Cycles
warning: living and unliving animals ahead
I’m writing this on Thursday night, today was a full moon. Last night, Wednesday, we were sitting with some visiting friends at Red Dog Saloon as the almost full moon started to rise. It was huge and beautiful against a still-light sky. A fellow patron stopped our conversation and said, “I’m sorry to interrupt, but do you hear this song? Do you see this moon? This is a quintessential Pioneertown moment.” House of the Rising Sun was playing, the Bob Dylan (so “Risin’” I guess) version. Also Dylan’s birthday was yesterday, the 24th.
I asked him (Rex) how long he’d be in Pioneertown and he said 3 years, with his rescue dog Polly who wanted to eat my leftover tortilla chips. I told him we have a Polly, too. I asked about the Pioneertown community, so he told us about the newcomers and older “hermit crabs” of Pioneertown that give bingo night at Red Dog noise complaints at 7:30pm. He said people come and go.
Full moons are a time of reflection - new moons are a time of calling in something new or shedding something old. Full moons ask for some stillness and quiet. Settle in. Listen up.
On this full moon, I got a text I’ve been dreading while having a slow morning at the coffee shop.
“Dead bunny in the backyard.”
With the amount of rabbits that our backyard hosts, the likelihood of this happening is high. Rabbits and mice are the number one prey out here, but our yard is a rodent sanctuary given the area immediately around our house is fenced off since the previous owners had dogs (the short fence kept the dogs away from the harshest of cacti and kept out larger predators). Our land beyond the back fence is where coyotes can roam freely. Birds of prey, of course, have full range of anywhere and everywhere. We don’t know how this one, a cottontail, died, but it was rigor mortis and ripped open, likely dropped by an owl or hawk.
The rabbits make dens within the thick native bushes that sprinkle through the yard. One bush in particular houses a rabbit couple we frequently interact with and feed sparse amounts of carrots or celery if we have scraps. We know to not encourage reliance but they are so consistently around and have other food sources given natural growth around the house too. Rabbits can have up to five litters of young a year, with 3 to 6 babies in each. Typically 28 days after the young are born, they are kicked out of the nest and must start finding food themselves. They can also give birth one month after mating.
As I headed home, I thought about the rabbit the entire way back. I thought about this being the first time we’d have to handle a dead animal on the property and both the sadness of an animal death, but also the twisted glimmer of hope that once we got through the first one, any future ones should be easier to stomach. I thought about how my father was the one to care for our dead pets growing up, and I was spared from touching their bodies until I’d peer into the small graves we’d dig in the backyard. I’d look to see if their eyes were opened or closed. And luckily, most of their bodies were woundless and clean. Should we bury this one? Should I contact the local artist who collects roadkill and makes jewelry out of their bones? Should we scoop up the rabbit with a shovel and take it to the back of the property, where more animals can do with it as they will, but out of our view?
We come up with stories to tell ourselves about death and the aftermath. When we see animals dead in the road, glowing in moonlight, they are always moved or gone come sunrise. The story I tell myself is of some early morning riser who throws all of them into the back of a pickup and whisks them away to a mass grave, saving the rest of us from experiencing the steady decay in the hot sun. Or maybe we imagine a rabbit’s spirit returning to the moon as the lunar goddess’ companion, beaming up into the sky to where it has always belonged throughout mythology and folklore. But in actuality, the early morning risers are the other animals of the desert that scavenge. We didn’t learn until today that ground squirrels and antelope squirrels are omnivores, and we learned this by watching them pull off the rabbit’s ear and continue to eat its body, tiny bite by bite, for the rest of the day.
I watched them eat it from the kitchen window and saw the terrifyingly huge, sweeping shadow of a Chihuahuan Raven circling the backyard, its wingspan big enough to block out a decent amount of light. They are omnivores too. They’ll pick up desert tortoise and drop them from the sky to crack their shells. This raven didn’t land, just surveyed the scene and maybe thought the rabbit was too far gone to be worth its time. With the rate of consumption from the squirrels, we decided to leave it where it was knowing it would be gone quickly.
I went to check on it every few hours throughout the day and watched the squirrels and their bloody little mouths scurry away the closer I got. Oddly enough, the location of the rabbit would change by a few yards each time. I don’t know what size squirrel could have done it - but it moved. Hour by hour, the rabbit turned less “pet” and more “thing,” no ears or eyes, heart exposed then gone completely. We think of the living as one with the world, but alive or dead this animal in its wildness always belonged to the land. Of the land, for the land - the fed becoming the nourishment. And I didn’t fear it, I couldn’t smell it, I just watched it dissolve.
For some reason I expected the other yard rabbits to be in hiding for the rest of the day. Maybe mourning the lifeless one, maybe scared they’d have the same fate. But the rabbits came out - the other cottontails and the jack rabbits, old ones and young ones.
I went outside at 7:30pm to await a beautiful rise like last night. 7:45, 8:00, 8:30 - passing time on the phone with friends in New Mexico who already had the moon visit them. I was expecting my big round fat early moon in the orange pink sky. A repeat of a perfect moment. But the sky remained dark. No moon. Our neighbor’s cat was howling. I had almost given up when I finally started to see a dark orange-blue halo emerging from behind the hills of the park. She arrived, late but in totality. She looked like the sun. She arrived to take the rabbit home. It reminded me of the last line in one of my favorite poems by Jack Gilbert called Waking at Night:
The blue river is gray at morning
and evening. There is twilight
at dawn and dusk. I lie in the dark wondering
if this quiet in my now
is a beginning or an end
My goal was to clean and salvage some of the bones once all of the fur and muscle disappears, but at this point, none will remain. We’ve watched ants carry the smallest of bones into their holes and each time I go look, another limb is gone completely. It’s for the better. The rabbits come and go. They were never ours anyway.
Love,
Lily
Beautiful nature writing!