Canada Day Weekend: Trophy Rabbits
A week and a half before the July 1 weekend, I cooked up all the rabbit meat I had in my freezer. These were the ones described in my post from June 14. I made three rabbits, prepared hasenpfeffer-style, but with a twist at the end. I started with the rabbits cut into four quarters and a saddle each. I coated them in flour, with a little bit of salt and pepper mixed in, then browned them in bacon fat from a few slices' worth of diced bacon that I had previously crisped up in a dutch oven. I then took the rabbit pieces out momentarily, and tossed in half a cup of chopped onions, cooking those just until they were soft. Then I added 3/4 cup of red wine vinegar, a cup of chicken stock, and a bay leaf, and turned up the heat to bring it all to a boil. Once boiling, I added the diced bacon and the rabbit pieces back in, placing the rabbit thighs, shoulders, and saddles in a single layer on the bottom of the dutch oven. The last step is to put a lid on it, and transfer it to an oven preheated to 325 degrees, and let it all simmer for about an hour and a half. By then, the whole works should boil down and concentrate into a coating on the rabbit pieces, plus some thick gravy. Then you're supposed to serve it over some rice, or with bread or something, which I sort-of did, but I also went a little different route. I took all the rabbit out, and went ahead and ate all the gravy with some buttered bread. I ate a couple thighs and shoulders in that sitting too, and then stored the rest of the pieces in the fridge. Over the next couple of days, I took out a few pieces at a time, heated them up, and dunked them in cayenne pepper sauce and ate them like rabbit hot wings. I think next time I'll try cutting out all that prep work, and just bread and deep fry them like chicken, then toss them all in sauce.
What that meant though, was that after finishing all my hasenpfeffer hot wings, I had no rabbit meat left in the house. That's an untenable situation, so I devised a simple plan to get back on the positive side of the bunny rabbit ledger: hunt rabbits all three mornings of the Canada Day long weekend. Since the rabbit woods are so close to my house, I can leave half an hour after sunrise, hunt for two hours, and be back in plenty of time to de-fur, gut, and butcher the critters before lunch. As I mentioned in a previous rabbit-hunting post last month, this is my favorite kind of hunting. It's a great way to keep your skills and patience well-honed during the summer, when there's no other more conventional hunting season going on. I do it by myself, and without the aid of a dog, so I'm basically limited to walking as slowly and quietly as possible, and hoping to bump into the odd rabbit in the open. I've learned through reading other hunting blogs and articles, and watching some rabbit hunting episodes from shows online, that the way I do it is not the way 95% of other people do it. Smart people bring a bunch of friends, and/or dogs, and actively flush the rabbits out of the brush, and either shotgun them on the run, or pick them off with a .22 if they're stationary. That's probably a much more effective way to get a ton of rabbits, but I enjoy the calm, quiet, and purposeful nature of my method.
Still-hunting for rabbits, which is basically what I do, involves taking a few slow, deliberate steps, followed by several seconds, or sometimes minutes, of looking around with the least possible amount of head movement. If a rabbit sees or hears you before you see it, it's already game over; the second they sense something's up, they bolt. These are not escaped domesticated rabbits that some people, especially in the Victoria area, are used to seeing near the city. They're wild cottontail rabbits, living in the bush, and being hunted not just by me, but lots of other predators as well. The path I travel on while rabbit hunting is very narrow, and bordered on both sides by dense bush. The time it takes for a rabbit to run across the trail and get lost on the other side is literally a blink of an eye. Even though I hunt with a shotgun, I very rarely have the chance to take a shot at a moving rabbit. 99% of my shots are at stationary targets, before they notice that I'm there. For that reason, I would use a .22 if it were an option, but rifle use is prohibited in the area. Taking mostly stationary-rabbit shots has its advantages, though. For one, it allows for careful targeting of only the head and uppermost part of the animal. This results in a clean, quick kill, with the least possible amount of meat damage. It also gives me a moment to accurately judge the size of the rabbit before taking the shot, allowing me to let smaller animals go.
