MindSpinner

Two small lionhead bunnies joined our household this year in the usual way, and the usual way is this: Offspring desire a new pet and are indulged because I have a weak spot for both offspring and pets. Offspring lose interest in new pet, for the most part, after a month or two or three, but I fall head over heels for pet, and so pet stays. In the matter of the bunnies, just multiply by two, and you have the story.

Pet, however, is the wrong word, for it implies a lesser position and human ownership besides. If you watch who waits on whom around here, you would logically conclude that the fur folk collectively own me, carefully train me and negotiate procedures only under duress, if then. (No amount of duress, for example, has convinced the cat that the couch is not a scratching post and the dogs that the Christmas tree doesn’t need christening.)

The white bunny, one Thomasin, is a case in point. He’s the bunny you’d most like to hold; if he doesn’t like holding, he doesn’t let on.

The hunger strike began gradually. First he snubbed the rabbit pellets I bought at Kroger when the bag from the pet store ran out. I had to drive 60 miles roundtrip to buy more of the pet store brand to which he was accustomed. I bought four bags, along with the sweet-smelling timothy hay rabbits are supposed to have, too.

Thomasin’s companion is a charcoal-colored bunny named Shawntycleer. (Yes, I know how to spell Chaunticleer, but Dark-Haired Daughter did not.) Shawntycleer, when turned upside down, looks rather like a boy to us, but we’re really not sure. Thomasin emphatically disagrees and acts on his opinions; that’s where he gets his nickname, Rapist Rabbit. In any case, to spare Shawnty a life of incessant and generally unwelcome sex, we house Thomasin and Shawnty in two different cages when they are inside and two different pens when they are outside. The life of companionship we had envisioned for them amounts to their sitting next to each other on occasion and touching noses between bars. (Dating relationships between parents of teenagers can work a lot like this.)

Shawntycleer is to be distinguished from Thomasin not only by means of a stark contrast in color, but also in his/her comfort level at being carried or held. Cooperation can suddenly melt into a bid for freedom - a frantic roiling of fur, ears, and claws like blackberry thorns. Because she (or he) is so easily spooked, when I pick Shawnty up, I’m always crooning that song,”a spooky little girl like you.” Shawnty is probably eventually doomed to give up a literary if misspelled name in favor of becoming “Spooky” instead.

But at least Shawnty/Spooky can be depended upon to clean up that little bowl of rabbit pellets, morning and night. Thomasin, on the other hand, began eating fewer and fewer of his pet store rabbit pellets, day in and day out, until he was eating, earlier this week, none at all. Nothing in. Nothing out. He wiggled his nose, turned it up, and vowed a hunger strike to the death. Death can happen in fairly short order with rabbits, in such cases, as I understand it. There’s supposed to be stuff going in regularly and stuff coming out regularly, and any interruption of the process of turning elongated cylindrical pellets into little round pellets is to be viewed as a medical emergency.

So I began to ply him with a diet of treats. He’s always liked a tiny carrot or two. He ate those. He likes apple slices, it turns out. Indeed, he likes wheat berries and lentils, too, and is simply beside himself for red lettuce leaves and baby spinach. In fact, when I come to feed him next, he has eaten everything. It’s delicacies in, pellets out.

All he wants, you know, is real bunny food - gourmet salads morning and night. He smirks at me as if to say that, if I’d let him out in the garden, he could procure his own gourmet salads and save me the trouble, but he patiently suffers the fact that I am a prisoner of my fears - neighborhood dogs, hawks, owls, coyotes, garden destruction and the lure of freedom that might make him suddenly hard to catch.

All in all, he considers his hunger strike and my consequent retraining a complete success. To pass the time, he amuses himself with the ironic fact that adult human beings take classes, read books, and conduct experiments in order to learn more about behavioral modification theory and practice whereas the subject is so easily mastered by furry little bunnies and six-week-old infants.

Shortly after my children returned home from their Father’s Day celebrations with their dad, Dark-Haired Daughter called on the phone, all the way from the back yard. “We have a present for you. Come outside.”

When I stepped outside they were standing at the back of the yard near the trees, petting a wild deer as if it were the family dog and feeding it carrots. It was a thin deer, as thin as if it were winter out, and it was apparently unafraid. The weather’s been dry here for so long that the grass has turned to straw and crunches like the husks of insects under our feet. I water only the garden, the shrubs and the trees to keep them alive. Farmers have but half the usual hay and fear losing their crops. I guess that it is the drought that brought the deer to nibble carrots from human hands and nip the leaves from the top of a newly planted blueberry bush. Still we are enchanted by a wild thing. I know. Deer may eat my garden this year. Deer will likely eat my apples when there are apples to eat. But since I was small I have felt a pang of grief to know that wild things are afraid of me because I am human, and so when a deer comes to call and does not start and run, it is as if some awful fall from grace has been undone.

