Drive - A Memoir 53rd Installment
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the back of the old house, and at the corner, I looked back and sure
enough he was following 20 feet behind. I untied my club from the
wagon wheel rim that was holding it in a curve as it dried. We had
selected and cut them while they were green from the old willow tree,
so we could bend them just right and let them dry. I had made my club
36 inches long, stripped off the bark and carved a rough handle.
Russell’s was almost exactly the same only a little more slender
and with more curve. These were useful for swinging when we got close
in. Lying on the ground were our throwing clubs. We made these about
a foot long with a fair heft. We liked to have the throwing clubs to
hurl at jackrabbits trying to escape. We sometimes hit them but
rarely killed one, but it was just plain fun to throw at a running
target.
“Jackrabbit
drive clubs?” Bootsey Monte Everett Rudd asked. They were his first
words in ten minutes, but that suited me. I didn’t like school kids
who chattered on and on about nothing. “Chattering is my job,” I
thought.
“Okay
listen up,” I became the teacher. “Just like locusts move in ten
year cycles, jackrabbits become thick in ten year cycles. I mean
really thick, so thick they over–run the farmers, eating half of
the alfalfa the farmer produces and pooping on the rest. Hasn’t Ted
told you about this?” He shook his head. “So during the uppermost
peak number of the tenth year, the farmers need to kill as many as
they can before the invading horde of jackrabbits puts the poor
family farm out of business. The farmers and ranchers get together
and organize ‘jackrabbit drives.’ The farmers use the age–old
method of building a funnel. They put up the pen which is a fence
built in a thirty foot circle and about ten feet high. There is one
entrance, and from that opening, the men put in several hundred feet
of snow fence at ninety degrees out both ways to create the huge
funnel. The snow fence slats are close enough so a jackrabbit can’t
get through. A lot of the farm families and ranchers show up with
their kids and horses, and the women bring ten gallon cans of coffee
and hot chocolate to drink and about two hundred dozen donuts. They
build a huge fire which keeps the coffee and hot chocolate hot.”
“Then
what?” That was Bootsey Monte Everett Rudd’s fifth and sixth
words and last words that day.
“Then
about ten or fifteen horsemen ride out then starting about two miles
out riding toward the drive. This seems to get most of the
jackrabbits moving in the same general direction. About a half mile
out Russ and I and fifty or so volunteers join in the horseman’s
line. We whistle, yell and bang
500 more words tomorrow
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