One night in early spring the temperature dropped down so low that our box of baby rabbits on the back porch died. We were so upset because these had lived the longest of all the survivors we’d ever collected. Every time we burnt the fields off it was the same thing. We took sticks and tried to chase the rabbits out of hiding . . . we tried to get them to run off. Lots of em did but far too many just froze right where they were in the dry thick brush that would soon go up in flames around them. Some babies survived the scorching. They had burrowed down into the cool earth. “Here’s one,” Alice would exclaim. “And another . . . and another.” We walk through the charred ground looking everywhere. We pick them up and put them in a card board box lined with soft rags. We take them home and feed them with an eye dropper. Dad always said a baby rabbit didn’t stand a chance on cow’s milk. “They need their mother.” But this time our rabbits had made it a whole week. Some were even eatin’ grass. So that cold night when we looked in the box and they weren’t movin’, we felt horrible. When dad got home we cried, “The rabbits froze . . . the rabbits froze.” He was drunk already but he opened him another beer. He staggered out to the porch and then brought the box in and put it on a chair close to the stove. “They’ll warm up,” he said. We didn’t know what to think. We just stood silently . . . staring at the rabbits and soon they actually started opening their eyes and movin’ their ears and twitchin’ their noses. We jumped up and down! We couldn’t believe it. Dad had brought them back to life! They lived alittle longer but one by one they just quit eatin’. We knew that was it this time. “One of the hazards of the game,” as dad would say. So we buried them in the back yard where we had buried box full after box full of baby rabbits before them.