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.

Gabriel in the Time of COVID-19

This photo of my son Gabriel was taken last September, in more liberated times! The last few days he’s been sick with a sinus infection as he, and we all, try to adjust to the new circumstances in which we find ourselves. His beloved day program has been closed for the time being, and so, like many people, he finds his routine upended and his circles much smaller. We are on “vacation,” but clearly something is different, and he possesses immense awareness, even if he doesn’t speak, of body language and telltale facial expressions and sheer energy. He knows, on some level, that we’re in new territory, that his parents, his brother, his caregivers, his friends and neighbours are all trying to get a grip. But none of this is something to “grip.” It’s nebulous and unknowable—precisely the qualities that the human mind tends to dislike; hence all that banging and resistance going on in there.

He has taken apart my office (his favourite place to sit) and so I’ve reorganized to better accommodate him. He likes spaciousness (how ironic) and for objects to be beyond his reach (if they’re too close, they ignite his desire to throw them; if they’re far enough away, they get to live in peace). Lately he’s been loving his usual jazz playlists, but especially Big Band and also opera (Maria Callas is a new discovery and he wants to hear her daily). Glenn Miller has been on repeat, and he likes to hold my hands and swing them while we listen to In the Mood, Chattanooga Choo Choo and the like (these are really uplifting tunes and I highly recommend). He has his shakers, bells and drum sticks, but mostly he just likes to listen. We drive to the ocean, too, and listen to music there, and sometimes podcasts, though this is clearly my choice and not his (but I figure I get to have some of my own listening in this whole affair).

The world over, people with intellectual disabilities are finding themselves confined to smaller spaces and different routines, because of something hard to define, explain or bring an end to. It is seismic, really, this adapting that we all have to do. There has to be a kind of elasticity and fluidity and you wonder where to find those things. The question hangs there palpably, “How long will this go on?” A snow day you know will end, and vacation, too. This thing, not so much. In our house, we have the added element of Gabriel’s needs, his sometimes tumultuous behaviours, but also his deeply felt presence, his utter sweetness. He is both delicious and sometimes impossible. And we have to do the impossible, for his sake and ours, of learning to float and be elastic in this new era. I was listening to Russell Brand’s recent podcast with Gabor Maté (if you want to hear cogent, sage responses to the pandemic, this is the podcast to listen to), which was brilliant and made me laugh with surprise, which is no small thing right now. Two of Gabor’s offerings that delighted were the Buddhist idea of “Relax, everything is out of control,” and the Chinese saying that a crisis is danger plus opportunity. I have a friend who calls difficult times “another fucking growth opportunity,” though this is clearly what is at work here: another growth opportunity, if an entirely unwanted and overwhelming one. So how do we sit with difficulty, how do we do the impossible?

It’s okay to have no idea. The mind can’t think its way through this. I think fully acknowledging the roar in the brain—that this seems like a shit-storm—is important (and it especially feels this way for caregivers who suddenly find themselves maxing out). It’s okay to feel perfectly, exquisitely overwhelmed—in fact, it has to be felt for it to dissolve. When I stop wrestling so much with my thoughts and resisting my resistance, I notice that that space opens up—the one beyond the mind and all our calculations and unhappiness and struggle. When I wrote my memoir, Know the Night, one of the transformative ideas that arrived toward the end was STOP STRUGGLING. It was the singular and simple lesson of that time period. My resistance had caused so much grief and wasted energy. But learning to float is hard to do, to let go, to say and actually mean, “Relax, everything is out of control.” We can’t fake it (and, as Deepak Chopra has pointed out, forced positive thinking causes more stress). Nor can we reason our way out. The one thing I’ve felt that I can do reliably is locate myself in my body, and have an awareness of my breath—but especially important is the part about being in the body, feeling that energy field. The tumult is still there, and so both of these modes are present: the expansive energy in the body and the difficult, seemingly impossible situation in which the body finds itself. The trick is to allow for both, and then it’s possible to float, at least for a moment.