Hare hunting your way to health and happiness
AS I WRITE THIS, there is just about seven inches of snow on our front lawn. The good news is I will not have to mow it any time soon. The bad news is, I will probably be tempted to hunt for varying hares.
Most people think of this as bad news for the hares – and, boy, are they ever mistaken. Hunting hares is one of those things that desperate hunters do when all the other hunting opportunities are no longer available.
It begins as a cold, damp and often exhausting activity. But after you squeeze yourself in to last year’s snow pants, it’s just plain frustrating. For the hares, however, it is their version of satellite TV – basically the most entertaining thing about winter.
Don’t get me wrong. Hunting hares can be a lot of fun – but only if you see them first. Yes, if you see a white animal sitting perfectly still under a bunch of branches on a snowy, white backdrop first.
The old adage is look for the glistening black marbles of their eyes against the snow. This should not
be confused with the glistening black pellets they leave behind, though it often is.
Most times, a hare hunt is merely a walk, often on snowshoes, through conifer forests, swamp edges and other places where delinquent branches conspire to remove your hat and then dump snow down the back of your collar. Of course, this does not always happen. Sometimes the snow gets dumped down your plumber’s crack.
On occasion you will see this ambush coming. So you will smile knowingly, take a side step to avoid it and promptly jam the tip of your snowshoe under a buried log so that you can do a proper face plant in the snow.
Then, you will pick yourself up and dust the snow out of your eyes, only to see a snowshoe hare run off.
Now, let’s talk about what happens on a bad hare hunt. Just kidding. On the plus side, hare hunts are actually a great way for the hunter to develop fitness, but only in that, if you hunt for hares more than a few times each winter, you’ll soon want to take up cross country skiing.
One of the worst things about hare hunting is the hat head you get after snowshoeing for hours and building up a sweat that you’d rarely attain in summer.
The worst example for me happened a few years ago after spending hours and hours traversing a cedar swamp and building up quite a lather. Despite all this, I only put up two hares, each of which I missed cleanly.
By the time I left the woods, I was soaked, shivering, frustrated and had sweat dripping down my head. So I stopped at a local coffee shop to buy a hot chocolate and a donut to stoke the furnace and regroup.
Before entering, I took off my hunter orange coat and hat and all my hunting paraphernalia so that I wouldn’t get too many stares, since I was now in a more urban area. But wouldn’t you know it, people still immediately figured out that I had been chasing hares and was unsuccessful to boot.
As much as I tried to wipe off the sweat on my brow, people immediately noticed.
In fact, the woman who served me whispered to her co-worker that I was having a bad hare day.