Bog Myrtle & Peat

When I got my ferrets in July, my main motivation was to use them bolt rabbits for shooting. As the autumn came on and I started to get interested in nets, the idea of shooting slipped away a little bit and I began to concentrate on catching rabbits the traditional way. Realising that it had been just over a week since I last had the ferrets out working, I took them up to the Chayne this afternoon and for the first time, I left the nets at home.

There is one reasonable rabbit warren on the farm, and I have been saving it for the perfect occassion. It’s in a nice, open position with no cover for hundreds of yards in any direction. As I opened the ferrets’ box and let the first boy in, the shotgun lay on the grass behind me. Rabbit tracks in the snow led back and forth from the warren, and I was certain that it wouldn’t be long before we had made contact. Sure enough, the ferret was nowhere to be seen. If there are no bunnies at home, both ferrets come out of the warren and look for me with expressions of disappointment. The fact that the ferret had gone in and stayed in looked promising.

After a quarter of an hour, he reemerged with a pair of rabbit fur slippers. He had clearly been digging at something, but was beginning to lose interest in it. Catching him up, I swapped him for the other ferret; the real fighter; the one who will never give up at any cost. As I had expected, he vanished and stayed underground for two hours. Stupidly, I hadn’t attached detectors or even brought a spade, so as the cold began to bore into my bones, I realised with horror that I had no way of bringing the situation to a conclusion. The ferret would never leave the rabbit, and I would be stuck on a snowy hillside in sub zero conditions until the tenant farmer found me in April, hunched up like Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining.

It was a mile’s walk back to the farm buildings, but realising that I had no choice, I stuffed boulders into all the holes and set off at a jog, hoping the exercise would warm me up. Half an hour later I was back with a shovel and a steel probe. There was no rumbling underground as you’d expect from rabbits on the move; only a soft scraping sound from beneath the snow.

Ten minutes of digging and the hole suddenly collapsed into the rabbit tunnel. A little face peered out, unrecogniseably smothered in mud and fluff. The rabbit was still alive, but so badly tufted that it could hardly move. I dispatched it and handed out its liver to the determined ferret, then packed up and jogged back to the car again.

Rabbits usually learn to defend their holes after they have been ferreted once or twice before, but this one had never even seen a ferret. Why he chose to put himself on lockdown is a total mystery, and although the ferrets are clearly delighted to have caught him, I wish I could have shot him as he bolted…