Tuesday, June 24, 2008

running in circles

It is early morning. Early enough that there is little traffic yet, but enough daylight to see clearly. We are stopped at a red light. Waiting. Three cars, ours heading in one direction and two others side by side facing us. We are all watching the road where a rabbit has positioned itself. The light turns green. Nobody moves. "someone should do something" says my friend Jon. He gets out of the car at the same time as guy in car #1 also gets out. They look at the rabbit, at each other, wondering how to help. There is some waving of arms, some shoo-ing, some murmuring of encouraging words. But the rabbit is oblivious to their attempts to help. He continues to run around frantically in a clock-wise circle. After about three or four turns he flops on the ground, panting, then gets himself up and goes into another frenzy of turning. By now, traffic is gaining on us. Car #2 has pulled out, realizing the rabbit is not going to change lanes. Jon gets back in the car and we head off, leaving guy#1. A few minutes later, our errand finished, we are back at the intersection, slowing down to look for the rabbit. There he is, on the other side of the cross street, on the boulevard. We do not know how he got that far. I fear he does not feel the soft grass under his feet. Nor the fact that he is now safely out of the way of danger. Still with the clockwise turns.

12 comments:

  1. A week ago, in the throes of report writing, I would've been able to say with complete confidence that I knew exactly how that rabbit felt.

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  2. its good in your case its the rabbit. here animal has changed, Cow. yes, cow it is here causing often traffic jams.

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  3. I wonder if there was something wrong with the bunny? Poison maybe? There's a lot of toxic stuff out there for them to get into. Doesn't sound like typical bunny behaviour to me. Poor thing

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  4. XUP, Yes we wondered that too. He didn't appear injured, just deranged. It was actually very upsetting to watch.

    Sandy, I can well imagine cows would create a much bigger problem. Here we have many dead bunnies on the road. I was heartwarmed that no one just ran over this little guy, though maybe that would have been best for him. Who knows.

    Frog, a squirrely bunny?

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  5. We have a ground hog near my shelter that does the same thing (not the circles, but stopping traffic)---so far he is the luckiest animal I have ever seen.

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  6. Poor little guy. I wonder if he was damaged in some way.

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  8. Oh, I hate to see that. Strangely, yesterday I also had a bunny hop across my road to work, had to break to miss him.

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  9. Yeah, the buggers are chasing us poor bun's in cars now. What's a rabbit to do?

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  10. Oh the poor thing. I'm thinking like xup that it ate something.

    Here in my urban jungle, the only animal you get to see are the two legged kind. And sometimes they act crazy too and it's not pretty to watch :)

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  11. At my brother’s place the other day we witnessed a poor little mouse doing an insane dance in the backyard. It jumped 5 feet into the ari, twirled around and around and around, jumped again, bounced back and forth twice and died. I can’t imagine what it was feeling. It looked like a horrid way to die.

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