10/09/2026
There is a kind of music you only hear on a cold morning in the fall, and it comes from a pack of beagles that has just struck a rabbit. 🐕 If you grew up with it, you can hear it right now.
Papaw kept three or four beagles in a lot behind the house, and all year they were just dogs that barked at the mail carrier. But come the first hard frost, he would drop the tailgate and they turned into something else. We would walk the fencerows and the brier patches with the frost crunching, and when that first dog opened up, he would just stop and grin. "That's Belle," he would say. "Listen at her." He knew every voice.
He taught me a rabbit runs a circle. You do not chase it. You stand still where it jumped, keep your gun pointed safe, and wait for the dogs to bring it back around. It was the first lesson I ever had in patience, and I did not know it was a lesson. 🧡 We would come home with two or three, and Mamaw would fry them up with gravy and biscuits.
Half the time I think he would have been just as happy never firing a shot. He went to hear the dogs run. Did anybody in your family keep beagles?
