Rabbits

Rabbits are part of the memoir’s account of rural hunting: they are driven into nets for sale and pursued with a rifle. Their appearances connect the practical handling of animals and food with the suspense and shared excitement of the hunt, most vividly when the narrator accompanies his father to Oakport.

Hunting with the Keegans

On Sundays, the narrator went hunting with the Keegans. Toby, a black whippet, proved better at swallowing mice than at running down hares and rabbits; the Keegans nevertheless considered him useful for turning quarry back into the path of their larger fawn-coloured dog. This passing assessment makes the hunt a cooperative practice involving several dogs, even when an individual animal was not especially good at pursuing its target.

The Keegans also caught rabbits with a ferret and nets, then sold them to the Delahoydes. The capture was described through the animals’ frantic movement: after the muzzled ferret was sent into a burrow, a muffled thundering rose within the warren before the rabbits crashed into the nets. The scene gives the hunt a material outcome—rabbits were taken for sale—while preserving the violence and panic of the method.

The hunt at Oakport

On the evening before the narrator was due to return to Aughawillan, his father took him into Oakport to shoot rabbits with a .22 rifle. Ammunition was scarce: his father had only three shells left and gave them to the boy to carry. They followed the broken stone avenue beside the lake, passed the fallen iron gates, and moved silently along a high wall to a breach overlooking fields where rabbits came out to graze as the light weakened.

The father waited for a shot and tried to line up two rabbits at once. When the rifle fired, he sent his son to retrieve the wounded animal. The boy brought it back, and his father killed it with a single stroke of his hand. The sequence turns the rabbit hunt into a lesson in practical participation: the child carries the ammunition, watches the aim, runs after the wounded quarry, and carries the dead rabbit on the walk home.

Rural practice and narrative significance

The two accounts show different means of taking rabbits. The Keegans’ ferret and nets channel them out of their burrow for sale; at Oakport, the rifle makes the pursuit a quiet wait followed by a sudden shot and a retrieval. In both scenes, hunting belongs to ordinary rural activity rather than being treated as an isolated spectacle, but the memoir attends to the animals’ fear and injury as part of that activity.

The Oakport episode also binds the hunt to a moment between father and son. Its dwindling ammunition, the fading light, the boy’s task of retrieving the rabbit, and the return with the animal in his hands lead directly into the father’s proposal that he come to live in the barracks. The rabbit is therefore both quarry and the physical object carried through a consequential conversation: the hunt supplies the scene’s shared task and its movement toward a change in their relationship.