Rabbit Redux

A rabbit rooting dawn today out here on the high Mesa riding the white-capped waves of old volcanoes. No clouds with 2 below on the window thermometer, the caldera silenced, a subtle cherry haze made of woodsmoke and yesterday's snowmelt drifting over town way in the eastern and southern distance. Out here aboard the Watership (upside) Down, I skim along with rabbits, plump ones and stringy, sinewy, demon-eyed jacks, lured out of my warm nautilus into the newly bright world, stalks of dry grass glistening like Christmas tinsel. Those rabbits, the rotunds, sniff the Tiffany-glittering surface of the snow for rabbit food and don't mind my first, heavy gulps of frozen air. I walk in my rubber and leather insulated Sorel's (bought, I must relate, for $80 at the Boulder Army store in 1994) in the direction of a dark juniper covered hump topped by a kissy-lips peak. I'm hoping to find the rabbit city and enter that world, whatever size may be required of me. But once I start moving with purpose, they skip into the dark tunnels of sage, and I turn back to my vessel. Only one remains in sight, a tall jack thinking it's a kangaroo, bounding as if on a pogo stick, along the south side of the dirt road, keeping up with a sherry red prius going 30 mph in the direction of the gorge.

Nearing home I am halted by three dogs, a bony malamute, a shorthaired, lean-muscular african looking pup, and a wylie-faced collie-shepherd mix. They move around and in-and-about me like water, sniffing and smiling, rubbing and panting. I'm soft among them, nobodied, and wish to enter like Gumby into their world. But there's the house, and they see it, too, and it brings back memories of the former tenant lady who, I'm told, used to feed them porkchops. I've no chops, and realize that I don't know what to feed them. I've been petless my whole life other than Dannie, my friends' Newfoundland, who I lived with for 4 years, and had been trained to feed. I tricked myself for a minute that they were just happy to be with me as a being among them, but they wanted the goods and they knew I could, or eventually would deliver. And I will, but still, I'm left with a lingering sadness from this morning; the disappearance of the rabbits at my clodding steps, and the heads-turning-in-unison departure of the tres amigos, noses tuned to other gastronomical possibilities up-mesa. I stepped back into my house, still toasty from yesterday's sun, and sat to meditate, thinking that maybe one day I'd crawl out into the sage and find Alice's wonderland.