The season of random green things appearing at the tips of every available brown thing out in the yard is finally upon us, mostly noted by the fact that the fiery heat box in the basement hasn’t done one of its typical, “click-click-click-WHOOSH!” things in awhile.    The cat is decidedly more calm for the fact.

Of course, things around here have kept me busier than a triple-phallus endowed billygoat, but what else is new?  The mere fact that I stay vertical on a regular basis is something to be proud of, I think.    Note to self:   Gloat to mother figure sometime.

The lawn is growing great guns which means that I will probably be unable to avoid mowing it on the weekend, lest my neighbors form a lynch mob and drag me to the town square.   The pretty, round, yellow flowers are peeking their way above the verdant blades, shining happily to the sun.   I will certainly have a moment of contrition when I push my way into their domain and violently hack them down at the peak of their glorious solar adulation.   I’m such a prick.

However, if you are an animal-lover, you will readily appreciate my act of compassion that I had last night.   As we arrived home, the rabbit that lives in our yard and neatly clips any fresh shoot in my garden apparently got unnerved and sprinted across the yard away from us, intending to disappear in my neighbor’s darkened lot, as he does on a regular basis.
Unfortunately for him, the green wire fencing that surrounds 2 sides of our property apparently looks invisible in the low light of night and he plowed into it, fully shoving his body halfway through the small rectangular opening in between wires.

Now, this is a full-size bunny.   These are not rabbit-sized holes in the fence, I assure you — they are roomy for a mouse, tight-fitting for a rat, and a cat wouldn’t be caught dead at a party in one.  So you can probably visualize a rabbit, whose ass is wider than his head, now stuck halfway through the fence.

The rabbit did what any normal, well-mannered wild mammal would do in such a situation:

He FREAKED THE HELL OUT.

In a flurry of fur and fuzz and shaking, the rabbit goes absolutely apeshit  and I was pretty sure there’d be a news story the next day about a coney streaking down the highway at the speed of omgholyshit and dragging a healthy amount of yard border along behind it, poles bouncing on the asphalt.  As it happened, the fence shook a lot, the poor animal made its squealing/screeching noises (nothing like it in the world, I swear), and it resulted in a lot of bouncing around, but no real progress.

So, at first I thought if I just approached it, it would get up the courage to make it the rest of the way through and really get free.    And sure enough — I got close to it and it went totally off its tree trying to get away from me.   If it had actually broken free at that point, it would have streaked forward and torpedoed itself into my neighbor’s siding with a force that would have resulted in a terribly cracked wall and one rather badly-dented bunny.

Then I noticed that it was actually somehow wrapped around the wire of the fence, which meant that in order to get out, it would have to gnaw its own hind legs off — at the butt — and leave its back end hanging there.   While I have no doubt that, given the option between doing so and getting anywhere near a human it would have gladly dragged its own bloodied torso across the yard, I thought I’d try to help it out a bit and avoid such desperate measures.

I retrieved a wire nips and a pliars and returned to the scene where the rabbit was transitioning between  wigging out and panting heavily while resting.    I cut and bent, cut and bent, and finally determined that he had wrapped his legs backwards over the next wire down and his feet (big clodhoppers) were stuck in the hole below his body.   Lovely!

Eventually he calmed down enough to see as my wife held the flashlight and I got the wires clipped and bent and pulled his legs free.   He actually didn’t struggle or move until he was completely out of the fence, and then he made a pretty quick escape to the side of my garage.

So, that’s my good deed for the week.

Mind you, I’ve been telling Landa for ages that I’m going to shoot the damned thing this summer, as it keeps destroying my garden, so I should have just gotten a hammer and clocked it one while it was stuck.    Somehow, though, I kinda felt like the odds were a bit too stacked in my favor, so…congrats, Mr. Bunny.   You get another go at life.   Develop a liking for frozen burritoes (and not my green beans) and we’ll be all good; otherwise, we’ll meet again.