What noise does a rabbit make? Ask anyone. They’ll tell you that rabbits don’t make a noise. There is no rabbit equivalent of Oink, Meow, Moo, Neigh, or Wooof. Only the very cleverest of children will wiggle their noises silently in reply to “What noise does a rabbit make?”
They’re wrong. So wrong.
When my Grandfather retired from the school district, he and my Grandma moved out of town to the country. They bought a farm. Insurance agents and real estate pros have a term for this kind of a setup, they call it the Hobby Farm. I’m glad I didn’t know about Hobby Farms when I was a kid, because to me, it was The Farm. ‘Hobby’ just sucks all the heft out of a thing like ‘The Farm’.
On this farm my Grandfather grew berries, among a great many other things, raspberries, and strawberries, oh the strawberries. These strawberries were legendary. They grew in the choicest rows, fertilized with trailerloads of aged horse manure, mulched with ample clean dry straw. It was a fine thing, this strawberry patch. The berries came non-stop in June and July from one variety or another. They grew to be the size of your fist. My fist, it must be said, has grown since the time of these strawberries so this simile has slipped beyond hyperbole and into plain falsehood, but it stays.
One morning, the task weeding this masterpiece of gardening came to me. My first pass at the task uncovered nothing worth pulling or hoeing. I was instructed that everything was worth pulling. If it’s alive in the strawberries, and it’s not a strawberry, get it.
This was going to be a much more time-consuming thing, then. I set to it anew more attentive and patient than before.
I had gone through killing the tiniest weed seedlings with the hoe without disturbing precious strawberry roots from some feet of the first row when I had the distinct impression that something nearby was moving. Something down the row did seem to wiggle now and then, but was clearly perfectly still when I turned to inspect it more carefully. Hoe the row and it wiggles, turn to look and it’s still. On the second or third repetition of hoe-wiggle : look-freeze I managed to pick out a sparkling dark eye staring at me from under a strawberry leaf.
I pretended to hoe while keeping an eye on that place. There was a rabbit under those leaves. He was eating the strawberries.
I made a couple of extra casual-looking sidelong steps in the general direction of the culprit, keeping up my mime of weeding with the hoe. I made stealth to within ten feet.
In one move, I crouched to spring, let the hoe fall aside and stretched out my full length into a headlong dive.
This is what I imagine it is like to cut off a ground ball hit into the gap between third base and shortstop.
The belly landing was soft, (remember all that horse manure, straw and hoeing) and I found that, to my surprise, I held a wriggling, twisting, squirming, struggling, muscular, furry little ball. It was only slightly larger than a baseball. That too was a surprise.
Along with it in my grip was a large portion of the plant he’d been hiding under. I set about untangling the two.
That was when he screamed. He shrieked like little girls do when they’re being tickled mercilessly. He screamed like a woman in a horror movie. The shriek was the kind that immediately preceeds a tragic death. Banshees are faeries of Irish lore that herald a coming death by screaming, so, to risk a cliché, he screamed like a banshee. It was ear splitting.
I was holding about three ounces of distilled fear. The effect was that of holding something so cold it burns your hands.
I can’t say if I dropped him, or if he broke free. Either way, he gathered his wits and split while my hands were still frozen useless and the chill was still on my spine.
