"A grouse gun and beagles. You get weirder all the time." So my long-time hunting buddy James Dennie said.

We were joining a mutual friend and his four-dog pack of rabbit hounds to check out a couple of abandoned and overgrown homesites that had been surrounded by large farming operations. For more than a decade, the places had been left to whatever Nature decided to do with them, and it seemed likely that we could stir up a race or two, at least enough to polish up the beagles before making more serious hunts later in the season.

One look at the first "yard" was almost enough to cause us to stay in the truck. We had expected to see the crumbling remains of what had once been a subsistence farmer's home, complete with half-gone roof and a front porch lacking a single plank. What we had not anticipated were the rose bushes that had once decorated the place, a wild, mad tangle of the multiflora type that had spread unchecked all those many years.

"Might as well let them get their tails bloody, I guess," our friend said.

The dogs went through the normal routines that dogs insist upon after riding for half an hour in a box, and then one by one they disappeared into the cover. Beagles are not briar-proof, but the good ones think that they are.

I had just flipped the breech lever on my double barrel to dunk in a couple of light loads of No. 4 shot, my favorite for cottontails, when a chubby tri-colored beagle named Charlotte cut loose with the squealing yelp that is her trademark signal that once again she was first off the mark. The three other pack members were only a couple of heartbeats behind her.

It seemed simple enough to figure out what to do: We had a hot rabbit race in progress and the cover looked like it would dictate that the race would remain in a chunk of terrain that covered less than an acre.

But 20 minutes later, when the dogs had brought the cottontail back around for the third time and it was coming obvious that we weren't going to get a shot by standing on the fringes of the cover, the hunting didn't seem nearly as simple.

Brush chaps are great for a lot of hunting situations, but as I pushed through the vegetable barbed wire (behind the roses there was a blackberry briar thicket that could have stalled a Sherman tank), I was wishing that they came up higher than my waist. My canvas hunting coat sounded like berserk squirrels were chewing on it, but the effort was not wasted. The cottontail offered a tiny, brief target at a distance of 12 steps and the skeet-bored 12-gauge flattened him without destroying supper.

We picked briars from exposed stretches of skin, and some that were not exposed for a week or two, but stories that the hunt generated are still being told. Anytime you take three limits of cottontails in less than two hours, you have had a hunt worth recalling.

During that same season, we hunted another couple of places that had similar cover, complete with rose bushes gone wild combined with briar thickets, but our successes were far less memorable.

The only major visible difference was that on the sparsely populated rabbit covers the animals that were there had been chewing heavily on the rose stems. But why in areas with higher cottontail populations did the roses show almost no sign of such foraging?

We returned to our hotspot and got our answer: oak trees. Big, shaggy red oaks and white oaks like the ones that people loved in their yards for shade back in the days before air conditioning. The mast that those trees dropped might have reached into the hundreds of bushels on a good year, and even on a bad year, they could feed as many rabbits as the thorny habitat could hold.