The train pulled in, not in due time, but several hours late. The conductor shouted “All aboard!” and as it slowly left the bay my thoughts turned homeward. It is then I begin to feel anxious about the folks at home and wonder if all is well.
CHAPTER V
HUNTING WITH A FERRET
Having many times tried with indifferent success to photograph the rabbit in his native fields and woods, I cast about for a means of stalking him at close range, and had for some time cherished the idea of taking a hunt with my kodak in a good tracking snow. Thus intent, I jumped from a passenger coach one day in the late fall, equipped with an Eastman twelve-shooter and ammunition enough to make a big bag.
I had left the station scarcely more than a couple of hundred yards behind along the public road, when I leaped a stake and rider fence, crossed a stubble field, bound for the bottom land. A field covered with tall, dry grass, right at the edge of a brier patch, looked a very likely place for cottontail. Just as I reached the little creek covered with ice, save where here and there the rippling water crossed the shallow, pebbly places, I struck a fresh trail. Carefully examining the footprints in the snow, which had fallen early the preceding day, I reached the conclusion, from the trodden condition of the ground and the little round brownish excrement lying here and there on the surface of the snow, that this was his playground and I must look elsewhere for the quarry. So I began a large circle around the brier patch to catch the trail to his bed. After passing several times around the thicket, I finally discovered the latest trail out. Bunny usually travels by long jumps from the time he makes up his mind to retire for the day. The trail followed what seemed the most cautious route—under an old fallen tree, then two long jumps and into an abandoned ground-hog hole. I cut a pole with the intention, if possible, of routing Bunny from his quarters. About the time the pole was half way in, out he popped from an unexpected direction like a flash, made a dash for a brush heap nearby, and disappeared even before I could get the camera into action.
When a rabbit is once driven out of a hole, it seldom re-enters unless hard pressed by the dogs. I have trailed them in the snow for hours, reading the story from the footprints as they ran, now hopping along leisurely, now doubling and following old tracks under, through, and over logs. In one instance Br’er Rabbit showed considerable ingenuity in making a long side jump to a board fence and squatting where the color of fence and rabbit was almost the same, by this simple ruse eluding his pursuers.
Color Blending