Hares With Handguns

We'd paused for a moment so Bill could adjust his pack. When you have a pair of snowshoes strapped to your feet, an uncomfortable pack is really an uncomfortable pack. I stopped, breathing hard, and thrust my ski poles into several feet of old snow. Bill dumped his pack on the trail, rearranged his gear, hoisted it once and, more or less satisfied, set it back down. Then he pulled out a camera. Would I mind posing for a few photographs with my pistol?

I wouldn't. I unholstered the little Ruger .22, got a tree stump in my sights, and let fly with half a dozen shots. All were low.

I'd bought the gun from a friend earlier that year, test fired it and been satisfied that it shot where I pointed it, so what was this? I examined the sights, but they looked okay.

"You want to sight that thing in?" Bill asked.

I thought about it, but decided not to. I'm not the greatest pistol shot in the world, but with a thirty-pound pack on my back and an unsteady hold, I figured the gun was still shooting where I pointed it. Besides, I was here to hunt rabbits, not drill holes in a tree.

"It will only take a minute," he said.

"Nope. Let's go."

Bill shrugged, and off we went.

The rabbits in question were snowshoe hares, and the snow was in the mountains of southwestern Montana, which, even with global warming, still gets plenty of the white stuff. Yet, oddly enough, in Montana, where just about everybody hunts, hare hunting has yet to hit the big time. All the harvested bunnies in the state wouldn't fill the front of a Honda Civic. You can't hunt rabbits on a snowmobile, horse or from inside your pickup. It's cold. And when you duck under a tree and snow from a pine bough slides down the back of your neck, you do the boogie woogie in the winter woods.

However, in December and January it's beautiful in the high country, really something. Snow transforms the world into a place few make the effort to see. Then there are the rabbits.

Hare hunting isn't a shoot-until-you-hurt proposition. The last bunny I whacked was a couple years ago, shortly after the conversation Bill and I had on the trail. We'd resumed our hunt and begun still hunting through the woods, a la Daniel Boone, hoping to cut fresh tracks. We did.

Bill probably isn't an expert at tracking bunnies, but he's a lot better at it than I am. He showed me how the hare had kicked up tiny tufts of snow in front of its hind feet as it dug in for one of its typical ten-foot leaps. It's something most people don't notice, and the tufts blow or melt away quickly, so it's a sure sign of a fresh track. These were smoking.

We decided to spread out. Bill stayed with the track, and I looped above him twenty yards, peering into the dense dog-hair pines ahead, hoping to spot the bunny's telltale flash of yellowish-white fur, a technique that had worked for us before. Then, as if we'd planned the whole thing, there he was, framed by green pine boughs in a tiny, sunlit opening in the woods--still life with rabbit. He was so close I could see his whiskers twitch.

"Bill, where are you?" I whispered. I couldn't see him.

"Here."