|
 To
your right you'll see a stock photo of one certain brush rabbit,
the nefarious, trap-eluding, perennial eating Sylvilagus bachmani,
bane of my soul.
All
the world will be your enemy, prince of a thousand enemies. And
whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must
catch you: digger, listener, runner, prince with the swift warning.
Be cunning, and full of tricks, and your people will never be
destroyed.
-Watership
Down
In
the beginning...
I
have a real boring story for you about a bunny that is trying
to f*** with my backyard. I don't even know where the hell this
bunny came from.
Thursday
It's
probably 7 am. The cat is making some kind of fuss, the pre-violent,
tail-rattling, deep throated meowing kind of fuss that has earned
her the nickname Gray Death. The husband goes to the living room
to check it out. "Hey, look at this," he says. I do.
A small, brown bunny with tiny ears folded back against its head
stares resolutely at us through the window from beneath a shrub
in the backyard. Cute!!! I shriek.
The
husband pauses.
"What
if he eats your plants, though?"
Now
it is true that I have recently, with no small effort, planted
a number of very young and probably fine-tasting perennial flowers
in a nearby garden bed. But seriously. A bunny that size? Its
maybe as big as a large apple. It stares and stares. I'm unconvinced,
and continue getting ready for work.
Later
that day.
 After
work, I am digging around the kitchen for something to eat and
have forgotten all about the bunny. I may have made a random joke
that he sucked down half the garden that day, but really, thought
no more about it. While at the sink, I look out to the garden
bed and notice that one of the new plants looks somewhat pruned.
Immediately I go outside to review the damage. 1.5 new plants:
eaten. My dreams of an impressive midsummer perennial garden are
instantly wilted.
The
bunny must die.
But
seriously, as any long term tiny dog reader surely must know,
my homicidal rage is reserved only for
bees. If any bee so much as veers in my direction outside,
any bee within a 10 mile radius of my house will die a swift aerosol
death. I loathe bees with an otherworldly vehemence. But this
is, after all, a bunny. And just days before Easter, to boot.
Night
is rapidly closing in, and I screech into town on the trail of
some type of protective bunny-repelling fencing type material,
armed with only a vague notion of what that might look like on
a store shelf. As I am forced to attend an all-day mandatory fun
style work event the following day, there is no chance of anyone
supervising the bunny's perennial intake until the weekend, by
which time he could set me back three weeks of growth, a small
sum of cash and hours of digging.
The
garden center closes within the hour, and appears somewhat half-lit
and bereft of customers as I dash through the garden tools and
seed packs, hoping for bunny repellant fencing to pop up behind
the wire tomato teepees and waterproof garden clogs. There is
nary a fence. I accost a nearby worker to inquire about the fencing.
"Nope, nothing like that," he says. What the hell kind
of garden center is this?!. "The hardware store next door
might have something like that, but they closed an hour ago."
"Is
there ANYthing I can use to keep this bunny away from the plants
for just a day or so?" I whine. He looks stumped, and then
wanders around a bit, until we arrive in the water garden section.
He hands me a package of pond netting with a picture of a giant
koi and some water cabbage on the front. "You could, you
know, put this over the plants somehow." Whatever garden
guy. I grab some weird garden staples and a package of white stake
looking things with a vision of a sloppily arranged, militaristic
ground cover forming in my mind. I pay about $20 bucks and screech
back home. Nightfall is within the hour.
 On
the deck, I am wrestling with yards of mesh pond netting like
a mosquito hawk in a spider web. It sticks and snags, and I thrash
and whip it around in an attempt to straighten it out like sheet.
This takes about half of the remaining daylight. By the time I
am done, I am hastily scissoring an unmeasured section and can
now see my own breath from the cold. I drag the net across the
yard, and proceed to clumsily stake the plants and drag the netting
around haplessly. The husband came to the rescue with six badminton
net posts and a staple gun, and by nightfall the plants are covered
by absurd, stapled down black domes of pond net.
