I love the time between Christmas and New Year’s Day. The hustle and bustle of Christmas is over and I have time to visit with friends I rarely see during the year.
By the time you read this column I will be busy preparing for my first week of the 2017 Legislative Session in Frankfort which I will report on in future columns.
Sen. Schickel
One of the things I always look forward to during this week is a rabbit hunt with my friend Toddy Jacobs, who has excellent beagle hounds. For me, it is tremendously relaxing—away from the world of computers, iPhones, and meetings with just Toddy’s old pickup truck, the howl of beagle hounds, and maybe some fresh rabbit meat.
I am 62 years old and Toddy is in his mid-seventies, but that does not slow him down in rabbit hunting—he wears me out.
As he unloads the dogs from the old pickup truck, he is laughing and carrying on, yelling at the hounds by name. Toddy was a maintenance man and supervised inmate workers at the Boone County Jail during my jailer days and we have been friends ever since.
Soon the hounds jump a rabbit and the fun begins. For some reason of nature—and I do not know why—when a hound jumps a rabbit the rabbit will almost always run in a large circle, sometimes for miles, eventually returning to the spot he was jumped.
So old Toddy and I just sit up there and listen to the hounds go. As they run into the distance, their howls get fainter and fainter, and Toddy says, “Kate’s in front now,” reading the sounds of the howls. We sit there and chat about local politics and what is going on at the Boone County Courthouse, and share a Snickers bar or a chew of tobacco.
The song of the hounds fades almost completely away as they are far off in the distance. Then the song starts to get louder as they have made the turn and are heading back to us.
It is then time to get set up and ready, for the rabbit is usually far in front of the hounds. Toddy is telling me to go here and his grandson to go there and then it is time to be quiet and wait.
About that time the rabbit shoots out of the brush and I shoot my normal three times (my nickname is “Three Shot,” because I always miss the first two, and maybe even the third).
After a lot of shooting and joking and hours passed, it is time to call the dogs in.
It seems like one of the dogs almost always fails to return so we have to go looking for it. After an hour or two, Toddy gives up and says, “let’s go to dinner!” and lays his old, tattered hunting jacket on the ground so the dog has a scent to come back to after dark.
We go into town for dinner and come back several hours after dark, and sure enough there will be Molly laying down on Toddy’s old, tattered hunting jacket.
I always look forward to those hunts about this time of year. It relaxes me before the upcoming legislative session, and I look forward to giving a full report in my next column.
For more information about rabbit hunting in Kentucky, please visit the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife’s website at www.fw.ky.gov.
As always, if you have any questions or comments about this issue or any other public policy issue, please call me at 502-564-8100, Ext. 617, or visit my LRC webpage to submit a message.
You can also follow me on Twitter at @SenatorSchickel. You can review the Legislature’s work online at www.lrc.ky.gov.
Note: Senator John Schickel (R-Union) represents the 11th District in Boone County.
