As a young lad on the farm, I had various chores that I needed to take care of lest I suffer my father trying to enrich my blood with iron in less-than-conventional methods. In the winter, one of these chores was feeding the horses/cattle hay out in our field (we released the animals out into the field when haying season was over).

The easiest way to accomplish this was by means of a snowmobile. I guess I use the word "snowmobile" in a purely academic sense; at one point, it had been a snowmobile, but it resembled nothing so much as a random collection of weathered duct tape shrouding an oversized lawnmower engine, all strapped to skis with the backbone and consistency of so many Olsen twins. We called it Helga.

Still, it ran, and that was enough. In the winter I'd usually go out to make my nighttime feeding run at about 8:30 at night. I'd toss a couple of bales of hay on the back of Helga, pull the cord a few hundred times, say some words I don't think my mom knew I knew, squirt a bunch of ether in the air intake, say a word I KNOW my dad didn't know i knew (based on the fact that I'm still alive) when I realize the can is pointed at me and not at the snowmobile), pull 50 more times, thank the Saint of Frustrated Winter Farmboys (his name is Bubba) when the yewt thing started, and head out on my way. I'd drop off the hay, and then the fun would begin.

At night, you see, jackrabbits used to cross our field in search of - well, I don't know what they were in search of (maybe they had a nightly rabbit orgy down by the creek?), but they crossed the field anyway. In defiance of all known science and engineering principles, Helga's headlight still worked, so I'd start scanning the field for those little glints that meant a rabbit sex party was imminent. As soon as I saw one, the chase was on. For a while I'd focus my efforts on keeping them in the field, mostly because the combination of Helga, slow though she was, and a barbwire fence would not have been good for my already pock-marked complexion. When I got them on a straightaway in the middle, though, I'd punch the gas and try to make some rabbit roadkill.

The great thing about this was that, since I was riding on snow, there wasn't a hard surface on to which I could crush the bunny. Instead, I'd usually launch thing about 10 feet in the air behind me. Sometimes that would be the end of the game, but more often they'd be stunned and run off. Thus you could get as much as an hours worth of fun out of one bunny. On night on which the rabbits were feeling particularly randy, I'd stay out until well past midnight. The only real down side to it was that in the summer I'd inevitably discover a few rabbit bones in freshly-baled hay - although that wasn't entirely a bad thing, because there was always the outside chance that the rabbit bones would choke the milk cow, thus saving me from being forced to molest the poor creature every morning in the pursuit of milk.

I feel sort of bad about that now. I promise, I do.