Friday
Now
this aforementioned garden bed in which the bunny did his snacking
is only one of three to be concerned with, but the other two remained
at this time unplanted due to a long, unbroken series of rainy
weekends. The upcoming weekends was to be of no exception. So
I enjoyed my mandatory fun style morale work event on day two
with no concern for imminent gardening tasks, and gladly drank
many glasses of wine while making a mess of the kitchen in Kaspar's
Restaurant with a mishandled hand mixer during a team building
culinary exercise. During the meal, we all listened to a co-worker
regale us with stories of a malodorous former acquaintance called
Stinky Jimmy. "The dude," he clarified for us, "was
most foul."
Upon
arrival home I learned that the pond netting had indeed kept the
bunny at bay, but that Saturday was due to be a nice day. In Seattle
in the spring, if you want to plant something, and a Saturday
comes along where there is forecasted to be something other than
steady rain (a partially cloudy or scattered showers will do)
you will garden on that day, or you may not have another chance
until July.
And
yes, the bunny was still a confirmed resident of the yard, and
had taken to boldly lounging in the open, chewing on weeds and
staring dewy-eyed up at us through the living room window, only
to inscrutably vanish at the first sign of being chased. He surely
would mow down any new thing I planted within days.
Saturday
Covered
in compost, hours into the planting of the remaining garden beds,
and no sign of the bunny. I know as I set each coneflower and
daylily into the ground that this differs from my college days
of stocking the Round Table Pizza salad bar with kale and carrots
only in that I am now paying for the produce that is about to
be consumed. The bunny surely eyes me merrily from beneath a nearby
shrub as I set up the crocks of torn spinach and salad dressing,
I mean, the gallon containers of poppies and carnation pinks,
anticipating his repeated trips to the salad bar as soon as I
am out of sight. He may not be aware that my first task upon completion
of the garden is to begin calling animal control facilities to
discuss rabbit traps.
My
first stop is the Humane Society, from where our beloved cat Mo
Mo, aka The Gray Death, hails. Being that it is an overburdened
public service facility, I am of course greeted by a hellish phone
tree terminating with voicemail, preventing me from talking to
any live humans about the bunny situation. So the husband and
I drive out there, and are greeted by hordes of boisterous families
adopting pets that half of them will lose, breed, or return, perpetuating
a vicious cycle of domestic animal mistreatment and overburdened
humane society facilities to the end of time.
Anyway,
I am shortly informed that the humane society does not have any
humane traps for loan, however, Seattle Animal Control does. And
so we visit this second facility and readily obtain a humane feral
cat trap with a trick door, and are instructed to bait it with
a fruit plate assortment, although "rabbits are hard to catch."
Back
at home, I am chopping bananas, realizing my arm is not long enough
to properly bait the trap, and trapping my own arm inside the
trap a number of times. No arms were harmed in the baiting of
the trap. Moments later I am crawling in the dirt under the bunny's
favorite shrub, creating a crafty trail of apple terminating in
a mother lode of lettuce, banana and apple on the far side of
the trigger plate. A wave of Grizzly Adamslike frontier feeling
comes over me. Meanwhile across the fence, children dressed in
bunny ear headbands shriek their way through an Easter egg hunt.
The irony does not escape me.
Much
later in the day, an untrapped bunny is seen lounging beneath
a rhododendron, eyeing the new plants. He looks perplexed, as
though thinking to himself "where are the croutons?"
Sunday
 Empty
trap. Enraged, I take to the garden hose, violently rinsing out
the shaggy, Wookie-shaped tree of uncertain botanical origin where
the bunny lately has been seen taking refuge. Die bunny die!!!
I scream and gun down the tree and its hidden bunny in a hail
of pressurized tap water. I had set the husband on the far side
of the tree to chase the quarry around the yard and out the gate
as soon as my surefire bunny flushing technique sent him scampering
from cover. However, no bunny emerged. After awhile it was clear
I was no more than an idiot watering a tree. In frustration, I
turned the sprayer setting to "stream" and tried to
dig up shallow weeds with water pressure. As I bitterly shot up
the weeds like a failed small town sheriff, sending showers of
mud and gravel across the yard, I began to feel not unlike Bill
Murray in Caddyshack.
It
is finally speculated that perhaps, it being Easter, the bunny
was sleeping in. Or working overtime. Surely he would be back
tomorrow.
