ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, January 8, 1996 TAG: 9601110011
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BILL COCHRAN OUTDOOR EDITOR
Frank Sizemore was trying to jump-start a sluggish rabbit hunt.
``Here ye go! Here ye go! Here ye go!'' he called to the hounds, his voice rising with the rhythmic cadence of an auctioneer. ``Get on 'em! Get on 'em! Get on 'em! Hunt him! Hunt him! Come on, hunt 'em in there!''
Eleven beagles searched the tangle of brush in front of Sizemore and his hunting partner, Jackie Tyree. The black noses of the dogs made snorting noises as they sucked the cover for scent. Their tails were upright and swishing, like windshield wipers in a rainstorm.
Old Whistler raised his head and gave a long, quivering yodel. The urgency of his voice attracted the other hounds. In seconds, all of them were bellowing.
``He's up,'' Tyree said, climbing onto a tree stump for a better look at what he hoped would be a rabbit squirting through the brush.
The hounds gathered into a bawling mob, their voices growing in intensity as they sped through the cover. Then the landscape fell silent. As suddenly as the hound music had begun, it ended, as if someone had turned off a stereo.
It has been that way for weeks, Sizemore said.
``Get him up and lose him. Get him up and lose him,'' he said, with a touch of disgust in his voice.
It is the weather, said Tyree, who had enjoyed flawless performances from the same dogs in previous seasons.
The ground was frozen and glazed with a frost thick enough to be mistaken for a light snow. The deep-freeze weather, evident most of December and into early January, had been sabotaging the chases, Tyree said.
``After a rabbit gets up, he picks up all that frost on his feet,'' he said.
That way, rabbits can run without leaving much scent. Or they hole up quickly, as if to conserve their energy for the cold, rather than squandering it on a chase.
``We are jumping just as many,'' Tyree said. ``It's just the weather. We jumped 30 one day and didn't get but 11.''
The hunt was taking place in Sinking Creek Valley, between New Castle and Newport. Sizemore and Tyree have enough contacts there that they can hunt rabbits several times during the season without retracing their steps.
The remote, scenic valley is wide and long, and you can climb perpendicularly from Virginia 42 thinking the open land will end over the next crest. But it stretches on. There are farmhouses hidden in the hollows, along with barns and clumps of round hay bales where you can hear the call of a farmer feeding his stock, ``Here cows.''
You don't drive the valley far without passing a church or observing a sermon on a sign that lashes out at American Electric Power's idea of putting a transmission line through the area.
There are Christmas tree plantings, where stately rows of cone-shaped pines, firs and spruce march across the rolling terrain. Some of the plantations look a little snaggletoothed following the holiday.
Angus cows, with broad backs and heavy, sagging sides, dot the hills, their shiny blackness contrasting with lingering skiffs of snow in hollows infrequently visited by the sun.
It is easy to tell where the cows are kept. Their fields are stubble, and a mouse would have a hard time crossing them without being spotted. But often, on the other side of the barbed wire, is cover - brush, briers, thickets, piles of tree limbs - where rabbits would post ``Home Sweet Home'' signs if they had them.
In a typical season, Sizemore, Tyree and their friends will tote 100 - sometimes nearly 200 - rabbits from such cover, but not this time. Success has been so low Sizemore doesn't like to talk about it, or does so jokingly, saying he'd be willing to trade his dogs for a sack of dog food.
``Every day I say, `I am not going to go.''' he said. ``Then the next day I say, `Maybe it will be better,' and I go. Then I'm back in the same boots.''
Afternoons have been more productive than mornings. When the sun has had time to melt the frost, the scent begins to flow. But this hunt began just past daylight, a time when the ground crunched under the bite of lug-soled boots.
The chases will intensify when the sun is up, Sizemore promised. He glanced to high ground in the distance, where the sun already was bathing terrain with its buttery color, but it is so far away in time and space it might as well have been on another continent.
In the grayness, the beagles got another rabbit up. Hound music swelled on the crisp air, as if the dogs had solved the intricate puzzle of scent on frozen ground. But it ended quickly.
``I could have run him that far,'' said Sizemore.
Levi Martin, a 10-year-old hunter from Craig County, was getting bored. He decided to leave the hounds and look for a fox squirrel in the groves of oaks.
His father, Ronnie, lives in the valley and frequently hunts with Sizemore and Tyree, but seldom carries a gun.
``I don't care anything about doing the shooting,'' he said. ``If everybody did the shooting there wouldn't be anything left to kill.''
Martin tags along to hear the music pour from the muzzles of Socks, Whistler, Boots, Whiskers, Rock, Drum and the other beagles bearing quick to pronounce, one- or two-syllable, names.
But the choir hasn't been doing much singing.
``What we need is some rain,'' Sizemore said, explaining that moisture would enhance the scenting conditions. He spotted some rabbit tracks, the hind feet oblong, the front small and round, but they appeared to hold no scent.
It finally rained last week, but behind the brief thaw came more frigid conditions, leaving Sizemore to tell someone that all those beagles sniffing the cover actually belonged to Tyree.
LENGTH: Long : 105 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: BILL COCHRAN. For Frank Sizemore (left), cold weatherby CNBhas made rabbit hunting so unproductive he's threatened to quit,
but here he is afield with 10-year-old Levi Martin following a pack
of beagles. color.