Mother of Rabbits

I was only 10 when I had my first litter.

My first job was a volunteer position. No, that’s not quite right; I was drafted, but I couldn’t say no.

I was 10 years old, and had just moved with my parents and rebellious teenage brother from a cramped lower apartment to a spacious two-story tract house in the suburbs. Our development, recently carved out of cornfields, was still bordered by a stream running through a narrow strip of Pennsylvania forest.

We were accompanied to the new house by two pets. Dancer, a fluffy toy Pomeranian dog, tolerated being dressed in doll clothes and pushed around the block in a baby buggy. Benny was an irascible big white rabbit with red eyes who would lash out with powerful hind legs at anyone daring to snuggle him. He’d been living in a wire dog crate in my pink apartment bedroom, but the new house brought him a large elevated hutch just outside the back door.

Although it’s hard to tell if Benny liked his new digs, children in our new neighborhood loved to open the hutch and let him escape. He’d lead my mother and me on a merry chase around the dead-end loop road, across the wide-open grassy lawns bordering ours. Eventually he’d tire and settle down under a car in somebody’s driveway, and we’d extract him with gentle pushes of a broom.

Through Benny’s wild escapades, all our neighbors came to know that we had a rabbit. And that was how I came to hold my first position, as a rabbit rescuer. Each spring, one or two of the locals would drive a lawnmower over a nest of baby cottontail rabbits, rarely with tragic results, but always with a probably misguided need to do something with the nestlings. They’d come to our front door, holding a box of tiny brown bunnies with oversized white tails, each small enough to fit in the palm of my hand, and beg us to take in the foundlings. Their children had played with them, they’d say, and surely the mother wouldn’t return. Or they just couldn’t leave them out in the newly shorn lawn, ready prey for marauding cats or raptors. And we had a rabbit, so we must know what to do.

Somehow I persuaded my reluctant mother to accept the babies, pleading with teary pre-adolescent eyes. I promised to provide their sole care, and I did. They required round-the-clock feeding every few hours. Several times throughout the night, I’d wake myself to feed them cow milk and Karo syrup from a syringe, dripping the potion the vet prescribed into each impossibly small mouth. Although sometimes little pink tongues would lap at the drops, often the liquid would dribble out, wetting soft brown fur instead of providing sustenance. About half of the young rabbits hadn’t yet opened their eyes, and although I started caring for each new group of nestlings with great hope, many didn’t make it past the first week. I’d find them lying stiff against the heating pad in their cloth-lined ventilated shoebox, and cry as we buried them in the backyard with all due ceremony.

A few older and sturdier younglings survived, and when they had transitioned to the solid food big Benny ate, we’d carry them out into the woods and let them loose. My childish self imagined them romping free and happy, digging cozy burrows, drinking from the stream and noshing on wildflowers, before finding a mate and making more baby cottontails. But even then I knew they faced many dangers that could end that idyll, not the least being raised by a human girl instead of their mother.

One of the survivors developed a tumor on her hind leg just before she was old enough to release. I convinced my softhearted parents to take her to the vet, who pronounced the rabbit to be of indeterminate sex before performing surgery. The lucky rabbit, who I cleverly named Bunny, came home with us to convalesce. It was a year before we took her (or him) to the forest, and she hopped away through the undergrowth without a backward glance.

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