Drive - A Memoir 109th Installment
Unfortunately,
the Helm drive was a bust. There were very few horsemen to go out far
and wide, and not a lot of people to finish up. There were loads of
jack rabbits as usual. Russ and I were taken with a dozen other kids
to join the line about half mile out. The line was spread out thin
with about a fifty feet between each of the drivers. As we moved in,
the line was leaking rabbits through the gaps like poop through a
goose. There were more jack rabbits getting away than we had driving
in front of us.
“Usually
there are a lot more people at these drives,” I yelled to Russ.
“Maybe it’ll get better as we move into the narrows of the
funnel.”
“Being
spread out like this is all the better for throwing” Russ shouted.
I
threw my club at a slow moving jack rabbit between us knocking him
down long enough for Russ to run over and club him in an overhead
smash. Out here we left them where they died. Our job was to drive
them and kill them. In the winter-drives the managers of the drive
have a market for them if they’re frozen, and they collect as many
as they can. In the summer, they leave them all because they’ll
spoil before they can be used for mink food or fur. It’s the way
the farmers try to save their crops from the infestation. At the peak
of the ten–year cycle, the hungry jack rabbits would flood out of
the desert like locusts eating everything in their path. It was like
a war…man against nature. If the farmer didn’t try to drive the
jack rabbits out, nature would kill them anyway, either through
starvation or the ‘jack rabbit plague’ which is a form of Black
Death to all of them anyway. Oddly, during the off–years of the
cycle, there were very few jack rabbits, not even enough to hunt.
We
were closer in by now and with only several feet between each of us,
the hunt was getting faster. From here on out we had to keep our
minds in the game, less talking and more clubbing. With war whoops,
dodging back and forth, and swinging and killing jack rabbits with
clubs in both hands, Russ and I with six or seven other local farm
boys finished the drive, pushing the hordes of jack rabbits into the
pen. It was actually ‘short work’ as there were only about 2,000
jack rabbits, and we dispatched them in about a half an hour. In
comparison, some of the biggest drives last winter had over 20,000
jack rabbits.
“Time
to eat!” I shouted as the drive came to an end.
The
organizers must have expected a bigger crowd because there were tons
of doughnuts, drinks and hot chocolate. We ate all we wanted and
carried away all we could hold for later.
That
night, after we finished
500 more words tomorrow
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