LSA News

No. 63, March 2005

Stuck in the Void

(story continued)

I let her out and soon become engaged in evening household activities and forget about her for longer than her preferred 60-minute jaunt. When I realize her time has gone over 2 hours I rush to open the back door, expecting a damp, but none the worse, rabbit to tumble into the room. However, much to my dismay, she isn't on the stoop. I conclude that she so loved her outside experience that evening that she has acclimated and wishes to continue her romp. Maybe she has found a warm and comfortable position under the yucca plant and is loath to move too quickly. I leave and in a few minutes, return to the back door and call to her. Hmmm, I do not hear the familiar rustling leaves, a sure sign she's on her way in. Even though it is a cold night, we leave the door open about 6 inches, so she can come in when she's ready.

When 30 minutes have passed and no Tweety, I go into the yard looking. With a flashlight, I check that the gate is closed, that there are no newly dug holes under the fence that would allow The Bird to expand her range into the wide world. I check under and behind all the shrubs, trees, ferns, compost pile, potted plants, and under the stoop.

Our back stoop is nothing fancy—basically a 4 x 3 foot wooden box with stairs attached to the left side. The bunnies have dug a groove on the right side of the stoop a few months before so that they could go under. Once under, they also dug a burrow into the ground. We don't know how extensive this hole is, but we allow them this refuge. Bunnies are notorious diggers and it gives us some comfort knowing that if any human or dog on the loose wishes to harm our rabbits that they have a safe place to hide. The stairs off the left side of the stoop end two feet in front of a solid wooden fence that marks the edge of the property. Therefore, one must make an immediate 180-degree turn at the cement landing, or walk into a fence wall.

I look everywhere and still no Tweety. Now, I start to worry. Even if there were an opportunity for her to leave the yard, Tweety has never been a bunny with wanderlust. She is definitely a homebody and a rather skittish bunny at that. I am very fond of Tweety. She is a beautiful and affectionate bunny. She enjoys lengthy daily petting sessions and is very communicative about her desires, which mostly include food and attention. She will sometimes engage in negative behaviors to get what she wants, like chewing things she shouldn't (my favorite pair of jeans or a throw pillow from the bed), but apart from that, she is a good bunny. She and I go through the weekly maintenance of grooming her luxurious gray, 4-inch-long coat. Though she is a bit of a drama queen during the process, it is an opportunity for us to connect and I give her small pieces of dried apricot throughout the procedure to take the edge off the unpleasantness.

Brian joins the search and is immediately concerned. He, more than I, knows the bunnies' habits. He is the one most involved with their daily care and maintenance. He cleans litter boxes, shops for the best organically grown greens, surfs online for the best quality Timothy pellets and hay, gets them in the house when it is feeding time, and feeds them on most days. He knows Tweety is not one to linger outside. She's not the bravest sort. I decide that we will look around the neighborhood and, if we still cannot find her, resume the search in the morning. It's getting late and hard to see anything in the foggy dark.

We don't find her, so we reluctantly go to bed. But before I do, I place a dried apricot and piece of carrot, Tweety's favorite foods, next to the hole leading under the stoop. I try to calmly reason that she has not left the yard or been taken, but was instead spooked by something and is hiding in the burrow under the stoop, safe and warm. When she calms down, she will come out. The treats will be an extra incentive.

I have trouble sleeping and so I check at various times during the night to see if she is waiting on the stoop. No Tweety and the apricot and carrot are still there. Finally, at daybreak, I get up, make coffee, get dressed, and resume the search. She has not come out from under the stoop. She must not be under there. So she somehow got out of the yard. After looking around a block radius and crossing the street on the four sides of our block, I go home, eat some breakfast and wait until a decent hour to start knocking on doors. Brian gets up during the wait and we discuss possible scenarios of what might have happened.

Maybe a dog got her. This is the scenario I least like pondering. But there would have to be some sign of this, like an open gate, blood, fur. We should have heard something too. So we must dismiss it. Maybe someone was so taken with the beautiful angora bunny that they stole her. But how would they know she was even there? It was dark and Tweety is pretty dark herself. And anyway she would be hard to catch for a human. Maybe she did get out. Our bunnies have gotten out of the yard before, but they are pretty loyal. They never go farther than a couple of houses away and they come back after a couple of hours. Maybe someone found her and they are holding her at their house.

It is a decent hour now, so I go knock on neighbors' doors. No one has seen her. In the meantime, Brian has let Peanut into the yard, hoping he might lead us to a clue. When I return, Brian has noticed that Peanut is very interested in the stoop. He keeps going under the stoop and into the hole, then running back out, with an anxious look on his face. He does this over and over. I decide that with all other scenarios being rather improbable and with Peanut's concerned behavior, she has got to be in the burrow under the stoop. The reason she hasn't come out is because she is stuck, either psychologically or physically. Either she is so scared that she chooses to stay down there or she has somehow wedged herself in. An even scarier thought is that she can't get out because the hole has caved in and she has suffocated! Plus, rabbits have been known to get so scared that they have heart attacks. Maybe she got scared, ran into the burrow, and had a little bunny myocardial infarction. Okay, maybe I'm getting a little worked up and my mind is running away with itself. I'll try to focus on what we think we know for sure.

Brian decides to dismantle the stoop. Soon, he has disassembled it enough that we can get to the burrow. Throughout this process, Peanut continues to run in and out. I lie on my side and push my arm into the hole attempting to feel anything. I stretch it, trying to make it longer than it is, almost straining it. Brian does the same. Neither one of us feels anything. We do now know that the hole goes in a straight southerly direction, toward the wooden fence.

