in my kitchen, around the farm
rabbit army invades, blooming flowers, honeysuckle ice cream
I send you this urgent dispatch from our reinforced bunker where we have retreated and regrouped and now mount our remaining line of defence. The situation is dire, but we shall persevere until our last dying breath for the love of life and country. We have been outnumbered and outgunned. Our defences have been corrupted. Our strategies defeated. We are surrounded and the enemy is moving in. We are requesting air support! I repeat, we are requesting air support! We estimate we have enough ammunition and manpower to keep us from being overrun for six more hours, but after that, we will fall. The bunnies will conquer us all.
And here’s where the camera fades from our position and pans out across our farm where the viewer can witness the full, unabated assault of the marauding rabbits. They are everywhere and they are legion. They sprawl out on the seat of the tractor, so confident are they. They weave in and out of hay bales that they have claimed as their intricate cities, complete with high-rise condominiums. They sun themselves on the log piles and have transformed my garden into their baby nursery. Tiny rabbits run around our boots, hoping to do their part in taking down the remaining two-leggeds. Wild buck rabbits have left the scarcity of their feral world to volunteer their services in reinforcing the numbers of this domesticated rabbit army.
At long last, the reign of rabbits has arrived!
I’m only slightly exaggerating.
We have been overrun and I am really starting to get concerned. It was kind of cute last year when two female does escaped/were let go. A doe without a buck isn’t much of a concern. We’ve had a doe hanging around the farm before. It’s kind of sweet to go out for chores and have a rabbit run up to you for their morning slice of apple or carrot. But, what happened last year was that our buck really did escape and he was gone for a week. We thought he was a goner, but he showed up one day, standing outside of the rabbit house, exhausted from his forays into unbridled rabbit partying. We let him into his house, but the damage was done. He had found those two escapee does and they had made babies.
And those babies made babies. And those babies had babies that made babies and… you all know the saying, “breeding like rabbits”.
Along one of our biggest highways here in Ontario there is an enormous apple. I’m not sure how long it’s been there, but we used to stop into the aptly named “Big Apple” when our kids were small. They sold apple pies and stuff of that nature, but it was the rabbits our kids wanted to see. They were everywhere. Thousands upon thousands of rabbits just running around. The story was that someone had dropped off a rabbit or two that became four and then maybe other people, tired of their pet rabbits, dumped theirs, too. I had never seen anything like it - a living, hopping land-ocean of rabbits. Then one day, they were gone. Not a single rabbit anywhere. Some people said they got a disease. That seems suspect to me. All that would be needed is for one coyote to find that bounty and word would spread like wildfire among their canine crew, “Smorgasbord at the Big Apple”!!
In any case, I want these rabbits gone. My garden is planted and getting planted. I can’t have rabbits destroying what’s in there. My garlic came up and the rabbits ate all of the tender green leaves off the top. There’s just amputated green bits sticking up like spiky pineapples. Our fruit orchard is full of beautiful, young tender trees that rabbits particularly love. I noticed my husband has been wrapping the base of our old apple trees in the orchard with chicken wire. Clearly, General Bun-Bun has the upper strategic advantage here. If we don’t mount a serious defence fast, it will be all over for us. I had a dream last night that there was a brigade of rabbits rappelling down the side of our house. It was quite cute in a horrific kind of way. I woke up realizing it’s