No, this isn’t
about that WWII prisoner-of-war movie starring Cooler King Steve McQueen and Scrounger
James Garner, although I do own that DVD and enjoy watching it periodically.
This is about a different escape and rescue that occurred at our home the
weekend after Easter.
My wife Delores
had visited local flower and garden shops and purchased several lovely examples
of flora for our front “flower gardens.” These aesthetically outline the
driveway, sidewalk, and front porch. As she was digging in some of the previously-positioned
thick grassy plants to the right of the porch, she “struck” (figuratively not
literally, we think) an amazing discovery. No, it wasn’t oil or gold…foo-foo.
It was bunnies! Three little furry baby bunnies!
The first
giveaway was the barely-audible whimper-like squeal she heard as her shovel’s
blade probably grazed or at least horrified one or more of the critters all
warm and snug in the nest their now absent mother had dug for them some days
before. At an unspoken signal all three dashed from their home scampering
furiously in different directions. Delores saw one cross the road to the
neighbors’ yard and one seemed to head around the house for the creek at the
back of our property. The third young rabbit…well, we didn’t realize until that
night to whence it fled.
Looking back on
the gardener’s dislodging of the triplets with the shovel blade, I am reminded
of a scene from one of my favorite Fifties Sci-Fi classic films Them.
FBI agent James Arness and policeman James Whitmore, accompanied by other
military and local law-enforcement officers, were investigating the
disappearance of two young boys in an early morning freak incident in the
“rivers” and storm drains of Los Angeles. Apparently they were flying a model
airplane with their dad early on a Sunday morning before he had to go to work.
They were attacked by giant mutant ants. The man had his arm ripped off but fled
the scene in his car driving several miles before dying of blood loss and
trauma. The boys ran into the large opening of the sewer drains from which the
ants had attacked. The rest is for you to watch later, because this is about
the rescue of a bunny from a shovel not two boys from giant ants.
To those baby
bunnies dozing all snug and warm in their nest, I imagine my wife’s shovel blade
resembled the attack of some horrific monster. The third sibling escaped the ominous
creature stabbing down repeatedly and menacingly within a hare’s breadth
(pardon the pun) of its head by dashing unnoticed into the cavernous and
welcoming opening of the garage (aka sewer drain in the Them analogy). Upon our
return home from a shopping trip to Nashville hours later, we spied the small
furball – at first mistaking it for a mouse or rat which we have never seen on
our property. With five college degrees between us, we quickly realized what it
was and the conditions under which it had hidden therein. With both cars parked
in that garage and the bunny among the recycling stuff against the wall at the
front, there wasn’t much room for humans to maneuver and certainly not much
access to line-of-sight as the critter moved. After that initial encounter, we
didn’t know if it had scampered underneath one of the cars or left the garage
cave entirely. Several minutes of fruitless searching by two tired homo-sapiens
at 10:30 p.m. after a long day (Delores had planted a lot of garden and I had
weedeated and mowed the yard) was all it took to convince us that the bunny had
escaped the confines. We retired.
Monday morning my wife left
for work a couple of hours before I did. As I was heading to my car in the
mid-morning, I happened to glance down and saw the bunny cowering precisely where
it had been at its first appearance Saturday night. I spent the next 15 minutes
trying to catch it moving everything and making a mess (when I turned over a
large white storage cabinet and some of the paint cans leaked onto the cabinet
walls and the cement floor), but I didn’t see it again. My natural hopeful
thought was that it might’ve left the garage once and for all. I wasn’t really
convinced of that and later voice-texted my wife (no I don’t text while driving
except occasionally by voice) via an overly “intelligent” phone phantom named
Siri. I stated that I had discovered the bunny and, though it had eluded my
attempt to corner or catch, it was probably still in the garage.
Upon returning home I
left my car parked outside and started moving everything…again. It wasn’t
there…but the one place I couldn’t see well was under the freezer. A tell-tale
hint was the amount of poop that I noticed immediately when I moved the freezer
slightly.
When Delores arrived
home, I lifted the freezer a few inches while she, bunny-like on all fours perused
the dark beneath. There it was “frozen” in the shadows of its chosen hare-lair,
sitting on a narrow metallic ledge underneath the right side of that appliance.
It had found a much cozier cave inside the larger one. In Them the boys found a
corner of an under-construction portion of a sewer drain where they huddled
waiting for James Whitmore, complete with flame thrower, to effect their
rescue. He died in the attempt; we didn’t…
Our bunny needed a
threatening but non-injurious prodding nudge from a broomstick to dislodge it
from its hiding place. It instantly darted to the front corner of the garage
striking the wall and doing a very acrobatic flip, tried to retreat back to the
front, broom barring its way; it scampered out the garage, through the front
yard, across the street and thru the neighbor’s yard toward the overgrowth
behind their house along the railroad track (please pardon the previous run-on
sentence). After watching its flight for freedom, we cleaned up the bunny poop
and the spilled paint and returned to our normal lives with little more than a
memory with a happy ending.
Moral? Not really. Just a
simple narrative about a cute, helpless creature’s escape and rescue from some
menacing giants. A lesson for all creatures might be “never run into a cave
unless you are acquainted with the owners personally or know who or what might
be lurking within.”
We hope our baby bunny
was quickly reunited with its mother and siblings. Maybe it will return to our
yard one day; perchance the three of us can sit on the grass or the front porch
and relive the story of the bunny’s plight from our memory banks. Or…if it will
allow a more personal interaction, we could enter our abode and watch Them
get exterminated on the television up in the bonus room. Surely an older and
wiser rabbit would enjoy that…I wonder if bunnies eat popcorn?
