Five Rabbits Came Home From the Timber

It took eleven minutes. I looked at my watch. At the end of eleven minutes, Clover took one hop forward and put her nose down in the pellets, and Della reached out slow as honey and picked her up by the scruff and the rump the way she had been taught, and pulled her into her chest.

Then she cried. She cried with her face in that rabbit’s fur, and the boys stood around in a circle with their nets and looked at the ground, the way boys do.

Huck said, “That’s one.”

We got one more that afternoon, a black buck called Pepper, and Huck got him. Pepper bolted when we came up on him in a patch of mayapple, and Huck swung that landing net sideways like he was scooping a bluegill off the top of the water and laid it right over him.

It was the prettiest piece of work I have ever seen. One of the brothers whistled.

Huck just knelt down and worked his hand under the net and held Pepper still till Della got there. He did not say a word about it.

We came out of the timber at six o’clock with two rabbits, a lot of scratches, and every one of those kids covered in seed ticks. Nadine had a gallon of tea on her tailgate and a box of snack cakes, and they sat on the bumper of her truck and ate like wolves.

Shawna watched from the porch the whole time. She did not come out.

That evening, I took Della home with me. I called her dad and told him, and he said it was the right thing. Shawna said nothing.

The two rabbits rode in a cardboard box on Della’s lap, and she talked to them the whole way, telling them they were safe, telling them they were going to Mama’s house where nobody would ever open the door on them again.

At supper she asked if she could pray, and she asked God to keep the other five out of the coyotes’ mouths till morning. She said it plain like that. Coyotes’ mouths. I had to look out the window.

Here is the thing about domestic rabbits that I did not know until that week.

An old breeder named Ivo who lives over by Dieterich called me that night. Nadine had told her sister, and her sister had told somebody at church, and somebody at church knew Ivo. He has raised rabbits for fifty years. He has more ribbons from the state fair than he has wall space.

“Mrs. Lasley, I heard about your girl,” he said. His voice was slow and dry, like a man who does not use the phone much. “I want to tell you what I know.”

He told me that a pet rabbit turned loose will usually stay within a few hundred yards of where it was let out, for the first week or so. It does not know how to go far. It will find a hidey-hole, a brush pile or a groundhog den, and sit there all day.