Here in Wolftown, rabbits [a]bound. Our dog, Taz -- an Aussie Shep mix with only two speeds: on and off -- chases them without much success. He's terribly quick, but they're just a step more agile. Still, every once in a while, he'll corner one and leave the results in the yard for me to discover when I get home. It's bad enough when it's just one, but occasionally he's dragged some newborns out of the warren and they lie there in a row like little brown shiny sticks of putty, barely alive, short little breaths just underscoring their [our] tenuous hold on life.
Last evening, Taz was concentrating on a something behind our stone chimney in the side yard (the only remnant of an old summer kitchen long since gone). I went to investigate and found a hole he had dug, inside of which lay a young kit on its side, head hidden under a clump of dirt, breathing shallowly. I shooed away Taz and then debated whether I should end the poor kit's misery. But with what? Brain her with a shovel? Bury her alive? Not willing to do any such thing, I decided to wait and to keep Taz away. Throughout the evening, I checked on her. When I went to bed, she was in the same position and still alive.
Next morning, I looked in the hole and the kit was still there, but now sitting on her haunches like the Sphinx, upright, eyes closed, motionless. I watched for a minute or so. No movement. I picked up a stick and gently prodded her. She was hard as stone and didn't respond. She must be dead, I thought. But how nobly dead! She had used her last energies to gather herself into an icon for the ages. Diminutive but every bit as proud as her Egyptian counterpart.
I turned and went to the shed and pulled out a shovel to dispose of the remains, but in the half-minute that I was gone, she had disappeared. Vanished. Either beamed up, or scampered away. Forbearance had worked; nature had decided on life. For the kit, and so far today, for me, too.
So I was thinking about this episode and wondering if I should record it. I thought, "hmm rabbit," maybe a good title using John Updike to show my literary creds. But I wasn't fully convinced until the ride in when I was listening the estimable Bob Edwards on XM who was interviewing memoirist Augesten Burroughs who mentioned John Updike in a riff about the writing craft. Well, that sealed it; that and the rabbits scampering across the farm by day and the fireflies lighting up the hollow behind it by night. Not a bad place to live here, the Updike Farm.
