Drive - A Memoir 8th Installment
from
the desert and put the fields under irrigation. They gave all the
fields numbers to indicate how big they were by the number of acres.
There was The Twenty Five, The Four by the pump, The Ten, The Six,
The Five by Ellis, The Six by the road, The Seven, The Flat (the
original seven acres), and The Twelve where we were hunting.
All
the fields were around the hill in the middle which wasn't much of a
hill, only about 10 feet high over the desert floor; in fact, it was
lower than the pump house on the high ground but this pile of sand
was a hill to us nonetheless.
Today,
my thoughts were on The Twelve and why we were having our first big
game hunt without tag or license. The Twelve, a field that is way in
the back southeast corner of the farm and the closest to the miles
and miles of wild sagebrush flats was covered with very little
alfalfa. This summer there was little harvest of the hay in that
field. In fact, very little of the alfalfa got over three or four
inches high because of the fifty or so antelope that grazed on it
every day. I was told that the farmer has a right to protect his
livelihood from predation by scaring the animals off. Sure, I
thought, scaring
them off only made them more curious, and then they’d be back
before you got to the house for lunch.
The 'bang' of the propane cannon worked a little better than the M–80
bombs the fish and game gave us because the cannon would pop off
every few minutes. Although after a while, the animals would just
ignore the noise. The
M–80s were GREAT fun, though. We sure blew up a lot of stuff with
them. Blowing stuff up is one of the things we lived for. Happy
explosions, I
dreamed.
If
farmers could not drive the antelope away, then they were allowed to
kill some, but only if they were well within their property and they
had tried everything else. Russ and I got to be the last resort of
predation control, and we planned on processing the carcass for
winter meat. Of course, we got the lecture that taking life was only
for food and not for sport. Of
course – you bet,
I thought.
Then
there were the jackrabbits. This was the ninth year of their ten year
cycle, and there were thousands of them. The jackrabbits much
preferred hay and grain to sage brush and cheat grass. The
jackrabbits swarmed the fields and haystacks like locust and the
jackrabbits destroyed all vegetation in their path and collapsed the
haystacks when they moved through the farms. My imagination began
stirring – oh
boy, the jackrabbits – the jackrabbit drives – hunting
jackrabbits for bounty in the winter.
This was going to be a fun and profitable year for Russ and me
because we were the most legendary jackrabbit killers
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