Cottontail Rabbit

I don’t know why, but for the last few weeks, I have had the urge to do some pencil sketches of animals. So last week, I got out my old drawing pencils and bought some new ones at Office Depot. Last Thursday, I took my wife, Corinne, to her 55^th Tivy High School Class reunion in Kerrville, Texas. We stayed at the Y. O. Hilton hotel which has a lot of stuffed animals in the lobby. I got started doing drawings again by doing a drawing of a grizzly bear that was in the lobby. Those bears are considered the top predators in North America for a good reason. They are huge.

This drawing is of a cottontail rabbit which is at the other end of the animal world in size from that grizzly bear. I did this drawing based on a photograph that I took of a cottontail rabbit in Palo Duro Canyon last fall about a year ago. I clearly remember taking the picture. There were several cottontails having a good time, in the early morning just after daybreak, romping around in the grass in one of the campgrounds. They seemed so happy to be alive. As I watched them, I wondered how I could have been so cruel to them when I was young.

As a teenager growing up in Southwest Texas in the little town of Uvalde, my buddies and I considered it a sport to go rabbit hunting with our .22 rifles. It just never occurred to me or my buddies that the rabbits had feelings and that we were inflicting great pain and death to these little harmless creatures. The ranchers did not consider them exactly harmless. It was believed that six adult Jack Rabbits ate as much grass as a cow. So they didn’t mind if we went rabbit hunting on their property as long as we didn’t get carried away wanting to shoot something and maybe shoot one of their cows.

As we got a little older and got driver’s licenses and needed something exciting to do at night when the social life in the little town was slow, sometimes we would go rabbit hunting in a pickup truck out at the little airport at the edge of town. At the airport, there were lots of rabbits in the open grass field. Also we could count on that there were no unexpected holes in the ground or hidden tree stumps in the grass that could damaged my dad’s truck.

I remember one night when we were out there hunting rabbits. Of course our parents would not have endorsed this activity.

John David and I were standing up in the back of the pickup with our .22 rifles shooting over the cab, as the driver, Charlie, chased the rabbits in the grass field. I remember seeing John David aiming his rifle at a rabbit running in front of the pickup. Suddenly, the rabbit made a turn to the left, Charlie sharply turned the pickup to follow the rabbit. John David, still aiming his rifle, faded out into the darkness as he went straight on forward. I had to beat on the top of the cab to get Charlie’s attention to stop chasing the rabbit to tell him that we had lost John David. We turned around and followed the pickup’s tracks back to where he had fallen out. We found him all scratched up, but OK. The only problem was, we had to concoct a plausible story so that he could explain to his mother how he got all scratched up.