Runnin’ bunnies ‘n beagles, We share a day afield with rabbit hunters By Larry Myhre
Gary Howey, left, chats with Stan Krause and Jim Finnell
as we walk into the hunting area with Buck the beagle.
(Photo by Larry Myhre)
Reprinted from the Sioux City Journal
LINCOLN — Nothing puts a smile on the face of Stan Krause quicker than the howl of one of his beagles on a hot rabbit track.
He and his friend Jim Finnell are both retired and spend most days somewhere in the fields around their Lincoln, Neb., homes searching for rabbits.
Gary Howey, Hartington, Neb., and I joined Krause and Finnell and their friends John Cariotto and Dick Turpin, both of Lincoln, for a day of chasing rabbits with hounds.
This was a first for me. I have done a lot of rabbit hunting, but have only dreamed of the opportunity of hunting them with beagles.
Now, I was standing near a brushpile on the 412-acre Stagecoach Lake State Recreation Area about 22 miles south of Lincoln.
The beagles were working the brush hard, but the rabbits were reluctant to leave the briars. Occasionally I’d get a glance at a bunny hotfooting it across the clearing only to enter another tangle of brush so thick even the beagles had trouble penetrating it. … Continue reading
In Pursuit of the Wily Wabbit! By Gary Howey
Often as a kid growing up in N.E. South Dakota, my buddies and I would pursue what we thought was big game that inhabited the thickets and woodlot along the river, the Wily Wabbit.
With BB guns in hand, off we’d go, heading down the Sioux River out towards Lake Pelican.
Didn’t matter much what type of rabbit it was, we were just after rabbits, it could have been a black-tailed or white-tailed jack rabbit or a cottontail, we just wanted to say that we’d bagged a rabbit.
We knew there were a lot of rabbits around as we’d seen their tracks in the snow, so it was only a matter of time before we came across one.
Well, after numerous trips we had yet to see anything but tracks, pure frustration brought our Great Rabbit Hunt Expedition to an abrupt end.
Like many things that one tries that doesn’t work out, rabbit hunting became something that I was willing to forget about, to bury deep in my subconscious hoping to forget.
Several years later Shorty, a friend of my Dad, Cal who worked with him at Sanders/Sharpe Chevrolet asked if I and my brother A.J. would like to go along and do some rabbit hunting with him.
My first thoughts were, nope, been there, tried that, didn’t need it until he mentioned that we’d be hunting them with beagles.… Continue reading