Whenever I think of rabbits, I think of Realph. He was a little tricolor beagle named after my great-grandfather--a lean, rugged, son of Norway who came to central Wisconsin in the 1880s and homesteaded 160 hardscrabble acres. Great-Grandpa made something out of nothing from that chunk of unforgiving real estate. Realph the beagle could do the same with a bunny track.

My cousin Scott held title to Realph and kept him fed, but no one owned him except the cottontails living on the ground once owned by his namesake. Great-Grandpa had somehow farmed the land, but that place was really meant to grow trees and deer and grouse and, of course, bunnies. Realph the beagle knew this--about the rabbits anyway--and spent the better part of his life pointing it out to my cousins and me every winter.

Anyone who's ever owned a great hunting dog knows they are infinitely smarter than the folks who run them, and Realph was something of a genius. He divided his life into three tidy compartments: eating, sleeping and chasing rabbits.

We started rabbit hunting as soon after the deer season as Realph would allow. Like most Wisconsin men, we took our whitetail hunting seriously, and also like our ancestors we abhorred waste, viewing an empty buck tag as an abomination. So we sat through the cold and we slogged through swamps, and we never gave up until we had "filled out." I know we loved deer hunting, but some days I remember not smiling very much.

As we went about our deer business, Realph waited patiently, groaning through pleasant dreams while curled in a little ball at one end of his couch. I never figured out how he knew when we had our deer, but he always did.

One day we'd come in from the woods and collapse on Realph's couch, hoping to join in his slumber. But Realph was no longer sleeping. Instead, he'd whine impatiently and nudge our hands and even our chins with his nose. Trying to nap next to a beagle that's ready to hunt is as hopeless as sleeping through a baby's feeding time.

Courtesty Of Remington Arms Co.

It seemed there was always snow on the ground then. Goaded by the little beagle, we'd remove a layer or two of clothing, don lighter boots and strap holsters holding little .22 Ruger pistols on our hips. Then we'd turn Realph--who'd morphed from a snoozing ball into a wriggling contortionist--loose from Scott's porch. He was bawling on a track within minutes. Something wonderful always happened to us immediately after Realph announced the first rabbit. I remember laughing out loud a lot, a sort of involuntary chuckle that would escape me without thought.

When I was a teenager, I painted houses for a man who was a nut about bluegrass music, which we'd listen to on his tape player all day long. George maintained that you couldn't hear banjo music and not get in a good mood. He was right, and I came to believe the same thing about beagles. If that baying doesn't spread warmth in your chest, you have to be dead inside.

Of course we were all young and tough and prided ourselves on being good hunters and even better shots. But we could, and did, miss rabbits with regularity and did not take our failure personally.

I think that was Realph's doing, too. Whenever I shot a bunny he'd been trailing, I felt like I'd taken a toy away from a toddler. He'd run up to the rabbit and give a little yip--like he'd caught the thing napping and wanted to get the chase going again--until he realized what I'd done. Then Realph would look up at me, shake his head, stare off in the woods and sigh audibly. Killing cottontails with a pistol was difficult for me, but somehow I always felt like I should apologize to that dog whenever I got lucky.

Not that it happened much. One year I brought a girl I was dating to my cousin's house in January. I'd told her about the rabbits and the dog and the happy sounds he made, and she said she wanted to go along. So Scott took us all to a little tamarack swamp, where Realph jumped a cottontail from a brushpile. That bunny blitzed straight as a bullet for 30 yards, then banked hard left and ran right at me.

My girlfriend was standing behind me as the rabbit came, so I took aim and kept squeezing the trigger until I'd emptied the clip. The rabbit never altered its course and passed so close that Realph's tail slapped the ankle of my boot as he bawled on by, hot on the bunny's track.

I looked at my girlfriend and we just laughed together, with light snow falling on our hats and shoulders. I ended up marrying her, just for moments like that.

The toughest part of any hunt with Realph was getting him to quit. You can teach a beagle to come when called, but the scent of game turns most hounds deaf. If it was late afternoon and Realph wasn't on a track, Scott would just run him down and stuff him--wriggling and squirming--into the game pouch of his hunting coat. Then we'd walk out in the gathering dusk, Realph's head sticking out of the coat, his nose snuffling for scent in pig-like grunts that wouldn't stop until we'd reached the house.

