The Hawk and the Rabbit

Jan Weenix, Dead Hare and Partridges, c. 1690 (Wikimedia Commons)

People keep talking about the natural world becoming prominent now that self-isolating is firmly established. At my house, we’ve had no shortage of encounters with wildlife, as we’re surrounded by abundant foliage and creatures, but I’m beginning to think that the creatures are, in fact, bringing their dramas closer in.

The area where I live in Rhode Island is partly suburban and partly rural and tends to a certain natural shagginess. Lawns might be neat (or not), but even where home owners have tried to impose order on their particular property, there’s almost always nearby scrub or woods or fully fledged forest. My own backyard is edged by a thin but tangled woods that gets larger and curvier as it winds its way down the road. It’s lush with vines and shrubs and is home to deer, foxes, coyotes, cottontail rabbits, groundhogs, possum, wild turkeys, fisher cats, squirrels and a large array of songbirds. Our feeder attracts cardinals, white-breasted nuthatches, tufted titmouse, gold finches and purple ones, chickadees, sparrows, junco, wrens, downy and red-headed woodpeckers, and bluejays. Cat birds and mourning doves also sit in the nearby trees. A few years ago, a pair of great horned owls sat in the oak near our bedroom window and exchanged mating negotiations around midnight, night after night, until at last the rituals were complete. Sometimes in summer we hear shrieks and cries from nameless wildlife in that shaggy scrub and the sounds can be terrible and haunting. More often we hear a cacophony of singing birds, and cicadas, and frogs.

There are hawks, too. Lately there has been an enormous female red-tail who hovers on the air currents, scanning the ground. You can almost feel her pass over before you see her or her shadow. She seems bigger than hawks normally are, though this could just be the effect of her being closer. Perhaps she’s incredibly well fed, and maybe we’re seeing more of her as one of those abundant-wildlife-consequences of COVID time. The rabbits on our property are large right now and numerous, and on Saturday this particular hawk swooped down onto the grass right behind our house and caught one. I didn’t see the strike, but could see something on the lawn that I thought at first was a large piece of broken tree branch. I couldn’t see the hawk. I looked through the binoculars and saw that it was a freshly killed, full-grown cottontail, lying stretched out with its beautiful long feet together. It appeared to be lacking a head, but I saw later on that it was just obscured. A bright red gash on the neck told the whole story; that, and the gruesome entrails, which had already been extracted and scrawled on the grass.

In the time that I waited for the hawk to return, there was a lot of activity in the yard. Clearly the hawk and her kill had created a ripple. The songbirds were gone for a time, but eventually returned. A crow swooped in and took an acorn-sized piece from the rabbit (a kidney maybe?), then flew away and didn’t come back. A very rotund groundhog hustled from the woods across the open grass toward the house, which I’ve never seen before. He was really booking it, almost comically so, but if his plan was to avoid the hawk he was right out in the open. Clearly he wasn’t thinking right. Eventually he dashed under the back porch and then was gone from there in a blink. The presence of this dead rabbit with its exposed viscera was both rattling and a normal occurrence (though certainly not for the humans in the house watching). The songbirds blithely went about their business.

Hours later and I was still checking the backyard. The sight of the rabbit was beautiful and terrible. The fawn-like colours of the fur, those quietly elegant feet, the curled front paws, the long ears. The gash was red and magnetic; impossibly bright. The rib cage sat alone and emptied, and all the entrails were loosely coiled on the ground, all wrong. Poor rabbit. But now that it was so fully in this arrangement, there was nothing to do but admire how complex and baroque the scene was.

I was setting dinner on the table when I saw a flash and turned to see the hawk arrive; she sat on the fence a few feet from the rabbit. She looked at me through the glass, but I stayed very still and she eventually swooped down on the carcass. I watched for close to twenty minutes as she worked at it, amazed by how big she was, and captivated by the straight-forward brutality of her work. Her feathers had the same lushness as the rabbit fur and shared some of the same colours. The rich textures and almost opulent nature of what I was seeing made me think of Renaissance still life paintings. It was vivid and right there: the idea of being consumed. Death and aliveness. (Our own dinner was vegan and served in ceramic pasta bowls and not nearly so suspenseful.)

Eventually the hawk flew off but much of the rabbit remained. Things had changed though. Death had settled in with a dazzling completeness. The red blood was no longer bright and crisp, but ruddy and faded. The fur, too, seemed washed out and the body even more deflated. Much of what was left was earth-coloured and dulling. I hoped the hawk was going to come back and finish, or that some other creature would pull the rabbit, or whatever it now was, into the woods.

When I got up in the morning and came downstairs, I found the hawk hunched at her work, finishing up. She caught sight of me through the glass, which startled her, and she flew off for the final time. But when I looked to see what of her meal was left, I was astonished to see that there were only a few puffs of grey fur and what appeared to be a leg bone. Nothing more. Later in the afternoon, I was looking out the window (which seems such a COVID activity these days) and I saw her flying, riding the currents, perhaps on the lookout for more.

The COVID experience so far

Goddard Park, the last time I was there before it closed.

