(continued from Part I, My Little Run-Away)
Where has the run-away bunny gone? Into what 18- to 24-inch snowdrift could he be hiding, this Winter of 2009-2010?
Well, there’s snow all over the place. He can’t get too far, I say walking the paths cut through our lower yard and patio, looking for those tiny footprints that might show a direction Cwazy may have gone along the human-prepared path.
I search and search with no luck. Decide to check the hilltop area where the chickens are at rest. There, behind the shed, I see prints. Can’t tell if it’s a bird, chicken or a rabbit made the prints. Hey, I’m a city boy, grew up with nothing but asphalt in the back yard of my North Philadelphia home. How am I supposed to know the difference?
Don’t know how long I look before giving up. I went into the warm house, but couldn’t rest. At nightfall, I grabbed a flashlight and searched again for the rabbit. Still no sign of him where ever I would flash the light. Not a sound to betray his whereabouts. He’s definitely gone.
I slept in wakeful fits that night. Restless. Feeling guilty for not doing enough for the little animal. Felt terrible the next day. Difficult to enjoy feeding the wild birds that flew onto the patio and nearby tree. I see their movement as the critters come toward the food I have just placed for them. I notice slight movement to my rear — in the rabbit’s favorite spot beneath the wooden chaise lounge. I dare not look. Or hope.
“Cwazy” I sing out. “YOU CWAZY WABBIT,” comes next as a tear of joy surfaces from somewhere deep inside of me.
The bunny made it through the night! He must have burrowed into a snow bank or dug into a crevice somewhere in the back yard.
Here he is, sitting up — front paws out as he rests on his back legs — looking straight at me.
“Come here, you cwazy critter,” I say, reaching into his bags for crunch food and Timothy Hay, as well as a change of regular water for the bowl that froze over night. He scampers over, jumps into his cage and chows down as if there was nothing unusual for him to have pulled an “all-nighter” outside of his home. Nuthin’ to it, at all.
* * * * * * * *
Well, he has now had two nights. Two nights in a row we let Cwazy run free in the yard and return to his cage for food and water in the morning. His white fur blends in with the snow, and I have little fear a predator will see him from above. Let him run free for now. Let him enjoy the snow. They’ll be time to round him up later. Time to return him to his home. Time for most of us this Winter to “burrow” inside and “flourish” later come Spring.
Let’s enjoy the day for what ever it has to offer us.
Contoveros 
Yup–Sinatra is the place’s claim to fame (well, that and baseball)…of course, he would probably have admitted that only under great duress! (There is a great mug-shot of him as an incredibly handsome, and obviously seriously delinquent, teenager that people like to hang around various establishments here–probably the best picture ever taken of him, courtesy of the Hoboken P.D.!)
Nancy
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Weren’t we all a little “delinquent” in our rebellious youth? (Some of us may still have a little in us. [I hope I do!] )
By the way, Isn’t it what we like about the rabbit? Doesn’t follow all the rules imposed by adults?
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Not me–I was a model citizen (hence the exposition on being an “initiate,” as you put it, in my comment on one of your earlier posts about meditation 🙂 )!
Nancy
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Nancy,
Twice now I have written a pulitzer-price-winning comment, only to see the gods of he internet chew it up and spit it out. Lost it again. This time on your latest post.
Oh well. I meant the “unitiated,” in my short post where I said
I
L
O
V
E
Y
O
U
on the left hand side of the poem.
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Michael J – On losing one’s prized prose: this happened to me often enough that once I really got into blogging, I finally made a pact with myself that I would not compose in my browser, except for two or three sentence replies…..it’s been a challenging discipline, but it’s starting to become more habitual. I’m sure you know this perfectly well for yourself, but I was amazed at how many losses of good prose I had to suffer before I took better care of myself! 🙂
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Steve and I seem to have the same reactions to these “animal cliff-hangers” of yours, Michael! First I worried like crazy about the chick and the falcon, and then I prayed, after reading your first Bunny post, that you’d find Cwazy.
Rabbits are weirdly smart, it seems–something one wouldn’t really expect (although Bugs Bunny was pretty much a genius, as far as I could tell). We used to have a bunny named Zelda, who loved spaghetti more than anything, and who had kind of a one-sided affair with our son’s stuffed bunny. But he (yes, he was a boy, in spite of the name) understood commands like “stay”, and he knew how to get what he wanted (spaghetti and the stuffed bunny).
Then there was the baby bunny named Steve (by my son) who just showed up one afternoon in the planted outside of our house. Now, we live in Hoboken, NJ, a fairly urban little town where one doesn’t ordinarily run into rabbits on the streets. We still don’t know how he got into our planter, but I’m fairly certain that there was a really good reason for it. We let him go in the back-yard, so that he could continue his bunny life in relatively safety roaming around the yards behind the brownstones, rather than on the city streets. We’ve worried because we haven’t seen him in a year or two, but your post reminds me that bunnies do have “inner wisdom” (maybe that’s what led him to the planter in the first place!).
Yay! Cwazy is OK!
Nancy
http://saradode.wordpress.com
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Bunny stories seem to be hopping around all over the place. Unbelievable amount of joy comes from such a fluffy little animal.
I mean, you can’t help but smile and feel good inside when you see a rabbit in the wild. I generally stop what I’m doing and watch the bunny make its way over grassland and into a bush or treeland. What does that say about us? About a longing to touch nature ever so briefly?
Good to see you, my lady. Glad to hear of more good things from Hoboken, NJ. (Home of old “Blue Eyes,” if I’m not mistaken.)
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Omigod, omigod, I’m so happy for Cwazy and you and your family! Whew. My pets have always been like family for me, so this was a real cliff-hanger for me becasue I totally put myself in your shoes.
By the way, I know that when this kind of thing happens we tend to blame ourselves, and think of what we “should” or “could” have done, but I didn’t see you do a single thing wrong this whole adventure. And I know your big love and big presence helped the bunny; also, bunny listened to its own inner wisdom too.
So happy for you and yours. Thanks for sharing.
Steve
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Ain’t it funny how we can get so much joy out of our family pets? They offer so much. Maybe that part of nature, the outdoor part, that we need so much in our busy lives.
Thanks Steve. Enjoy your inner wisdom too.
michael j
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I agree!
Thanks again, amigo!
Steve
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