Nadine lives on the next place down the blacktop, a quarter mile east. Her husband farms twelve hundred acres of corn and beans with his brother, and she has raised four boys and a garden the size of a church parking lot.
Her youngest is Huck, twelve years old, and Huck is the best hand with a fishing net in Effingham County. That is not my opinion. That is what every man at the bait shop will tell you.
“Nadine, I need your boy,” I said. “And any other boys you can find.”
She did not ask why. She said, “What are we catching?”
“Rabbits. Seven of them. Small. In the timber behind the Lasley place.”
“Give me fifteen minutes,” she said.
Huck came across the bean field on his bicycle with two long-handled landing nets tied across the handlebars and a coffee can of something rattling in the basket. Nadine followed in her pickup with two more boys from down the road, brothers, ten and thirteen, and a little girl from church who was in Della’s 4-H club.
“What’s in the can?” I asked Huck.
“Rabbit pellets,” he said. “Mom said they’d come to the rattle if they know it.”
That boy was twelve years old and he had already thought of more than I had.
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We went into the timber at one in the afternoon in ninety-one degree heat.
I will tell you what that was like, because I do not think people who have not done it understand. The air under the trees does not move. The gnats get in your eyes and your ears. The rose briars catch your pant legs every third step. You walk bent over, looking under every log and every brush pile, and you cannot hear anything over the cicadas.
Della went in front with the can of pellets, shaking it every few steps. I made her wear a long-sleeved shirt of her daddy’s and his old cap. The sleeves came down past her fingers and she rolled them three times.
The boys spread out in a line on either side of her, about ten yards apart, nets held low.
Nobody talked much. Huck had told them to keep quiet. “They freeze when they hear you,” he said. “Then they bolt. You have to be quieter than them.”
The first one we found was a doe Della called Clover.
She was sitting under a fallen hickory about a hundred yards in, in a little hollow where the leaves had piled up. She was perfectly still with her ears flat, and if Della had not known exactly what shade of gray-brown she was, we would have walked right past her.
Della stopped. She held up her hand. Everybody stopped.
She got down on her hands and knees in the leaves, and she shook the can, very softly, and she said, “Clover. Clover girl. Come on, baby.”
The rabbit did not move.
Della put a handful of pellets on the ground in front of her and backed up a foot. Then she sat down in the leaves and waited.
I have never been so proud of anything in my life as I was of my daughter sitting in those leaves.
She did not lunge. She did not cry. She just sat there in ninety-one degrees in a long-sleeved shirt, with sweat running into her eyes, and she waited.