I’m still processing the snake episode. For my children, killing the big snake was some sort of heroic adventure, like slaying a dragon. They’ve even been Sunday-Schooled into associating snakes with evil.

I was appalled at the size of the thing, at the three or four broken places along its length, at the smear of blood and mud on the blade of a machete I bought for whacking overgrown weeds. I can tolerate little snakes, but bigger ones unnerve me to a degree, and cobras, in particular, appall. (Can the story of Rikki Tikki Tavi really effect all this? Or the Habu - Mongoose fight in the sultry tent at the fair in Okinawa?) Whether by instinct or training or both, I have been programmed to fear and out of fear to want to quell the life that animates the snake, for it is not only the form of the snake that inspires fear but the way it moves.

But my visceral reaction to a sizable snake is disturbingly out of sync with how I want to see the world. If Friday’s snake was a rat snake, then there was no reason to see it dead. If it was, on the other hand, somebody’s escaped monocled cobra (a far-fetched possibility), then it was in entirely the wrong place, a neighborhood where children play.

Friday’s snake made two incontrovertible points. We live in a world with snakes, with that which we fear, sometimes reasonably and sometimes unreasonably, and we live in a world where our fears and our instinct to survive can nimbly overtake our judgment and effect destruction.

What is it that appalls me most about the snake - the snake itself or what it discovers in me and in my children? And does not the snake question apply whenever we act out of fear? Is it possible that what we have most to fear is not what frightens us in the first place but instead what we may allow ourselves to become when we feel threatened?

While I was at school finishing the very last yearbook spread, my children undertook a favor for me by planting my currants in the back yard. (I will have to redo this before they wake this morning - they hadn’t a clue and planted them without soil amendments about four inches below ground level. But they did remember to water.) An afternoon adventure found them in the form of a snake sunning itself on the sewer access, a concrete slab with a manhole cover near where they were planting. Catapult Kid slew it with a machete while Dark-Haired Daughter bonked it with a shovel until it was dead and deader than that. They threw its head out of the yard, across the fence and down by the railroad tracks, which is where I’ll have to go if I really want to find out what kind of snake it was. In fact, I do - I’m curious that way. They told me it was a cobra with a circle on its hood. Yeah, they’d tell me that. They haven’t watched Indiana Jones and Snakes on Plane for nothing. The remaining 4.5 feet of it I can’t identify - a solid brown back with whitish underbelly, no pronounced pattern. Maybe a rat snake?

After they’d shown me their conquest, Catapult Kid had a notion to burn it - heaven only knows why - some ritualistic sacrifice reminiscent of Lord of the Flies. And to that end, he brought it, draped over the end of the machete, up to the house and laid it on the deck. Next thing I knew he was preparing to fire up the sacrificial altar, our rusted Smoky Joe Grill, with the sacrificial fuel, MatchLight Charcoal.

Newly minted, nominal adults possessed of a bad idea and a sense of humor sometimes presume to overrule somewhat shrieky maternal vetoes along the lines of “You are not going to cook that damned snake on our grill!,” and so it came to pass that I picked up the snake on the end of the machete and tore out through the kitchen garden for the back fence, with Catapult Kid in pursuit and closing in fast. Remembering his considerable prowess in middle school football, I gauged my timing and swung the machete, slinging the snake in a graceful arc across the fence but, alas, not out of sight. It landed conspicuously in leaves at the base of a tree, white belly up.

“Oh,” he laughed. “That should be easy enough to find.” Suddenly an impromptu outing for dinner and a movie sounded like the best and most timely of ideas, and so we left the snake in the woods, the charcoal in the grill, and the currants only somewhat planted, hopped in the car, and managed to stay gone until well after dark. And now that it’s morning, I think I’ll just sneak out to the woods wearing a good pair of boots, find that snake, and bury it somewhere.

“Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.” - Ernest Hemingway

The mouse was cold and stiff the morning of October 25, its head resting next to the wheat berries. I bought steel wool to close the two holes through which another mouse might follow, the one hole behind the stove and the other in the cabinet above the microwave.