Besides providing delicious rabbit meat, hunting bunnies also gives me a much-needed reality check when it comes to my skills as a hunter. Once in a while, usually when I haven't seen any animals for a longer stretch of time than normal, my mind will start to shift to other things, and I'll start getting an internal dialogue going about one thing or another. Invariably, this is when a rabbit will run out in front of me and dive into the brush on the other side of the trail, hopelessly gone out of sight. I'll be left standing there, still frozen in my tracks, to realize that I wasn't quiet enough, that I wasn't cognizant enough of the situation, and that if I had been deer or bear or elk hunting, that might have been a whole weekend's worth of hunting ruined. It's a good opportunity to reset, remind myself that it's only a rabbit this time, and to remember this lesson the next time I notice my mind wandering during a hunt for bigger game. Any second could be the second that matters. I also try to use the time to monitor my pace, to make sure that I'm not rushing. I sometimes catch myself thinking of the next spot along the trail where I'm likely to see animals, and anticipating that spot instead of staying focused on slowing down and keeping alert. In a two hour rabbit hunt, I'll actually only cover just over two kilometres. At a normal hiking pace, on a moderately rough trail, I would normally go around 15km in that same amount of time. So at as slow a pace as I'm going, and as still as I'm trying to remain, and as intently as I'm trying to stay focused on any movement or rabbit-like shapes in the brush, the whole experience is like a calming meditation, punctuated by gunfire. It's the best.
On Canada Day itself, Friday the 1st of July, I had a very good morning of hunting, getting three rabbits. Two of these were of the Boone and Crockett, trophy-size variety. Usually the really large rabbits stay at least partially obscured by brush at all times, and never really come right out into the open. They also scram way faster than the younger rabbits if you don't see them quick enough. To spot these guys before they know you're around typically means picking out their partial silhouette from the jumble of sticks and branches and grasses at the edge of the trail at no closer than 50-60 yards. And they're exactly the same colour as the aforementioned jumble. So to get two of these larger rabbits in one morning was very satisfying. The other rabbit was a smaller one, that I didn't realize was that small until after I shot it. As I was saying before, it's tough to judge size when the bunny's on the run. This just happened to be one of those rare shots where the animal was running away from me down the trail, instead of from one side to the other, which afforded me enough time to get a quick shot away. To make matters worse, it wasn't an immediately fatal shot, prompting what small game hunters with no dog call the "shoot and sprint." The wounded rabbit tried to get away into the dense underbrush, and I had to run to the spot where it entered and crawl in after it on my hands and knees and locate it from the sound of its movements alone. Luckily, I did find it, and my wounded rabbit recovery rate remains at 100%. After that fun little diversion, I checked myself over for ticks and called it a morning.
The next day, my alarm didn't go off; or actually it did, but the speakers on the phone I had set the alarm on were blown, unbeknownst to me. So Saturday's hunt got scratched. Using a different phone this time, I got up the next day, July 3, and got another three rabbits before breakfast time. Two of these were of average size, and the third was probably the biggest cottontail rabbit I've ever seen; it weighed close to five pounds on the kitchen scale at home. I spotted its outline in some tall grass at the side of the trail from about 60 yards away, crept to within 40 yards to ensure a tight enough pellet spread, and shot it through the grass. When I walked up on it and picked it up, I couldn't believe it. When holding it by the hind legs in one hand at my side, the front legs dragged on the ground. It's times like that that I wish small game animals got more respect. A five-pound cottontail rabbit! There should be a weigh-in at the local game club, and a full-body taxidermied mount, and a tour of the outdoors and hunting trade shows in the area for such a creature. Alas, no such honours were bestowed upon my trophy rabbit. I brought him and his two associates home, skinned and gutted them, cut them into shoulders, thighs, and saddle, and vacuum sealed them for the freezer. There were nearly two pounds of meat from the big one alone, and over six pounds altogether. Just like that, my rabbit meat crisis was brought back from the brink, and as I write this, all six of them from that weekend are in the deep freeze, ready to go the next time I need my rabbit hot wing fix. A great way to spend a few hours of a Canada Day long weekend; much better than fireworks and flag facepaint.