Okay, I’ve had enough. After savagely eradicating everything from my garden that I didn’t personally put there, I’m declaring a truce against a certain collection of small sylvilagus floridanii that have adopted it as their playpen cum banquet hall. How much do they eat? Not enough to matter. Why do they get to stay? Two reasons: the Cat, and the Encounter.
The Cat is a tom, not ours, that likes to hang out in the back of the yard. Cool for us, because he catches the mice that like to party in the motor home. Bad for us if he comes too close to the house, because the birds and bunnies are also choice morsels. The Cat knows his place, and when he pushes it, someone is usually nearby to chase him back to his lurk-about. Last night both kids charged him into the woods. Today? Not a sign of him 🙂
The Encounter happened this morning, when I enlisted the girl-child to help me chase a furry ball with teeth from the garden before it decimated the beans. It was aggravating enough when it felled my zinnias just before they could bloom. No way am I sharing what promises to be a record-breaking bean crop. So out we go, pokers in hand, to scare the vile beastie out of our patch. The beastie, smaller than my coffee cup, picked about the dumbest place to hunker down and play “invisible”: right in front of the gate. My daughter takes the back, I take the side, and the strawberry box covers the other side. The only place to escape is the open gate. Right.
She bends over slowly, expecting any moment for the furry bundle in the weeds to bolt for the door, but nada. So intently was the baby fuzzball pretending to be invisible that I think he (she?) honestly convinced itself we couldn’t see it. So my daughter decides to give it a little poke in its puffy white tail to entice it to move. After two pokes and no movement, my daughter ruffles its fur and scratches it on the back. Maybe it was just too full to run away, or maybe it knows what a gentle heart my daughter has. Either way, the baby (it is now known as Baby) stretched out under my daughter’s hand for a nice scratch before it capered off–right past me and back into the beans.
Where it can stay and eat to its heart’s delight. I only hope when it’s too fat to fit through the fence that it’s on the other side.
Tribelet of Hoodlums 