Rattlesnake and Rabbit

Cyndi comes home from camp completely obsessed with rabbits. She saw a little one eaten by a rattlesnake early in the morning when she slipped away at dawn to hike alone through the desert.

You ask, "You went off by yourself?"

She is a serious eight year old, with the eyes of a forty-three year old woman who has seen war or plague or faminine, something like that.

"I just needed to get away," she says. "Those girls can be a lot."

You can’t disagree with her there, and since she’s been home, she’s been researching rabbits, reading about them in encyclopedias, begging you to go out to the scrub and help her find them. It’s been three days that she’s been back, and you’ve been hoping that her attention will snap to something else, but it hasn’t yet, and you think it might not for a while.

She begs you to get a book about rabbits. So you take her to the bookstore, holding her hand as you walk the aisle. The salesperson takes you to the children’s section and finds books about cute bunnies.

Still holding your hand, she looks up to you and says, These are books for little kids. She looks at the salesperson and says, "I want to learn about death."

The woman looks at you, but you deadeye her back. You ask, "You have any books like that?"

The best that she can do is a field guide of North American mammals, which you bring home, and Cyndi reads religiously for a couple of days.

Eventually, you bring it up. "How goes the reading?" you ask.

She shrugs. "It only gives me facts."

"What do you want?"

"More," she says. "Can we go find some rabbits?"

So you do. You take her out to the desert, and since you live out in California, the desert isn’t far. You drive down a dirt road where you’re sure that you’ve seen them, and when you park in the early morning light, it doesn’t take you long to find them. Cyndi’s fallen asleep, so you scoop her up in your arms and wake her. You point out at some bushes and say, There they are.

She leans forward and tenses and watches them flitting in bushes and then pausing, then moving again. She watches them for a while and groans her way back into a resting position in your arms.

"What’s wrong?" you ask. "I thought you wanted to see rabbits. There they are."

"I know," she says. "Thank you."

"So what’s wrong?"

"I’m trying to understand if they’re fulfilling their destiny by becoming food."

You look down at her. "What? Where did you learn . . ." But you don’t finish the question. You know where she learned to talk like that. "Well," you say, "that would be your mother’s argument of course. Do you think she’s right?"

"I don’t know. Do you?"

"I don’t know," you say. Then you think better of it. "No, I don’t."

She doesn’t say anything, but she asks you a question with her eyes.

"I think that the world is often chaotic, and sometimes things just die. I also think that the snake was able to live."

She nods and puts a couple of fingers in her mouth. She’s not satisfied with the answer, but that’s all right by you. It’s not a satisfying answer.

She pulls her fingers out. "Do you think there are snakes out there?" She points at the bushes near the rabbits.

"Yes."

"Do you think they’ll eat some of those rabbits?"

"Yes."

"Okay," she says.

You watch them for a little while until you can feel her falling back to sleep in your arms. It’s still early, and that’s a big concept for a child, so you put her in the car. She is, you realize, more like you than her mother, and that’s too bad. Maybe Cyndi will have the good sense to grow up to be a composite of the two of you. Maybe she will be something else. Maybe she will be a philosopher. Maybe she’s just starting the big push through life that everyone does, and she has a lifetime of unanswerable questions ahead of her.

All of this is unknowable so you watch the rabbits scratching out their lives as best they can as she sleeps in the car.

John Brantingham writes:  I was the first poet laureate of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park, and my work has been featured in hundreds of magazines and in Writer’s Almanac and The Best Small Fictions 2016. I have eleven books of poetry and fiction including Crossing the High Sierra and California Continuum: Volume One. I teach at Mt. San Antonio College.