Wearing the right clothing for the task is vital. Start with a good pair of leather boots or rubber-bottomed ones if the ground is wet. They should be well broken in, since you'll do lots of walking in a day of dogless rabbit hunting. A heavy canvas jacket protects the upper body well. Wear double-faced brush pants to shield your legs from thorns and stickers. Finally, because of the thick cover and poor visibility, wear blaze orange on your upper body so your partners or other hunters in the area know where you are.

It helps to have one or two buddies when you hit the rabbit cover. If necessary, though, you can push game by yourself. In either case, the best approach involves zigzagging through the cover rather than moving in a straight line. The erratic movement tends to alarm the quarry, which can't get a precise fix on where you're going. Thus confused, it's more likely to give in to panic and to flee, and to present you with a shot. Also: To suppress the noise of your approach, work with the wind when possible.

Inserting a sudden pause or halt into your progress is a great rabbit-flushing move. When you move steadily, many cottontails will let you go right past them, thinking that they're well enough hidden to evade detection; if, on the other hand, you stop, the sudden silence unnerves the quarry, which, fearing it's been spotted, must take flight.

Pausing also lets you get ready to fire on flushing game by raising your shotgun partially and planting your feet firmly, just in case something moves. Shots taken from this ready position are more likely to fly true than those popped off when you're surprised and caught off-balance in mid-stride by a bunny bursting wildly out of cover.

Stopping every few minutes is a sensible idea if you're working through prime habitat. Pause for at least 10 seconds; 20 or 30 will be even better. If the cover's not especially good, walk a bit farther until you come to better habitat and then pause.

When you're working with a friend, try mixing up the pauses. Let one hunter work 30 or 40 feet ahead while the other stands still, alert for flushing game; then, the second person works up past the first and pauses. No, you won't probe as much ground as you would simply walking through nonstop -- but you'll see more rabbits, and get off better shots this way.

It's important to have a plan for positioning yourself for the pause and for deciding when to arrest your progress. If one hunter's working through a patch of brush so thick that shooting would be impossible even if a rabbit were seen, the other person should be standing on the outside or far edge of that patch, ahead of the moving person, so if a rabbit flushes, the stationary shooter is likely to get a shot.

Often the person busting through the thickest cover won't even know that all the thrashing is moving rabbits, but the hunter on the outer edge will see game, and get a crack at it as it breaks from the thicket. If you come upon old overgrown machines or a brushpile, it can even pay to stomp on or kick it. If there's a danger of falling as you do this, place your gun down in a safe area first while your partner waits with his shotgun at the ready.

One thing you'll learn quickly when you're trying to jump rabbits: You can't be lackadaisical if you expect to eat much Haßenpfeffer at day's end. Although they can only run at 18 m.p.h., rabbits have a knack for getting behind cover or out of sight pronto. If you're in prime cover, walk with your gun held in at port arms position; expect to see game at any second. You'll be ready for a snap shot -- which is all you're likely to get when you kick up cottontails: a mere instant, from the time the ball of fur springs from cover to its disappearance behind the next brushpile or clump of weeds, in which to react.