Alleys

Alleys

My dogs and I choose the alleys over the streets,
their porous surfaces underfoot; alleys massage
the dew claw and the dew and all substances that enter
EARTH. The backways offer scents for my companions
to ponder and consecrate while I gather dandelions
and clover for the rabbits and hens. Sometimes, I
let one free, as the alleys accept wild ways. Tall
grasses, ivy fighting with knotweed, wheel barrow
leaning, a shovel standing erect, compost piles.
Life seems real here: less for show and more about
what is required. Some folks garden out back. Mason
bees pollinate overgrown borage. I spy a green plum
and think I will return here in August. Without eating,
I swallow hard over chard of every color, ripe berries.
A crow saunters ahead of us and takes a short flight
onto a post, waiting for us to move on. Again and again,
the dogs follow scent trails that I cannot detect, the
hidden paths of others who ambled here. Perhaps for a
rodent that has passed this way, the smaller dog yips and
spiral dances. We pause at a school yard but there are
no children today, just acrobat swallows diving for bugs.

Beginnings

Our thirteen year old daughter insisted we raise our own chickens some eight years ago. Since then, they have colored our lives with their cackles, dust baths, scratching and eggs. My husband and I live in a city on a busy road with a view of the lovely Narrows, but enjoy a large lot and we have given half of it to the 13 hens, who are agile athletes, insect hunters and foragers of grass and seed. We are relieved to get protein from our own land and to be able to feed the chickens a locally manufactured grain. We also love selling eggs and giving countless away. I remember lamenting the waste that was my yard. Now it is transformed into productive pasture!

It is illegal for us to have a rooster. Only recently have we dealt with broody hens. After successfully ridding our first victim some months ago of this condition---we picked her up and moved her all the live long day--- two others currently want to hatch their own young. They warm stones hopefully, rarely eating or drinking. I must carry them to the water hole and each afternoon, shut the hen house, in order to prevent them from nesting day and night. They become weaker and weaker, never able to hatch either stones or their own infertile eggs. They are unfulfilled! We wonder why roosters are outlawed but noisy and toxic cars continue to drive next to the Puget Sound, contributing to its rising mercury levels. We want just one rooster. Our hens do even more so.

More recently, after speculating aloud with a visitor, that rabbit husbandry makes sense, for city dwellers, this individual showed up in the middle of the night, leaving 3 California White Rabbits, rather irresponsibly. My husband and son got busy building them a hutch and fencing them in next to our hen house. We were told they were 2 females and 1 male but it turned out that only 1 was a female. We have thanked the stars many times for this confusion, as she has lived up to her reputation and produced two litters since reaching maturity last March. On May 13, our daughter's 21st birthday, I set the 3 rabbits "free"...which meant I opened their area gate, encouraging them to forage the larger yard. Rabbits eat far less discriminately than do hens. In no time, they had clipped our oregano and sage neatly, eventually leaving them leafless. At this point, we had not realized that 6 babies lived in the burrow their mother had built. Only in retrospect, did it occur to us that the reason one rabbit had turned yellow, was that she was preparing to mother. Old Leller began digging a warren for her young much before she reached sexual maturity. She was filthy due to her long hours of work in the dirt.

When her babies popped out of the warren on spindly legs that carried them unevenly, what wonder we all felt, the adult rabbits too! The father and mother cuddling proudly, the babies atop them. Plenty of nose kisses and sharing of carrots. Uncle Scruffy, who had fought to father but lost and carried wounds proving his earnest desire, a sentinel. He too, looked after the young ones though he stayed away from father Big White. We were astonished at how communal rabbits are, how loving to one another. But more experienced now, we realized that Old Lellow was carrying a second litter. We sadly admitted that rabbit family love was unsustainable in our yard by the Sound.

My husband, Paul, built two rabbit traps which when turned over became hutches. He placed delectables inside and over a two week period managed to catch the 6 baby rabbits. They had known a life of delincuency. They had slipped through all fence openings, into the garden, around the front and onto the road side. And wherever they slipped, they ate! Mainly our bean plants and radishes! Paul made a trap door, roped it, looped the rope onto our deck and watched for baby bunnies to head inside. When they did, from the deck,he pulled the door shut, ran outside and placed the bunnies inside a larger hutch.

The result of all his clever plotting is that the two males share the larger yard; Old Leller and her second litter dwell in the original bunny yard, now bolted shut and surrounded in tightly woven chicken wire; and the 6 first generation babies live in a hutch. The lover parents kiss through the fence. Big White still bites Uncle Scruffy whenever they are near one another. The six babies pile together as they must have in their warren some weeks ago.

The conversation that inspired the residency of the original rabbits involved raising rabbits as a protein source...My thought then was that it could be humane and responsible to raise rabbits. I do feel that the males have a lot of space but they experience loneliness. The mother is free from pregnancy for a time and can devote herself to the new brood. I can live with the way we are treating these rabbits. However, my heart is sad for the six in the hutch. They had frolicked and taken such liberties. What a contrast caged life must be for them. I was astonished at the affection of rabbit family life, but the month long reproductive cycle forces us to be very calculating.

Well, two babies from Litter #1 will be moving to a Bellingham urban farm next week. The other four will be butchered in October. The nursing babies will be butchered in November and will have only known a sweet life with their mother until just prior to their deaths. Then we might breed Uncle Scruffy, abuse victim, with Old Leller. This third litter too, will have only known life with their mother.

I have been a vegetarian for eight years. I am not particularly hungry for rabbit meat, but I believe I will at least try some, in appreciation, feeling that I truly earned the right to eat.