Hunting With Jiggs and the Scout

I should first explain about my dog Jiggs and a little bit of his history. Jiggs was a "found" dog and I never really knew if the story of his finding was absolutely true or not. My Mother claimed to have found him one day in a parking lot downtown and said nobody claimed him and he wore no collar or tag so she brought him home. I had lost several dogs already due to disease and cars so she thought I needed a new dog.

He seemed old beyond his years when I first met him (I never knew how old exactly). He came slowly wandering into the kitchen to meet me when I came home from school that day. He sized me up for a bit and then strolled over to allow me to pet him and I was accepted as his boy from then on. He was a tri-colored cocker spaniel with mostly black hair and a few gold and white patches to break up his camouflage.

Jiggs and I formed a team thaat grew into each other; he trained me and I learned, not without mistakes, but I learned. From the start he loved to roam the woods with me and whether we were just tramping around for fun or fishing or hunting, he seemed to know what to do and what I was supposed to do. A well trained boy can make a dog look good so I think he took extra special care with me.

At first most of my small game hunting with Jiggs was done with my .22 rifle and later with my Stevens pump 12 when I finally graduated to a shotgun. Jiggs could flush a partridge just right so I could get a shot and squirrels were often enticed around the tree they ran up so I could get a shot there too. With rabbits(cottontails) he knew just how fast to chase them so they weren't running all out when they came by me. A rabbit usually likes to circle around back to his home territory, so a hunter can get a good shot if he is positioned somewhere near where the dog picked him up. With the .22 rifle I tried mostly for head shots, since a wounded rabbit could be lost if it got in a hole or thick tangles, so the head was a good place to aim.

I decided I needed a good handgun so I talked my Mother into helping me buy a Colt .22 Scout single action; nothing fancy but a good, dependable, well made revolver by a true American icon of gun manufacturing. It had fixed sights, a simple blade front and groove top strap and a kind of heavy trigger pull, but it was and still is a great little packing handgun. I've used it close to fifty years and it's still shooting fine.

After I got my Colt .22 Scout, I practiced until I was blue in the face plinking everything I could find out in the pasture behind the house. Tin cans, wood blocks, sticks or anything else that presented a challenge; dried out cowpies worked well! I had read plenty of Elmer Keith about handgun hunting so I was itching to try my Scout on rabbits.

There is nothing more exciting, well that may be a bit exaggerated, but close to nothing as challenging as trying to hit a hopping rabbit with a .22 revolver! Sometimes the shot would be close, others further away but I never shot at a running rabbit that was beyond my self-imposed maximum of 15 yards, sitting shots were a bit farther sometimes. I didn't carry a ruler along but I pretty well knew what was too far away for a clean hit. That's what all the practice in the pasture had been for, to establish how far was too far!

For the next few small game seasons, Jiggs and I racked up quite a string of game to the point that my Mother was running out of new recipes for rabbit! She really made some good dishes, fried in a pan with biscuits and gravy, deep-fried like chicken with seasoned batter, sauteed and baked. Sometimes it seemed like we had rabbit every other day for a while. Of course, there was an odd squirrel or partridge every so often to spice up the wild game menu but rabbit was quite the main fare.

In case you're wondering, I come from a family that was not too well off during my childhood so hunting (and gardening in summer) was a necessary part of filling the freezer during the fall. We used everything we could get, deer, bear, rabbits, partridge, squirrels and even raccoons when we got them out of the corn fields. I was taught that you didn't shoot things needlessly, you shot for food or to get rid of pest animals, but we didn't kill for sport. I have lived by that tenet pretty much throughout my hunting life. I like a trophy deer as much as anyone but it must be edible too. And I do shoot varmits when the need arises.

Since those early days of my handgun hunting I have used my other handguns to hunt with many times. I have taken rabbits and grouse with my Python and I have hunted whitetails with my Ruger SBH with handloads, but when I want to shoot for fun now I seem to be attracted to the .22 Scout more often than not. It reminds me of the "Good old days" and hunting with Jiggs.