Monday
No
bunny in the frigging trap. I re-bait it with banana and carrots,
necessitating a second round of crawling in the mud to set up
the booty just past the trigger plate. Thankfully there is also
no sign of snackage on the newest plants. He is laying low just
to f*** with my mind. Every few minutes, I scan the backyard until
night falls, after which I take to suddenly snapping on the porch
lights, hoping to catch the elusive beast mid-meal. No dice. I
know he is out there. I will wait.
Tuesday
No
bunny in the frigging trap. I re-bait it with apple and lettuce,
necessitating a third round of crawling in the mud to set up the
booty just past the trigger plate. Thankfully there is still no
sign of snackage on the newest plants. Where the hell is the bunny??
Did he leave? Did I drown him? Did he ditch me for another, better
yard with real grass instead of hideous gravel? Is he under the
house, building a massive warren of tiny apple-sized bunnies with
voracious hothouse flower appetites? Dammit!!!!!!!!!
Thursday
I
have stopped baiting the trap. Ancient, desiccated apples serve
as slug food inside the trap as an eerie stillness descends over
the garden. The bunny has been MIA since Saturday. I am due to
return the trap to the Animal Control facility by the weekend,
and may have at that time nothing to show for my trapping labors.
I would starve in the frontier. Wild animals would eat my crops,
animals that I would then be unable to capture for food. The bunnies
would laugh, their beady, merry eyes dancing as I succumbed to
some frontier disease like TB, shivering under a burlap sack in
my cabin.
The
only upside to the situation is that the bunny appears, for now,
to be gone.
The
end?
Friday
The
husband convinces me to re-bait the trap today, since this is
the last day we have the damned thing (the loan period is seven
days, and ends tomorrow). What's the point? I crank. And waste
some good spring mix or apples? Before work I crabbily cut up
apple, stuffing down every other piece, and placing the rest on
a paper plate for the slugs. Out in the muddy garden, I wedge
the trap back under the wookie tree, craftily hiding it with some
shaggy branches, in what is surely to be my most pointless activity
of the day, second only to driving to work, not really getting
any work done, and then driving home.
I
take one last look at the stilled garden, knowing the bunny just
isn't there, and surely laughs at me from his newer, better-landscaped
garden down the block. I then leave for another superfluous work
day.
That
night, the trap door is propped open just as I left it, and inside
the trap, slugs dine blissfully on apple.
Saturday
I
return the trap after a long rambling drive to the Animal Control
facility, after spending far too much money at the mall on clothes
purchased in an attempt to stop looking so much like an adolescent
slob with pants four sizes too big. "Any luck?" the
front desk person chirps. With the rabbit, she means. "No,"
I say. "But I think he's left for good, anyway." I pick
a lettuce leaf from out between the hinges of the trigger plate
and hand over the trap.
It's
over. And really if you think about it, I won, since the bunny
is gone.
That
night I scarf down a giant enchilada dinner, after which I figure
I had better take a long power-walk if I want to still fit into
the new, actually-fitting pants recently purchased. When I return,
it's almost dusk, and I enter the house through the backyard to
peruse my perennials for any signs of new growth.
But
then...
Something
is moving behind a shrub.
It
is a tiny-eared, apple-sized rabbit.
I
look in either direction it could logically have gone. But it
has disappeared, using the highly effective lagomorphian subterfuge
that's kept dumb large prey like myself effectively at bay for
thousands of years, allowing rabbit populations to rage on, terrorizing
gardens all across the globe.
I
scream and run to the living room window, jumping up and down,
pointing to the shrub, two fingers behind my head like rabbit
ears. The husband sits on the couch watching a baseball game on
TV. He looks up, unimpressed. He nods. He knows.
"I'm
getting the trap back," I screech after running inside and
swearing incoherently for many minutes.
"Uh,"
he says, "They're closed Monday and Tuesday." No trap
till Wednesday.
For
hours, I mumble insanely, jumping up every few moments to scan
the garden. I am reminded of the following immortal
words of vengeance, uttered by Ricardo Montalban in Star Trek
II: The Wrath of Khan:
"He
tasks me. He tasks me, and I shall have him! I'll chase him 'round
the moons of Nibia and 'round the Antares Maelstrom and 'round
perdition's flames before I give him up!"
Stay
tuned...
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