Drive - A Memoir 34th Installment
There
was all kinds of other things growing that we couldn’t eat or even
know what they were. The whole area had gone to rack and ruin over
the years and was thick, wild and untamed. The growth was helped
along by the Old Man, who turned the water to it flooding the entire
area every couple of weeks. We had chopped, hacked and clawed tunnels
and trails through the jungle eating berries along the way. The
gooseberry was my favorite. It was our sanctuary. But today we were
looking for the perfect tree limb we could carve and bend into our
rabbit drive clubs.
“While
we find our sticks, you can elaborate all the details of your
magical, mysterious jackrabbit trap and how it makes us money.”
Russ told me as he ducked into a jungle tunnel.
“Okay,
as I was saying, we get a huge roll of chicken wire, enough to go
around the fence that circles the farmer’s haystack, and then we
put in the tunnels.”
“Tunnels?”
Russ was still not able to follow my logic.
“Yep,”
I love a good story. “We cut a piece of chicken wire into a three
foot by three foot piece and then roll it into a tube that is three
feet long. We cut a hole at the bottom of the fence we have installed
around the haystack and wire the tube to the hole so it protrudes
toward the haystack. We put in a couple of tubes on every side of the
hay yard fence.”
“I
don't get it,” Russ reasoned. “Do the jackrabbits go into the hay
yard through the tubes?”
“Bingo!”
I shouted. Here's the magic. In the night jackrabbits go in through
the tubes to eat the hay, and in the morning, we show up and climb in
the hay yard – with our clubs, of course. We have a dead end fence
attached between the haystack and the outer fence so we can herd the
jackrabbits around the haystack and up against the end fence where we
club them to death, load up our barrel, and are ready to collect out
bounty paid by the mink farm. I figure we’ll get eighty or a
hundred each night. We’ll make up to ten bucks each day – day
after day after day. If we fence two of the hay yards and make twenty
bucks – heck, fence ten stacks and make more money than the idiots
who rob banks.
“Whoa,
Whoa, Whoa, I have one question!” Russ demanded. “Why would the
farmers want us to fence the jackrabbits in
their hay yard? And why don't the jackrabbits go out the tube they
used to come in?”
“That's
two questions. I'll take the second one first” I said. “Jackrabbits
are stupid, unlike us humans. They come to the food thru the tube,
immediately forget how and where the entrance is so when we come
after
500 more words tomorrow
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