Imagine a time, in the long, long ago. When young boys were allowed to freely walk through large open spaces hunting birds, rabbits, squirrels etc. with shotguns.
I think my brother and I were 11 and 12 years old at the time and living on a big stretch (1/2 section) of land out east of Colorado Springs. We had grown up with guns in our hands and had what I would call a good amount of safety training and small game hunting experience. Our family had enough faith in our decision making to where we were allowed to go out most days to hunt our afternoons away and get into other such boyish adventures on our property.
We were out with 2 blue tick hounds hunting about anything we could find one afternoon when my slightly older brother (again, all of 12 years old) spotted something running toward a tractor sized brush pile. He swore that it was a rabbit, and the chase was on!
My brother and I, along with our two hounds, surrounded that sizeable brush pile and began to formulate a plan. We figured that if we could shake the pile enough, whatever was hiding inside would come running out and we would be able to shoot it on the move.
So, we shook. We climbed on it and we stomped. We threw rocks at it. Our dogs howled and barked at that dark pile. All to no avail.
Now, my brother being senior to me - by all of 18 months - came up with the best possible plan. Why not just stick the shotgun barrel into that tangled old brush pile and shoot what was obviously a big rabbit. We'd then simply roll that pile off and recover our game. Remember, this was a brush pile that I'd say was easily the size of a full sized pickup truck, but when you're 11, this seems like it will be pretty easy to do.
Anyway, after hearing scratching noises coming from the pile that implied that the rabbit was still holed up in there, we executed our plan.
My brother proceeded to get the muzzle of his shotgun into the closest point of tangle where we could hear the movement coming from and pulled the trigger.
We learned several valuable lessons that day.
#1 - I am amazed to this day that nothing genuinely devastating happened to us, such as catching a pellet in the eye - or worse...
#2 - We learned a dramatic lesson that day about the critical nature of game identification, as my brother was unfortunate enough to have misidentified the species that he had initially swore to me had run into that pile.
The poor, unfortunate animal that he had caught running into that pile out of the corner of his eye had most certainly not been a rabbit.
My brother's shot did connect with enough of the animal to scare or injure the animal to the point where, within milliseconds of him pulling the trigger, all four in our hunting party (me, my brother and both of our pups), were covered in a thick liquid jet of skunk spray.
It was a long walk back to our farmhouse, during which two pre-teen boys were hard at work trying to craft a feasible story as to why we were all covered in the most putrid & headache inducing smell that I'd ever experienced.
If I recall correctly, we didn't sleep in the house that night.
what the heck? I walk down the hill a few yards and off across a little draw there's a young man jumping up and down with his dad. Unbelievable. I just turned and went home.
