MemoirDraftBunnies

Choose a beginning

One day, my daughters found two dead bunnies in the back yard. Earlier that week our neighbor told my wife that he had been finding headless dead bunnies in his backyard—one a day, for a while. The neighbor’s cat, he said, would lay beside his tool shed, underneath which a rabbit was nesting, and wait for the young ones to emerge. The neighbor talked of starting a neighborhood petition.

Now there were two dead bunnies in my backyard.

I grabbed the shovel and a paper sack from the garage and walked toward the spot in the lawn where the body of the first one lay. It must not have been there very long—the body was still limp. A fly landed on its bloody neck.

“Ew. Ew.” The girls were distraught. And barefoot.

“Get out of the grass,” I yelled at Elizabeth. “You might step in something.”

I slipped the shovel under the furry corpse and lifted it into the bag. This was not my favorite time to be a dad. In the division of household labor, disposing of dead bodies falls to me. Last week I had to shovel a chipmunk off the driveway. It appeared to have dropped dead suddenly—stroke? heart attack? poison?—and lay behind the rear tire of our minivan. Fortunately, I discovered the body before Pam pulled out of the driveway, so I didn’t have to get out the hose in addition to my shovel. Two years ago when one Saturday morning I found our cat Maggie dead on the bathroom floor I had to pick her up and put her into a cardboard box before the girls woke up. I didn’t think until later that I could have lifted up the edges of the bath rug on which she lay and flopped her into the box, thereby avoiding picking up the dead body with my hands.

“Where’s the other one?” I asked Emma. She pointed toward a spot a few feet away. The second body had been there a while longer. It was stiff, more like roadkill than a corpse. I scooped it up with my shovel.

“Oh gross!” Emma exclaimed. Maggots writhed in the grass where the body had been. Emma ran for the house.

Elizabeth also had disappeared. Inside, I found her checking on our cats. “Sunshine would never do that,” Elizabeth, who is six, told me. “Sunshine knows better.” Elizabeth apparently felt the need to distance the gruesome scene in our backyard from our own household cats, whom we never allowed outside. (Our own domesticated predators could only lay on the windowsill or on the floor by the front door and look out upon nature, dreaming of chewing the head off a bunny. But they knew better, thankfully.)

I wondered what Emma was thinking. Emma is the older one, the ten year old, the deep thinker. Was she thinking about the cruelty of nature? About the circle of life? About her own mortality? What should I say to her? What should I have said when we were all standing there looking at it? Looking death in the—not the face—but the bloody neck. Certainly, I should have said something. Given some life lesson. Imparted some wisdom.

I asked her later what the dead bunnies had made her think about.

“I felt worried that I was going to find another one. I was actually afraid to go in my backyard for a few days after that. Then I got over the fear.

"To tell you the truth, I asked mom if that could cause rabbits to go extinct.”

Did she now think about our own cats any differently?

“Well, our cats don’t have any claws,” she told me. “I don’t think they would know how to hunt.”

Since our cats didn’t know how to hunt, whether or not they knew better was something we didn’t need to know. As for any future victims of cats who don’t know better, I’m keeping my shovel handy.