Hidden talents as revealed by COVID-19 seclusion so far:

Focaccia maker (with the last known packet of Fleischmann’s in the Western world)

Grocery launderer

Gabriel hair cutter and stylist (turns out I’m an ace barber—who knew?)

Sleeping cat annoyer

This seclusion has been very revealing of everything, including the light-hearted, but more often it shows the fears and anxieties that growl there in the background. I used to grind my teeth every night, long before the virus, though years of meditation and body awareness have helped with this more than I can say; but I woke from a quick nap yesterday with my jaw clenched tight.

Nameless, shapeless anxieties have become re-articulated in the tendons of my back. I noticed this when I was in the kitchen this morning, but this noticing is helpful—the most effective thing, I think, to do with all the feelings and sensations passing through. Maybe the most fundamental skill is to learn to witness, to allow judgment to cool down, to be easier with not-knowing and uncertainty. Bare observation is evidence of that lovely paradox that shows up in the territory between our minds and pure beingness—you accomplish something by doing nothing. Except watch.

But speaking of doing, simple witnessing isn’t by any means easy to accomplish. I don’t always have the knack, and these are unprecedented times (not unprecedented in terms of horror, but in the way of the specifics; I think we can all agree that, in general, human atrocity is perfectly predictable). Things and attitudes change daily. The entire globe is now connected in this intricate net of sickness, anxiety and (maybe) hope. New York City, beloved by so many, is roiling in a fear so palpable that it’s felt everywhere, and each day of seclusion, regardless of where you are, is a rocking between catastrophic thinking and perhaps moments of peace or the ability to witness. I have found it’s a uniquely bizarre experience, for instance, to wash a load of groceries in the kitchen sink like so many babies, but on the other hand there is food, plus soap and clean water. My husband puts his arms up toward the ceiling every day and says, “We’re alive!” and then I do this, too, and we start laughing, not because any of this is at all funny but because it’s an entirely human thing to do, especially to ward off suffering. There have been many moments when I’ve teared up or been frozen with anxiety. “We have to be grateful,” says the mechanical engineer whose scientific mind is often the counter to my literary one, but lately he is philosophical. Gratitude is the best antidote, true enough.

The parks and beaches here in Rhode Island are now closed, which is a necessary measure, but a blow to people with disabilities (and their caregivers) who need a safe place to go to be outside. Gabriel’s world gets (inexplicably, to him) smaller and smaller, though he seems to be adjusting now. Music, as ever, is the saviour, as it has been for so many years for him (us). The accessibility of vast cathedrals of jazz, big band, funk, classical, and opera is a brilliant light in this whole business; it feels like a miracle, actually, to download lists of tunes, and to hear the intricate and soaring record of musicians’ personal suffering and hope—what is jazz if not the most ingenious telling of profound hardship made wholly listenable? I think the lesson here is that the suffering isn’t repressed or shoved aside or falsely turned into a positive, but rather paid attention to—witnessed. And allowed to sing.

Swans at Twilight and What Happened Next

Monday late afternoon I was out for a run/hike in Ryan Park. It had been raining all day and was already quite dark when I set out from the parking lot (I had my light in my pocket, planning to run the last bit in the dark). All the leaves are down, so the woods are quite grey and twiggy (but beautiful in their way in winter), plus there was the misty sky and absent sun. When I got to the pond, I saw three enormous swans alternately gliding and feeding with their heads under water. I loved seeing them, their bright forms in all that accumulating darkness. Rain was falling hard at that point, and I continued past the pond, along the gravel road and then back into the woods to cross the arched bridge. At the bridge, it started to absolutely deluge, so wildly that I laughed out loud (it happens a lot, actually, that I laugh out loud when I run). The temperature was in the mid fifties, so it was warmish, and being in the downpour was delightful. There was something undeniably funny about being the lone, sodden human underneath all that rain. I’ve had similar experiences in summer when running in a hard shower, but it’s been a long time. 

Something else happened, though. I noticed as I was going over the bridge that it was really darkening. I continued winding my way along the trail through the woods; eventually the path comes up behind some houses, and then the parking lot isn’t far from there. I don’t like starting out a run in the dark by myself, but ending one in the dark is different. I love the process of the woods getting dimmer, as long as I have the light in my pocket. Then I have a choice, which is to turn the light on or just stay in the deepening twilight and let my eyes adjust. I did eventually turn it on, but the batteries were on the weak side and so it didn’t make much of a difference; which gave me the opportunity to really look around at the forest and suddenly feel it more. I felt a shift, since I couldn’t discern as much with my eyes, to feeling the woods as a whole. It seemed a bit like disappearing, but also not. There was an unmistakeable merging, or submerging, of me within the forest, or a dissolving of boundaries. Words can’t really convey what happened all that well, since disappearing and appearing all at once can’t really be conceptualized, but there it is. I realized that being in the dark twilight like that, feeling those transitions, surrounded by the power of the woods, facilitated the dissolving of borders. It seems to me that this is something missing from contemporary life, the opportunity to be in the dark without lights of some kind; and that experience would have been entirely common once upon a time; and I’m guessing the experience, too, of dissolving and being part of something larger, the sensing of the magnitude of the natural world.