Among Other Things: Mixed Feelings

Ever have ambivalent feelings toward things? I have; still do. I guess it started when I was a kid during World War 2. The patriotic thing to do on the home front was to raise chickens and rabbits and to have a “victory garden” to grow vegetables. Our family did all three — with varying degrees of success.

We got eggs and meat from the chickens, meat from the rabbits. So did resident opossums and foxes in the Hollywood hills. But the granite soil didn’t yield much in the way of crops. However, I did acquire a taste for fried rabbit that Mom used to cook, chicken, too. Straight eggs I was allergic to so I avoided them. I don’t think our efforts contributed much to the war effort.

Advance forward to the end of the war: I was invited to join a friend and his family for a couple days at their property in the desert near Lucerne Valley. We decided to go rabbit hunting. I fired the .22 once and that was all it took. I didn’t hit it clean and that rabbit squealed and squealed and I felt so bad I bawled. Those high pitched squeals still haunt me. Thus ended my hunting days.

A few weeks later our family was camped at Blue Jay campground on Lake Arrowhead. I had gotten a Scout knife a few weeks earlier. As I sat outside the tent whittling on a stick, a blue jay lit at the base of a nearby tree. I still wonder why I did it, but I threw the open bladed knife at the jay – and nailed him. Felt so ashamed that I took that knife, folded the blade and tossed the knife as far as I could into the lake. So much for bird hunting.

Shortly after moving to Polson, I noticed rabbit was sold in the meat market at Lloyd Crannel’s Main Street Market, located where the Sandpiper Gallery is now. I convinced my wife that fried rabbit was really good. She prepared it just right – twice. Until I read her a filler item in a newspaper that stated, “Rabbits are members of the rodent family.”

Her reaction: “Well, I don’t cook rodents in this house!” She didn’t either. Next time I was in the market I commented to Fay Spicker that I didn’t see any rabbit in the meat case.

He said, “I don’t carry rabbit any more. A lady was in the other day and saw the rabbit meat and she mused, ‘Hmm, cats?’”

Result of my poor judgment and big mouth, four of my five kids never hunted. I feel I short-changed my kids growing up in Montana.

But I still shoot deer – with a camera! And daughter Ruth has some incredible, professional quality animal pictures ranging from whistling marmots to grizzly bears.