Enslaved by Ducks (4 page)

His muteness struck me as eerie. A happy cat will purr. An unhappy
dog will whine. Parrots are vocal tracts on legs. But rabbits come into this world and leave it as sonic blank slates, occasionally grunting when they’re picked up in a manner offensive to them and, as we later learned, emitting a low buzz when they’re sexually stimulated or in an aggressive mode. Making eye contact with Binky was only slightly more rewarding than staring into the shallows of an opaque pond. I knew
someone
was there, some being with a strong personality, but no spark of recognition leaped between us.

Though Binky challenged my communication skills, he was adept at conveying his own desires. Banging his empty water dish against the bars of his cage, he expressed his dissatisfaction with being locked up as unmistakably as Jimmy Cagney in
White Heat
. He was addicted to schedules and loathed changes in his environment. The addition of a Christmas tree in our living room met with his approval, because its boughs gave him a new place of concealment. But when Easter rolled around, and we finally removed the tree, he expressed his outrage by thumping the floor with a hind foot whenever he came into the room and snubbing us for more than a month. On another occasion we had the audacity to shift the position of the couch to accommodate a new floor lamp. Minutes after his evening parole from his cage, Binky snuffled at the new lamp, raised himself on his hind legs, and with a shove of his front paws toppled the interloper.

Binky’s narcissism was greater than any cat’s. The majority of his nonnapping hours were spent fastidiously grooming himself. Other than that, his favorite out-of-cage pastime was giving electrical wires the licorice-whip treatment and hiding in impossible-to-reach places. He was happiest when combining the two. The AC adapter cable to my pricey Sony shortwave portable ran through a narrow channel between the wall and our platform bed, where I
figured it was safe. Elongating his pear-shaped bulk to the requisite two-inch width, he wriggled snakewise down the passageway and clipped the wire into pieces. To curb his appetite for the cables I loved most, I cut a three-foot length from an old extension cord and presented it to him. With all the disdain a rabbit could muster, he plucked it from my hand and with a toss of his head flung it from his sight. Like sharks attracted to transatlantic phone cables on the ocean floor, Binky apparently craved live voltage. He never injured himself pursuing his habit, but our appliances sported numerous bandages.

Binky gave us our first jolt of pet destructiveness. Though his widely scattered poop pellets were inoffensive as such materials go, they presented us with an ongoing maintenance problem. Rabbits, we’d been told, were easy to litter train. And it’s true. They gravitate naturally toward a litter box, mysteriously divining its purpose the first time they hop inside. Just as instinctively, they are also keenly set on establishing a presence throughout their territory. Chin-rubbing is one method. Glands on the front of their heads deposit their scent on whatever coffee table, coat stand, chair leg, or human foot they rub against. But when a rabbit, especially a male, is serious about letting others know which lands he claims as his own, bodily functions are most effective. We learned this with Binky, and the lesson was magnified with a later rabbit population in which three males vied to plant their flag in shared territory.

More worrisome, we found, was the front end of a rabbit. Rabbits’ teeth grow continuously. Unchecked, the lower incisors rise up in werewolf fashion, while the upper teeth can curve inward until they eventually penetrate the roof of the mouth. Usually, the act of eating grinds down the teeth, and excess length is kept in check by a rabbit’s love of chewing any object within reach. To that end, Binky gnawed at our woodwork. He pulled out our living room carpet
fibers. He made hors d’oeuvres out of the dust jackets to
Flying Saucers from Mars, Flying Saucers and the Three Men
, and
They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers
, three classics of modern science I kept on the bottom shelf of an upstairs bookcase. He decimated shoes, speaker cables, antenna feeds, chair legs, phone lines, computer interconnects, area rugs, record-album jackets, litter boxes, wicker baskets, magazines, and the ribbon cable from our satellite dish.

