This article was originally published in St. Stephen’s News in December of 2010.
“What happened to the White Rabbit?” asked Wiley Hawks, intrigued by the ultimate fate of the large and handsome rabbit I had rescued from a neighbor’s Christmas dinner table. His interest had been sparked by a finely crafted antique English ferret cage he had acquired at a local auction.
“It must have been a very small ferret, don’t you think?” he said, holding up the tiny, highly polished mahogany casket. As the world’s living expert on English rural oddities, I am often asked for my opinion about such arcane artifacts.
I explained that ferrets didn’t live in those miniature cages. They were merely used to transport them from the hutches where they lived to the burrows where their owners hunted rabbits. This was done by pegging nets over all but one of the exits to the rabbit burrows. The ferret was then released from the cage into the burrow.
Rabbits—rightly terrified of the vicious little predators—soon started fleeing the burrows only to be trapped in the nets over the exits and swiftly dispatched by little boys wielding what in my part of the world were called “ruddy girt sticks.”
The knack was not to hit the ferret—a feat easier said than done. I was present when Reuben Packer fatally whacked his dad’s favorite ferret. It was the first time I had ever seen a grown man sit down and weep.
My white rabbit enjoyed a long, well fed and slothful life in a warm and roomy hutch. Field rabbits, by contrast, figured often on country folks’ menus. Some were shot, more were trapped, but most, I suspect, came courtesy of the men with the ferret cages. GPH✠