My story actually begins before I entered the field, even before I started the drive. It was 6:00 AM, for those of you who are blessed never to see this time, it's not worth it in the least. Better to remain dormant and blissfully ignorant, than to be jarred awake while even the trees are asleep. The morning's dialogue was not the friendliest. "I'm driving?" The look on my face betrayed too much. 'Yeah, you have to pick the girls up at school at three thirty.' I sighed, and knew that the day could only get worse. The only problem with having to pick the girls up at three thirty was that the hawk was programmed to be sharp at three thirty, and I even asked my mom the day before; who was going to get the girls after school�at three thirty. It's not that she lied to me, she told the absolute truth, someone WAS going to pick up the girls, ME!
The day went slow, and it was near four thirty before I got to the field. I didn�t have very long to hunt, nor to wait�
I was in a hurry, spending no time canvassing the rocks like I should have. If there were any bunnies in there, they stayed. Still, my first slip was quite soon. I was about twenty five feet from the boundary of the piles when Aquila left his perch beating a path straight to the weeds. He hit in some thick thorns, and the rabbit kept running. I made a mental note of the general area it was in, picked the hawk up (he seems to have a hard time getting out of brambles), and worked that way. Fairly soon another rabbit flushed from a different area, headed toward the same region. Oddly enough, they ran away from the most obvious holes I knew of. I guess I'm just getting that much better at outwitting the bunnies. I saw the whole flight, Aquila beating down Goshawk style, headed toward the rabbit, which had turned toward the rock piles. Aq missed his chance to go down in the open, and suddenly pitched up on one side, then over and down onto a four-foot thick patch of thorns, I knew just by the location of his wingover that he wouldn't be able to take it. I made tracks toward the rock piles, attempting to head the two I had already flushed back out into the open. No such luck. They must have had another hole in that area. The hawk was up in a snag, about ten feet from my starting position. As I walked that way again, planning to head out toward the brush pile near the outside border of the field, lo and behold, there before me were three rabbits. HO HO HO! I screamed, but Aquila needed no prompt. Down he pumped, straight toward where I saw the rabbits enter the thick brambles. "No not there!" My mind raced with the thought that he would waste another slip trying to kill through thorns thicker than he, or that worse he might injure�kill himself going down onto the rocks. He pulled up over the high cover, just barely buzzing it, then dropped down out of sight. There was a loud crunch, and a muffled and truncated squeal coming from a three-foot section of milkweed just before the beginning of the rock piles. "HA, That's what I'm talking about," I shouted, running toward the scene. It was a young buck; very small in comparison to the ones I usually take from the field. On the way to gut it, my right hand snagged on a thorn, ripping a quarter inch gash into my right pointer finger. My middle was next. It did not get through the skin, so it is more of a sore divot than anything else, until about another quarter inch, then it delves a tad deeper. Why am I telling you this? Never, never take off your right-handed glove when in thick thorns. All in all, despite the bad start, the day was not a total waste.
*all quotes and events are written after the fact, and so certain literary license must be taken.*
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