If an irreplaceable possession was challenging enough to warrant several sessions of intensive gnawing, it would turn into a project with Binky. The degree to which we opposed a project defined his enthusiasm for it. To thwart his will was to energize him. As soon as we’d release him from his cage, he would make a bunny-line for his work site and eagerly resume his labors where he’d left off. Reducing a reference book to paper pulp or chewing the Egyptian motifs off a decorative pillow were favored projects. But his appetite for this line of work paled next to his obsession with gaining access to a hiding place once I had blocked its entrance. One of these was the space between the headboard shelf of our platform bed and the wall it nearly touched. Ensconced in this dark recess, Binky was virtually unreachable. Assuming we even knew he was huddled there, the only way of rousting him was to thrust a cardboard wrapping-paper tube down the crack between bed and wall and blindly whisk it back and forth.

I first tried preventing access to this miserable lair by placing a small suitcase on the floor next to the bed, but he easily nosed it aside. When I wedged it in firmly with the help of a spare blanket, he scuttled over the roadblock. I finally had to cobble together a wall of blankets and boxes arranged around a heavy cushion. Though he was unable to surmount the obstruction, he would not be dissuaded. Day after day he would bolt from his cage and scurry
directly to the bedroom, where he’d rake his front paws furiously against the pile until Linda or I finally pulled him away and shut the bedroom door. That only turned his attention to the outside of the door, the sound of his clawing reaching us in the living room.

When you match wits with a rabbit, you cannot win. If the rabbit bests you, you’re a fool. If you best the rabbit, you’re a fool who’s bested a rabbit. This truism sunk in the day I forgot to close the basement door and Binky found the most vexing hiding place of his career. I scoured the usual places for him: behind the washing machine, between the dryer and the sink, beneath the workbench, under the fuel-oil tank, in the hellacious cubbyhole where Linda stored Halloween, Easter, and Christmas decorations, against the wall next to the water heater, in a pile of possibly clean, possibly dirty clothes, and even among the canning jars. The third time I hit the basement to search for him, Binky sat nonchalantly grooming himself in plain view as if awaiting my arrival. When I took two steps toward him, he sauntered to the end of an unfinished run of plasterboard, hopped onto a cinderblock, and disappeared behind the wall.

Just beyond arm’s length, he resumed his toilette, oblivious to my cajoling, pleading, and threats. I tried to chase him out with a broom, but that only drove him in deeper. From a step ladder, I poked my trusty wrapping-paper tube down toward him via an opening in the unfinished ceiling, hoping to block his path and force him out into the open. But he was too fast for me. He scuttled down the full length of the wall to the far corner, where I could just make out the shape of his ears with a flashlight. I had no reasonable hope of getting to him.

Common sense told me to wait patiently until Binky tired of this warren that lacked a single chewable wire or until his stomach beckoned him toward his food-stocked cage in the kitchen. But I wasn’t in the mood for common sense. I needed to show Binky that
a rabbit wasn’t the boss of our house.

“Leave him alone,” Linda counseled. “He’ll come out when he’s ready.”

“You’re absolutely right,” I told her, pretending to agree as I followed her upstairs. Then, while Linda was taking a bath, I sneaked back to the basement.

With a small utility knife, I cut a vaguely rectangular shape in the plasterboard at the base of the wall exactly opposite where I knew Binky sat, then used a screwdriver to pull and tear the hunk of drywall free. The commotion should have tipped Binky off, but since no amount of thumping had ever driven him from a hiding place, he remained still just long enough for me to make a grab at him. He was sitting too far forward, with just his hindquarters framed by the wallboard cut-out, and he wriggled from my grasp just as I tried darting a hand in front of his chest. He came out from behind the wall the way he had gone in and, before I could catch him, ran across the basement floor toward the stairs to the kitchen.

Binky’s independence angered me, and the fact that he angered me angered me further. After almost two years in our house, he wasn’t becoming any more domesticated. If anything, he seemed to be growing wilder by the day. I didn’t like the feeling of chaos that Binky brought to our environment, the notion that I could be innocently reading the
Lowell Ledger
newspaper thinking all was well with the world when some portion of the house was being eaten away under our feet. I also took his disobedience as a conscious thumbing of his wiggly nose at my alleged authority.

