This month Northeast Mississippi lost one of its favorite sons when Tulon Rushing crossed over the Jordan to home. His mother, Esther Rushing, was my grandmother’s (Altie Elizabeth Blunt McRae) niece.
I remember meeting Tulon when I was around ten when my uncle Otey McRae took me on a rabbit hunt on Christmas Day about 1957. Otey, having survived polio as a child was kind of self-isolated on his family’s farm in the Highland Community near Tishomingo State Park. Having roamed every inch of the local woods, fields, and roads, he was well-known as a woodsman in the Highland community where they all lived.
It was a tradition for the McRae/Blunt cousins and others to hunt swamp rabbits in Bear Creek bottom. Their beagles would scare up and chase these big and plentiful hares, and the young men without shotguns would chase down the rabbits and drop them with short sticks or clubs. Phillip Blunt told me before Tulon’s funeral his memory of these hunts, also. They piled up the rabbits and put them in a toe-sack for an older neighbor to clean and eat.
I remember a big rabbit getting away, and it reversed its tracks, jumped in Bear Creek and swam to the other bank!
I grew up with and retold the way Tulon had a real burst of speed to outrun the rabbits and box them on the head with a miniature St. Louis Cardinals baseball bat. I’ll never forget the tall, lanky young cousin of ours! He was actually 29 years old. He will be missed.
Danny Mohundro
Eads, Tennessee
October 2022