I didn't rabbit hunt for close to a year after Realph died. The passing of a great dog can do that to me. But one winter day I found myself staring at the television as crystalline sunbeams shot through the windows, glared off the set and bounced into my eyes. Without knowing why, I went to my closet and shucked on long underwear, light wool pants and shirt and a Filson hat. I was stringing up a little recurve bow when my wife stepped in the room.

"What's up?"

"Tired of TV," I mumbled. "Thought I'd go to the woods and shoot stumps or something."

"Might as well take the dog with you," she replied.

Our golden retriever was a wonder on pheasants, though the season had closed a month before. Still, Cody led me happily across the fields. I followed mindlessly, glad to let him have his head. Within minutes we were trudging along a brushy wood line where abandoned farm implements, prickly ash and rotting stumps created a tangle of cover. Cody disappeared into the mess, and I paused at the edge, enjoying the cold breeze on my face.

When I looked up, there was a rabbit coming at me. He wasn't running, just poking along in a series of hops and stops. At every pause he'd stare at his backtrail. I could hear Cody back there, snapping twigs as he bumbled through the dense cover.

With the rabbit's head turned, I snuck an arrow out and snapped the nock on the bowstring. My arrows were tipped with judo points, but I knew they'd kill a bunny at close range. I felt a keen tension I hadn't experienced for a long time as I searched the cover for a shooting lane. The bunny was surely heading for a hole somewhere near the stumps and machinery.

It was a shot I'd have made if I weren't so excited. Cody finally drew close enough to make the rabbit nervous again, and I drew the bow as the rabbit slipped through the brush and stopped only 10 feet away. The arrow was off the rest before I'd thought to release it. It struck the snow inches in front of the rabbit's nose and skipped off the frozen ground. One prong of the judo point caught a branch and flipped the arrow crazily through the air before it straightened out and landed with a ping! into a rusty old paint can. The rabbit simply disappeared as I broke into a long, hearty laugh that brought the dog running.

The laughter was all it took. I led Cody down to that brush patch frequently that winter, bow in hand and a spring in my step. Though I finally killed a rabbit--and it took a while--I don't believe that golden of mine ever lost his confusion.

He was used to hunting for me, quartering fields or making retrieves as I signaled directions with an outstretched arm. But at the Junkpile, as I eventually named the place, I'd crawl atop an old baler or manure spreader and try to send Cody off with a vague wave of my arm. He completed his circles more out of boredom than obedience. Still, like all retrievers, he sensed when his master was happy and tried to repeat any behavior that seemed to please me. Though Cody always stunk as a rabbit dog, he was with me when I got the fever again, so I called him my beagle-by-proxy.

Thankfully, Scott soon got himself another rabbit dog, giving me an excuse to visit him several times each winter. Eventually some of Scott's buddies would also start buying beagles, some of them highly bred dogs that arrived by airplane from faraway places in little plastic crates. There's no such thing as a bad beagle in my book, but I haven't seen a one of them that could match Realph. I like to think of that little hound as sire of the whole pack. Without him none of those guys would be running hounds today.

Like many sportsmen, I'm primarily a big game hunter. My early fever for whitetails never went away, though now I'm less concerned with filling a tag than I am the animal I attach it to. And then there are bear and mule deer and caribou and all the other noble and wonderful big game animals that require so much time you can't help but hunt them seriously.

Ducks and geese are somewhat more frivolous but they, too, require skill and effort and a certain concentration to hunt well. I could lose myself while pheasant or grouse hunting, but I'm always so focused on the dog work; watching a retriever or setter you've trained is like sitting through your child's dance recital.

So rabbits are the only game I hunt without care or expectation. I learned to do so from a little beagle named after my great-grandpa, a manic tricolor that lived for nothing more than a lively hunt on a cold winter day. There are few meals I enjoy more than cottontail, and I still feel a warm pride when I make a good shot on a bunny skittering through dense cover.

But mostly I just love the chase. And these days, whenever I find myself standing over a cottontail, I find myself looking off into the woods and sighing out loud...and hoping the next hunt won't end so soon.