We never planted the garden. Springtime got away from us, blown to tatters on April snows and a too-fast moving May. The garden was ignored, then forgotten. It lies fallow, overgrown with weed and daisy, raised beds holding neglect and ruin, standing as relics of good intention gone to seed. Weeds of questionable provenance reach for the sun, grow high and thick and mysterious. What plants these? From where were the seeds borne? What will their richness yield?
Into this thicket Sally ventured last week, hacking back some of the growth in a vain attempt at, certainly not order, that is gone to the weeds, but perhaps a measure of control of the wild greenery. Into the green tangle she worked under June skies and a sun of crazy heat.
Something moved. Something small, hidden in bowed-over grasses amid tangle of stem and stalk. She paused, did Sally.
A sound, soft as a raindrop. A shadow that became a form. The form that moved into a ray of light and took shape, definition: Rabbit. A very small, very young rabbit, of large, damp eyes and small ears folded back as if blades of grass. Sally and rabbit stood, eye to eye across the garden gone bad; neither moved.
Then Sally took a slow, purposeful step backward; another, soft footfall on yielding dirt. Another, until she was at the gate. She opened the gate, stepped into the yard and clicked shut the latch.
She told me about it after work and took me to the garden. “It was right about here.” We stood in the shambles of the garden, the garden of high hopes gone bad. “Right over there.” There was nothing.
She moved to one of the raised beds that should be bearing ripening tomatoes but instead lies matted with weed; took a soft step forward. A shrill, high squeal rose to the air and a small rabbit blurred from under her foot and ran. Then a second. A third. Sally, with no intent to harm, had stepped on their nest.
The three rabbits huddled motionless in the weeds, eyes bright, hoping against all odds that in their motionlessness they would become invisible.
We backed out of the garden and peered over the chain link fence. The babies seemed to be as small statues of rabbit.
We left the garden, went to the house, kept the dogs inside. Half an hour later we peeked over the fence. They were gone.
Fenway figured it out. Fenway, the Boston terrier, the Boston terrible, the Boston rocket, Fenway gamed it, found the scent of rabbit and knew what it was. Thor and Riika, born and bred to hunt, my twosome of field and forest missed it. Fenway did not. Where we saw little bunnies cute as the day is long, Fenway saw something else: Prey!
He hunted them, did Fen, hunted with a zeal and an intensity that matched the rising heat of early summer days. We moved to protect the rabbits, made noise when we let the dogs out, the better to alarm the rabbits to flight. We tried.
Fenway’s obsession ran torrid as the June temperatures, spiking red-hot into the danger zone, an obsession no less real and no more appealing than the ugly heat, for name any one obsession that, at its heart, is anything but unattractive.
In a crackling hot afternoon he rushed manic and crazy-wild, coursed the perimeter of garden fence like a perverse inmate at the high wire; Fenway wanted in, not out. He dug at the base of the fence like a badger, his efforts for naught. He ran the wire, whined and barked. I imagined small rabbits cowering in fear in the garden.
He overheated. A Boston terrier cannot regulate heat well and lives vulnerable to the baking heat of open sky and burning sun. He was panting deep and fast and his body burning is as if with fever. Sally and I carried him to the basement sink, held him under cool running water, dampened him down as the chill water carried the heat away and he returned to normal. We put him to the floor. He shook himself off then ran the stairs, stood at the back door and whined to be let out again.
We told him “No,” and he looked at us with big dark eyes as if we have betrayed his very reason for life.
He did not give up. After it cooled he bounced across the yard, springing high for a better sight line, running side-to-side, crisscrossing the yard as if a pinball in the old machines propelled by paddles, a blur of movement; up, down, right side, left side, down the middle. He was enervated by memory of rabbits, driven mad with the scent in the air, that mystery world that we can only imagine, the world of scent in which dogs live and revel in and that can write them a story line that only they can read.
He was driven to wildness and abandon by the intoxicating scent of rabbit and in that intoxication rendered powerless to its draw and allure as all those intoxicated are; a common thread, dog to human.
We’d sometimes see the small rabbits slide from shadow and cover into the yard as shadows might move from darkness to light. We’d rap the windows, put them to flight, do what we could to prevent carnage.
Good intentions can only go so far. On a hot summer evening under glowering cloud with distant thunder sounding a drum beat, a rabbit came into the yard. We missed it. Fenway did not.
Rabbits are rabbits; they do what they can. Dogs are dogs; they do what they will. Blood runs deep with both; instinct carries the day. Prey and predator; they cannot escape lineage, cannot run from bloodline, cannot dodge DNA from which comes intensity, desire and obsession, from which is determined predator and prey, from where comes life and comes death.