The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Long Hillside, by Thomas Nelson Page

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Title: The Long Hillside
A Christmas Hare-Hunt In Old Virginia
1908

Author: Thomas Nelson Page

Release Date: November 16, 2007 [EBook #23514]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LONG HILLSIDE ***

Produced by David Widger

THE LONG HILLSIDE

A CHRISTMAS HARE-HUNT IN OLD VIRGINIA

By Thomas Nelson Page

Charles Scribner's Sons New York, 1908

Copyright, 1891, 1904, 1906

I

There do not seem to be as many hares now as there used to be when I was
a boy. Then the "old fields" and branch-bottoms used to be full of them.
They were peculiarly our game; I mean we used to consider that they
belonged to us boys. They were rather scorned by the "gentlemen," by
which was meant the grown-up gentlemen, who shot partridges over the
pointers, and only picked up a hare when she got in their way. And the
negroes used to catch them in traps or "gums," which were traps made of
hollow gum-tree logs. But we boys were the hare-hunters. They were our
property from our childhood; just as much, we considered, as "Bruno" and
"Don," the beautiful "crack" pointers, with their brown eyes and satiny
ears and coats, were "the gentlemen's."

The negroes used to set traps all the Fall and Winter, and we, with the
natural tendency of boys to imitate whatever is wild and primitive, used
to set traps also. To tell the truth, however, the hares appeared to
have a way of going into the negroes' traps, rather than into ours, and
the former caught many to our one.

Even now, after many years, I can remember the delight of the frosty
mornings; the joy with which we used to peep through the little panes
of the dormer-windows at the white frost over the fields, which promised
stronger chances of game being caught; the eagerness with which,
oblivious of the cold, we sped through the garden, across the field,
along the ditch banks, and up by the woods, making the round of our
traps; the expectancy with which we peeped over the whitened weeds and
through the bushes, to catch a glimpse of the gums in some "parf" or
at some cle