Howard, and several others were livin’ over here at the Deal place and several of them went rabbit huntin’. I think it was Thanksgivin’ or some time pretty close to Thanksgivin’. And goin’ up the bottom over there at Richie’s–Richie’s bottom right there beside of the woods. I was walkin’ along the edge of the woods, and I saw a rabbit settin’ beside of a sweetgum, y’know. And–I just–instead of jumping it or shootin’ it–I just walked around behind the tree. I didn’t care if it did get up–I just reached my foot around and set my foot on it, y’know. The thing set there and I picked it up. Walter Rodgers–he always talked funny–and he said, “Aye dod, next time I go rabbit huntin’ w’you, you’ll hafta leave at ol’ dun at home. You don hafta do nuthin only go pick em up.” Oh lawd, they just laughed–tickled all of ‘em.
Dad continued to put his foot on or otherwise catch rabbits in their beds thoughout his life. When he no longer caught them himself he pointed them out for us to catch. During World War II and for a period up to about 1955, the family hunted to supplement food for our table. Hunting was not just going out to shoot. Dad’s skill at catching a rabbit in its bed was the economical way to get the meat. In fact, we usually carried only a few cartridges for the rifles or a few shells for the shotguns in those days. If we went out and saw nothing, we brought the ammunition home and laid it back on the Middle-room shelf.
Tags: agrarian scenes, community, family, farm life, guns, holidays, neighbors, rabbit hunting, remembrances, story telling, Thanksgiving
