The bunny hunter (pun intended)

It's spring here in Chicago -- well, I mean, not real spring, since it's currently 28 and snowing, but technically spring, and we did have a few days in the 60s. This spring, Lucy has taken on a new job -- she is the bunny hunter. For those who don't know, beagles were originally bred to hunt rabbitts. Their patches of white -- usually on their paws, their scruff, and the tip of their tail -- helped hunters spot them in the dark when they had tracked a rabbitt. Lucy's never had much interest in bunnies before now. She was really a squirrel gal back in Charlottesville and even at our old apartment in Chicago. She chased them up the trees. Of late, she's even become enthralled with scaring gatherings of pigeons and making them scatter. But never bunnies.

Last week or so Wes and I took a walk through Grant Park with her because the weather was nice. We were walking across an open area in the park when Lucy doubled back and starting sniffing and scrambling through the bushes. We saw the rabbitt -- fuzzy white tail and all -- hop away. Lucy tried to pursue, much to the travail of Wes, who had the other end of her leash. She found three or four more that day and had an awful lot of fun chasing them. I've never seen this dog as excited as she was going after those bunnies, and that's saying something.

Bear in mind, of course, that Lucy would never actually do anything to the bunny if she caught it. When she was a puppy in Charlottesville, there were little frogs that hopped around our apartment door at night. She liked to paw at them when they jumped, and on one or two occassions she even picked one up in her mouth, but it tasted funny and she spit it back out. The frog jumped away. I think they finally figured out that if they just sat still when she came by, she wouldn't pay them any mind. Bright frogs, really.

This morning I was taking Lucy to the little roundabout park a block away, and she stopped and stuck her head between the irons slats of a gate that fenced in gardens that belong to the townhouses between our condo building and the park. Some people have done really nice jobs with these mini-gardens, with all varieties of plants and sometimes a little sculpture or fountain. Well a bunny must have visited overnight, because Lucy stopped at several of these gardens to thrust her head through and sniff with great animation. I was a little concerned about her head -- she got it stuck under the couch the other day going after a treat -- but she pulled out when I tugged her along.

So that's Lucy's new job these days -- saving daffodils and shrubbery everywhere from being munched at. She is the bunny hunter.