Week 10Summer Week 10
Rabbits are everywhere among us.
—Susan Orlean, On Animals
Anna’s Rabbit (1975)
We have a white rabbit now. I don’t understand why my friend is not allowed to keep her pet, but the rabbit has come to live in a hutch in our backyard. He is huge, far too large to be pulled from a magician’s hat. He weighs even more than our dachshund, who is massively overweight. I had no idea that rabbits could grow so big. Maybe his unexpected heft is why the rabbit lives with us now.
One weekend, not long after the white rabbit comes to live in our backyard, we get home after dark from my grandparents’ house in Lower Alabama. When my father turns into the driveway, the headlight beams sweep across the front yard. I lean forward to see better. “It snowed while we were gone?” I ask.
In the front seat, my parents turn to look at each other. That’s not snow.
Alabama Wildlife Rescue (1981)
The baby cottontails I am caring for are smaller even than the baby squirrels I have already released as a wildlife rescue volunteer. The squirrels drank their formula from a doll-size bottle, but for the first few days the bunnies need an eyedropper to feed. Only a few days, though—I could swear these soft creatures grow visibly bigger in just the time I leave them for class. The night before the day I have set for their release, I come back to my room to find their box empty, and it takes some time to find them. That night, to be safe, I close the box. The next morning, all three are stretched out on the bottom of the box, dead.
Next to the Maple Tree (the Last Year a Dog Was Allowed in the Front Yard)
The mower, its blade set as high as possible to protect rabbits and turtles, snakes and skinks, sweeps aside the top layer of a rabbit’s nest we have never noticed. The mower deposits the cut grass back on top, and we don’t see. The dog sees. This dog is only curious, entranced with the blind creatures that stir and cry out when he noses them. He doesn’t mean to harm the one on top, but it screams nonetheless, a piteous sound its mother, hidden somewhere nearby, surely hears.
I pull the dog away. Squatting, I try to think of what might keep these baby rabbits safe. The hollering one is silent now, and I return it to what’s left of its nest in the crook between the raised roots of the maple tree. Immediately it burrows down among its brothers and sisters and sets them all in motion, too, a squirming pile of soft fur and rooting mouths. The heat from their bodies rises into the hot air—more heat than seems possible in an already burning summer.
I cup the nest and reshape it with my hands. The fur the mother rabbit has pulled from her belly to set on top of her babies beneath the grass—that warm, sheltering layer—is now wafting across the yard in the breeze. I tug some longer blades of grass around them, gather some pine straw to add on top. All day long I keep the dog inside. All day long I fight the urge to push aside the straw and check on the babies.
When Haywood gets home, he pulls out some old fencing shoved behind the toolshed and fashions a barricade around the rabbit’s nest. A few snips with a bolt cutter, and now there’s a rabbit-sized hole, just big enough for the doe to get through but not big enough for the dog’s shaggy head. I pull a chair onto the front stoop and wait at the rabbit hour. I hear the great horned owl. I hear the neighbor’s dog, and another neighbor’s answering dog. Not another creature stirs in the failing light.
I worry. Will she come back? Can she reach her babies if she does come back? What about the rabbit fur scattered across the yard—will it summon the kinds of predators that no jury-rigged fence can hold back? Will the makeshift nest provide enough protection if it rains?
The next day the dog finds something a few feet beyond the fence. He pushes it with his nose and waits. Pushes and waits. I walk over. It’s a dead baby rabbit. I take it from him and tuck it into the brush pile, where some hungry thing will eat it.
Inside, I call wildlife rescue. From my own volunteer days, I know there’s not much they can do over the phone, but I call anyway. I need to know if the rabbit kit crawled out of the nest to die. Did it die of internal injuries caused by the curious dog? Was it starving, scratching its way through the fence because its mother couldn’t reach it?
The helpline volunteer tells me to wait till early morning, open the fence, reach past the pine straw, and pull out one of the kits. Check it quickly and put it back, she says. If its belly is full, there’s nothing more to worry about.
That warm little belly is tight as a tick.