Rabbit Tracks in the Snow

Early in my childhood memory is that house on
the hill in what was called the Pflanze Woods and
the time of the snows that came down in silence
and covered all things and might have meant stay
inside and keep warm but changed when my dad
said let me show you how to track a rabbit.

Mother smiled her approval of this idea as I
wondered about it, then let her bundle me for
the cold and pat and praise me to the outdoors.
I followed him, this North Carolina mountain
man presenting himself as a college professor
of psychology and other of life’s mysteries I had
no need to understand like I did the finding of
where the rabbits go in the snow.

 I had no idea then of how the mountain man
and I would later be at stubborn odds on this
and that, but here I followed him like wisdom
itself and as that which could be no earthly
better that bright and peaceful day. This was
a child’s Christmas and birthdays and ice cream
all bundled together.

I followed him across the yard I played in, and
past the big tree I hoped to climb someday, and
then more out and down along the ridge to where
a rabbit might roam, and was happy because this
journey was for me, me alone, and without my
older brothers who would have ruined it all.

 Dad first explained that many animals such as
dogs and foxes and squirrels leave tracks in the
snow, and we must first find the rabbit kind of
tracks. Not knowing what was right or not right
about this, I still looked and looked as hard as
I could.

And when dad did find some tracks, he showed
how a hopping rabbit lands his large hind feet
down first and in front of his small front feet
which touch down last behind them, and this is
how you know rabbit tracks. I thought this was
a sacred lesson about life in the world ahead of
me. And for that reason, I have never forgotten it.

We followed but never found the rabbit we
tracked that day.

I wondered from those tracks was it running
scarred as if chased by something large and
mean? Or was it just enjoying the new fallen
snow and the clean crisp air?

If it saw us coming, did it fear we had a gun?
Or did it run joyful and carefree as I thought
it might? 

Did it raise its long ears and listen to the
sounds of the east Tennessee town lying down
below our ridge, or were those to a rabbit
the sounds of another world?

They were another world to me that day.

I was tracking rabbits.