Nutt House Bunch

When I was in college, I ran around with a large group of kids. My best friend and I often visited a group of cowboys who lived together in the Nutt House (literally). One of the resident’s of the Nutt House had gone to high school with us. The other four were from all over North and West Texas (Muleshoe, Plainview, Quanah, and Breckenridge).

They were your typical fun-loving countrified college kids. Because I only lived about thirty miles or so from campus, they would often come down to our house just to visit and get a home-cooked meal.

My family lived on a farm in the middle of nowhere. Therefore, we had lots of wildlife. Nothing excited the Nutt House Bunch more than hunting coons and rabbits.

One night when they came down for supper, we all went down to the bottom in a pickup. With two of us in the cab, the rest rode in the back with their rifles resting on the cab roof. We would zoom around Daddy’s fields spotting rabbits and they’d fire a shot. They usually hit their target.

After we tired of that, we drove over to the creek and shined for coons. Sure enough, we found some and they took aim at them, too. They never missed a shot.

Back then, coon skins were worth something. They’d retrieve them so that they could skin them and market the pelts. Rabbits, on the other hand, were not worth anything. So, the boys would take the rabbits by the tails, sling the rabbit really hard, and pop their tails off. Once the tails were free, they’d stuff them in their shirt pockets. At the end of the night, they pulled out the rabbit tails to see how many each one had. The one who had collected the most was pronounced the “winner” and won a can of snuff.

Now, that’s a redneck adventure isn’t it?