The winters I remember from my childhood were a lot different than those of today. I don"t recall ever wondering if we would get snow by Christmas. It usually fell in November. Temperatures were colder, too. If you could get just one week of open water trapping before the creeks froze, it was a good thing. Ice fishing always slowed in January; but, there was 30-inches of ice or more under your feet.

It was a good time to be growing up on a farm in South Dakota. Pheasants were everywhere. Permission to hunt was usually just a matter of asking. Duck hunting was unbelievable on sloughs which had yet to be drained and tiled.

And, there were jackrabbits.

These big hares, which turned white in the wintertime, ranged in unbelievable numbers across the farmland.

They provided both hunting and income, each coinciding with the arrival of those sweeping arctic fronts which clutched the landscape in an icy grip.

Fur prices for jackrabbits hovered around the 50 cent mark most winters. Local mink raisers often paid more for rabbits delivered fresh.

A fur buyer in Sioux Falls, several thousand of the big white hares piled in his warehouse, told me that the skins were sent to Europe where they were made into felt. I don"t know if that was a fact, but the huge piles of dead rabbits he collected each winter was.

Local communities often hosted huge hunts for jackrabbits in the wintertime often attracting a hundred or more shooters. They"d surround a section, armed with shotguns and proceed with military-like precision to the center where the rabbits milled. They"d take hundreds of "jacks during a day. The money gained would be used to host a party for the participants at a later date.

For a farm boy, most winters were very long, indeed. There were morning and night chores centered around the livestock, but little work the rest of the time. School, of course, was a necessary evil and weekends were something to treasure.

The jackrabbits were what made wintertime life good.

During the daytime, you rarely saw a jack. They laid up then, usually in a pocket dug into the snow under some cornstalks or simply a depression in a plowed field. They had dens, usually abandoned holes dug by badgers or fox, but most of the time they preferred lying in the open, tucked back into a pocket with their large, black-tipped ears lying flat along their neck and back and big, brown eyes alert for any predator, me included.

Jackrabbits are active at night. Under the cover of darkness they leave their daytime lairs and run about, foraging in cornfields or alfalfa fields. But, mostly they just run around seemingly for the sheer joy of it.

They were attracted to gravel roads where their big tracks could be seen in the snow lining or piled across the ditches. Hundreds and thousands of tracks littered the snow on both sides of the country roads.

In the fields their trails, packed hard by their big hind feet, could be found, usually along a woven wire fence where they would simply run for a long time.

I hunted alone most of the time, simply because I was alone. Weapon of choice in the winter was my single shot 16-gauge loaded with number 4 shot. With the shotgun, I simply walked picked corn fields, zig-zagging along and hoping to scare one up.

They usually flushed close by and you had plenty of time to fire that single shot. Success had a high and a low side. All hunters want to be successful, after all that"s why we are out there and a rabbit meant 50 cents which was a fair amount at that time. That would buy a box of .22 long rifles. Being successful meant you had to carry that large rabbit for the rest of the day. Most big jacks run about 8 pounds or more. Get two or three of them and you are talking hard work.

Sometimes I"d hunt with the .22, usually when I was out of shotgun shells. It was a lot tougher to bag a rabbit with the .22. Hitting one on the run was very difficult and generally a waste of good shells. Sometimes you can stop one with a loud whistle and he"ll stand up on his hind feet and look for the source of the sound. That was the downfall of many a jackrabbit. But, jumping one while hunting with the rifle generally meant that rabbit would get away.

No, you had to change tactics.

You had to spot them in their bed before they ran. That meant you had to hunt a lot slower. You couldn"t walk along daydreaming. You had to stop and search the cover with your eyes before moving on a few steps and repeating the process. This was still hunting in the purest sense of the terms.

Their white coats, with a sprinkling of black and grey hairs along their back, was a perfect camouflage in the snow. And there was always snow. More than half of the big hare"s body would be hidden by the nest or hole they were sitting in. Often that big, brown eye would be the first thing you would spot, then the rest of the rabbit would somehow come into focus and you"d wonder why you hadn"t seen it earlier.

Their tendency to sit tight meant that a single hunter would pass by many of them and never know they were there.

You"d learn a few things that would help hunting them. One was they never sat facing into the wind and the winder the day the more reluctant they would be to leave their bed and run. They were also more inclined to sit tight if they could observe you approaching from a long distance. Like most animals, if your course was not directly towards them, they"d sit and wait.

Their daytime cover consisted mostly of cornfields and plowed fields and while most were found in the corn, the plowing was certainly worth hunting, at least along the edges. Pasturelands would also hold them in the daytime if there was some taller cover to trap the snow so they could build their daytime nests. Alfalfa fields, while littered with rabbits at night, seldom held a single one in the daytime.

The big rabbits are gone now. When I go back to the farm on the rare times when there is snow on the ground, there are no tracks along the ditches. It"s that way throughout eastern South Dakota, northeast Nebraska and northwest Iowa, all areas which hosted hundreds of thousands of jackrabbits as late as the 1960s, but no more. See one now and the sighting becomes an event.

Most of the wildlife biologists I"ve visited with over the years blame the decimated numbers on lack of habitat. Farming practices have changed and, I"ll admit, much of our landscape resembles the surface of the moon once the snows return. Much of our lands are so barren in the wintertime that not even a field mouse could survive upon them.

I doubt jackrabbits will ever return to their former numbers. They need wide-open spaces with enough cover to get them through, both summer and winter. Croplands no longer provide what they need.

Our winters are no longer the same, and it is not just because the weather is milder.

Larry Myhre is outdoors editor of the Journal. Reach him at (712) 276-5965 or email at: lfentfish@msn.com