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Grandpa Dietle wasn’t a deer hunter, but he did like small game hunting with his Stevens single barrel 12-gauge shotgun. He had a beagle named Butch that he kept chained to a doghouse near the southeast corner of the barn. Butch was a gung-ho rabbit dog, and one day I got to see him performing the job he loved. I was just tagging along with Grandpa, dad, and an uncle or two, still too young to carry a gun myself. Grandpa said Butch was old and tired and might not do so well. He may have been old, but he sure was magnificent that day.
We walked all over hill and dale as Butch sniffed the ground. I found out many years later that we were hunting on a farm that my great-great-great grandparents John and Lydia Tressler had once owned. Whenever Butch scented a rabbit, he would start barking as he tirelessly ran after the scent, trying to make the rabbit circle back to us. I remember him chasing one rabbit until it holed up in a brush pile, and had to be flushed out by jumping on the pile. Butch’s reward for success was eating the offal after each rabbit was field dressed. He ate pretty good that day.
In the mid-1990s I interviewed my dad and his siblings to see how they remembered Grandpa and Grandma Dietle (their parents) from when they were growing up, and here is what I learned. Grandpa was a very hard worker. For example, when he was teaching at the Witt School he walked more than three miles each way in the winter, and still did his morning and evening milking and other farm chores. He took his shotgun along on his trek to and from the Witt School, so he could hunt small game along the way.
The paragraphs above are excerpted from my 2024 book, “In the Land of Used to Be.”