Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [98]
There is one limiting factor to the free-for-all buffet: my own queasiness. With the progression of summer, we have found ourselves overrun with cottontail rabbits. To quantify: when I step from the office on a recent warm evening, I count sixteen rabbits in the front yard alone. These are too many rabbits. Anneliese has been asking me to trim the herd for several weeks now, but I have resisted. I was raised never to shoot an animal unless the end result is bound for the table. And although I happily hunt and eat cottontails in winter, I was also raised to believe you should never eat a rabbit killed when the ground isn’t frozen. Tularemia, the old-timers said. But when I saw those sixteen rabbits in one spot, I prepared to yield the point. Then a night later I went to fetch something from the pole barn and found a rabbit pulling itself weakly around the corner of the barn. It was obviously ill, all hunched up and blinking at me as I approached. I loaded the .22 and killed the poor miserable thing. When you have that many rabbits and they start showing up sick, it’s time to cull. I went back up to the yard and shot the first rabbit I saw.
When I picked it up by the hind legs and walked to the weedy edge of the yard, I was just about to give it a fling when the old “shoot-it-you-eat-it” pang returned. I looked at it again. It was full-grown and to all appearances very healthy. Still, I couldn’t shake the idea that you don’t eat warm-weather rabbit. Then from down the ridge, I heard a querulous porcine grunt. Of course…Pigs are omnivorous. Rabbits are free. Waste not, want not. It seemed a little creepy, though. I waffled. Then I hiked on down there and slung that rabbit over the fence.
They snuffled at it a bit, and then the carnage began. They chomped it at opposite ends and ripped it in two. They crunched the bones. They gnawed the ears. They gobbled the guts.
Gentle reader, I am not a fellow quick to fold his tent in the face of grotesquery. But as I watched Cocklebur bounce the last bit of rabbit ear on her lower lip like she was dandling a cigar, the bridge of my nose assumed the topography of a crinkle-cut fry. I found myself wondering if tularemia could be passed on via pork chops, or if I was very possibly contributing to the spawn of mad porkrabbit disease.
I shot three more rabbits. I slung each one deep into the valley, where at night I hear the coyotes sing. There is more than one way to keep the circle unbroken.
While the project is on hold until definitive research can be conducted, I presume there is nothing inherently dangerous about converting our excess cottontails to bacon. The real challenge lies in coming up with a marketing program to make the idea as palatable as that of grass-fed beef. Those “grass-fed beef” people are working from a point of real advantage, as the term conjures bucolic images of breezy green meadows and trim cuts of pure protein. In days past I paid the rent by writing an advertising slogan or two, and I have applied myself to this current challenge with diligence, but so far have only come up with the undeniably catchy but ultimately unusable “Stick a fork in our rabbit-fed pork.”
Like flowing water and snaking flames, the movement of hay—off the sickle, off the rake, into the baler—is hypnotic. And there are the aromatic dimensions—the hay green-sweet or minty at cutting, tealike in the mow. When I drive past a freshly mown hayfield I anticipate the fragrant seep and ride it right back to my seat on the Massey-Ferguson. When I step into my father’s empty mow on a day when sunlight slants through the beams, the soft underbelly of my forearms tingles at the memory of the red dots and scratches left by the stem ends after a full day’s baling.
And what better than haying to soothe