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Show and heads along clotheslines. Mothers liked neither the odor nor the sight of the "chiselers1" long teeth grinning gruesomely over the wire. The catch smelled pretty "gamey" all the way to the courthouse before the young head-hunters converted it into nickels. Jackrabbits figured as other sources of income. Some of us boys skinned the hares, stretched the pelts over U-shaped wire frames to dry and sold them to furriers for a dime each. I used to have a dozen or two skins drying all the time in the unfinished half of our second story. Some of the skins wound up as trim on ladies' coats and dresses, while others were ground up for felt hats. For a time, sureshots with a .22 killed rabbits and shipped them to Salt Lake City butcher shops. Abruptly the demand ended late one winter. Customers might have heard about the boils, some as big as your fist, that many jacks had in summer. That's why most of us never ate jackrabbits, only the fine-textured, white meat of cottontails. But a few ate jacks. A neighbor of ours told of riding past the humble shack of immigrants recently arrived from some Central European country. The mother and two daughters came to the door with their hands and arms red with blood. "Good heavens!" the visitor exclaimed. "What's happened? What're you doing?" The trio grinned broadly, and one of the girls explained, "Ve're grindin' bunnies!" They were converting rabbits into sausages. "Young Johnnie" Dinwiddie and a pal tried an enterprise that promised public service and private profit. They bought a mile of |