I came to this conclusion after the most impressive of Binky’s numerous escapes from the backyard pen that I had cobbled together for him. I had based his pen around the structure of a play area and sandbox that the previous owner of my house had built. I added metal fence posts between the existing four-by-four timbers
and looped a roll of chicken-wire fencing around the whole thing. At first, escaping was simply a matter of Binky perfecting his hurdling skills to clear the three-foot-high fence I had foolishly assumed would keep him in. When I raised the height a couple of feet by adding another roll of fencing, he started probing my less-than-sterling workmanship. My fence posts protruded from the ground at widely varying angles like a bad set of teeth. Upon locating the post that leaned away from the pen at the greatest angle, Binky developed the fancy footwork needed to scramble up the steeply inclined fencing. Or he would run in circles around the pen until he’d built up sufficient speed for an impressive leap onto a board and enough residual momentum to launch himself over the fence. In the end, I had no choice but to add a third level of fencing, bringing the total height to an insurmountable six feet.

“That’s one pen he won’t get out of,” I bragged to Linda, after depositing Binky in his newly refurbished stockade. Fifteen minutes later, I was upstairs trolling for African music on my shortwave radio when Linda called to me.

“Sweetie, I don’t see Binky.”

“Don’t worry,” I hollered down to her. “He’s in there.”

“I sure don’t see him.”

Surveying his pen from the upstairs window, I couldn’t see him either. He was usually a blur of motion as he busied himself with an escape attempt, but the cage was calm and apparently quite empty.

Linda bolted out the front door in hopes of intercepting him before he hopped out into our busy street or lodged himself under one of our cars. I ran out the side door and nearly tripped over him as I went down the outside steps. He was sitting on the second step licking himself with unusual gusto, as triumphant as Houdini at the completion of a spectacular feat. “Running away isn’t the object,”
Binky’s presence at the door told me. “Escaping from your stupid pen is the point.” How had he pulled it off? I’d never paid any attention to the numerous holes Binky had excavated while out in the yard. He would dig down a foot or so, then immediately abandon his burrow to start another one. But never before had he extended a hole into a bona fide tunnel.

“I wonder how long he was working on this?” Linda marveled, as we surveyed the exit hole that had popped up through the grass a couple of feet from the northeast corner of his pen. His ingenuity forced me to line the inside perimeter of his cage with rocks of a weight that would thwart any more escape hatches.

“This is our last rabbit,” I subsequently told Linda. “They don’t make good pets.”

“There’s nothing wrong with Binky.”

“He belongs in the barn,” I fumed.

“You shouldn’t talk about Binky like that,” Linda said. “He’s crazy about you.”

In fact, Binky had begun to exhibit one or two endearing characteristics. Often when I puttered around in my upstairs office, he would sit on the floor beside my chair and groom himself, happy as long as neither of us acknowledged the other’s presence. Sometimes when I came home from work, I’d find him upstairs under my desk, apparently waiting for me. I experienced a small but unmistakable flinch of pleasure at seeing him, and if I approached him on hands and knees, pretending to be searching for a mechanical pencil that had jumped out of my pocket, he’d even tolerate a few light strokes of my fingers.

We marveled at his brashness with our cat, Penny, whom we had brought home as a companion for him. Though Penny did play a little roughly once she had outgrown the kitten stage, Binky could give as good as he got. Head bent low, he would grunt and launch
a rhinoceros charge at her, forcing her to leap to the top of the couch for safety. They were especially rambunctious in the morning, waking us by bounding onto the bed in pursuit of one another. Even without Penny, Binky had begun greeting us by jumping on the bed, scampering across our legs, then immediately returning to the floor. From any other animal, these morning leaps would have served as mere footnotes—and leg notes. From Binky they were a veritable declaration of love.

As the first week of May rolled around, however, he failed to act as our alarm clock. He kept to himself in a corner, displaying unusual listlessness. His appetite was poor. When I would carry him back to his cage, he didn’t fight me. We knew he had to be sick, but didn’t realize that rabbits often show symptoms of illness only once it has advanced too far to easily treat. One morning his condition had obviously worsened. He barely moved at all. Linda hurried Binky to the veterinarian a half-mile up the street, but returned home less than ten minutes later with the extraordinary news that Binky had died before she could get him in to see the doctor.