We decide to dig. But where? The foundation of the house is on one side and concrete covers a 2-foot square area around the burrow. The bunny excavation has apparently been quite extensive, but how far does it go? Does it turn? What I could feel in the hole is that the concrete landing at the bottom of the stairs is the ceiling of the hole. That is good news, I think. Less chance that it could cave in on her. But is it possible that past my reach, the hole might turn down, going deeper into the earth? I think, assuming that the hole goes straight, we should dig on the other side of the fence, next to the neighbor's driveway. If the hole goes farther south, she could be under the driveway, in which case we might never reach her. If the hole goes down deeper into the earth, we probably won't get to her either.

Brian decides we should dig in our own yard first, perpendicular to the hole. We will shoot for intersecting the hole and pull her out forward. Brian starts digging. The big shovel with a long handle is soon useless because we must turn and dig out the dirt from under the sidewalk, instead of downward. This requires something like a short handled pickaxe. I drive to Fred Meyer and buy a different tool. As I am driving, I think about poor Tweety in that cold, dark, claustrophobic space. She is probably cold and terrified. She has been down there for possibly 17 hours! This is Tweety we're talking about, the faint-hearted one, the one who spends most of her time under the bed, the one who thumps the floor with the slightest unfamiliar noise, the one who runs away terrified when I carry a load of laundry in my arms, unable to recognize that ominous form. She is hearing all sorts of threatening noises above her with Brian taking apart the stoop and digging. Then, someone keeps nudging her bottom. She may not even know that that someone is Peanut, who is trying to help. A frightening thought enters my mind: maybe she doesn't hear or feel any of this because she has suffocated in that hole.

I return home with a short-handled, hoe-like tool. Brian uses it for about 10 minutes then he realizes this isn't working. We still have four feet to dig and it is going very slowly. Brian can't get a good vantage point from which to dig effectively. Plus, we are either going to completely miss the target or his right shoulder and arm will completely fall off from the wrenching twisting it is enduring. We need to try to figure exactly where she is so we have a better idea of where to dig. It is now that Liesl has a brain wave. I don't know why I didn't think of this before!

I find a stick about 4 feet long and lie on my side at the opening of the burrow. As long as the hole is straight (and it just has to be), this will tell me where we should dig. I push the stick in. It is stopped by something and this something gives a little. It is a soft something. It has got to be Tweety! I pull out the stick and what do I see on the end of it but gray wispy, super-soft angora fur. What a relief. I measure my arm length plus the amount of stick that actually reached bunny about 4 and a half feet. She is under the concrete sidewalk 4 and a half feet to the south. We immediately grab a big shovel and a small hand trowel and jog to the other side of the fence to our neighbor's driveway.

Our sidewalk continues into the neighbor's property and abuts their driveway. In the dirt strip that runs parallel along the length of the driveway, I begin digging with the big shovel. When I have dug about 1 foot down, I use the trowel to dig in a westerly direction underneath the sidewalk. I have dug for less than ten minutes and about 10 inches under the sidewalk when a bit of the dirt falls away on its own. I look at Brian and tell him that I must have begun to intersect the burrow already! Now I dig with my hands because if she is close, I don't want to hurt her. In a few more seconds and I feel fur! I dig a little more and I feel what seems to be her rump. But her rump is cold! OH NO, she is cold because SHE IS DEAD!!! I hysterically tell Brian that I feel her, but I think she might be dead. Tears start flowing uncontrollably. Brian asks me to move so he can have a feel and assess the situation, but I will not budge. I run my hand under the sidewalk again, but this time, I push my hand underneath her and I feel the most miraculous feeling: a warm bunny tummy.

A rush of relief floods over me. She's alive and I can't stand the thought of her uncomfortable for a second longer, so now I dig frantically with my fingernails. Finally, I get a big enough hole so I might be able to pull her out. But, man! She is in there really tight. I can't get a good grip on her to pull her out. The burrow did turn, like I was afraid it did, but not down farther into the earth, but in a westerly direction. That is how she got wedged. The turn was quite sharp and once she had gotten in, she couldn't back herself back out. Peanut had been the architect of this burrow and he is quite a bit smaller than Tweety. And anyway, Peanut, that was an awfully abrupt turn you decided to make in your excavation!

Bunnies have that really loose skin that isn't really attached to the muscle like human skin is. With both hands, I grab the fur on her sides and pull. And next thing I know, there she is! Our Tweety Bird. We rescued her. She is dirty under her paws and around her nose because she has been breathing air filled with dirt in a very tiny space. Poor little thing. I cry tears of relief as I embrace her 8-pound, fuzzy body. Brian embraces us both and kisses Tweety on the nose and head. She is cold and frightened and all this over-zealous affection and crying frightens her even more. Time to attend to her needs. We bring her into the house and give her pellets, water, and some veggies. She drinks for a long time and eats almost frantically. We decide to keep an eye on her for the rest of the day, but she seems almost back to normal in an hour or so. She retires to our bedroom and under the bed.

Brian and I recently added a fourth rabbit to our household. We lost our guinea pig recently to old age. She had been Tweety's friend and Tweety deserves another companion. Soon after losing Daisy, we read about a recent case of rabbit abuse. This motivated a desire to rescue a rabbit, so we found a very sweet, active, affectionate rabbit at Greenhill. Rudy was added to our family on November 12, 2004. He currently resides in a cage in Tweety's room. It is our intention to bond Rudy and Tweety. However, this has proven to be a slow process. Rabbits are very territorial even when spayed or neutered and The Bird is no exception. Bunny bonding is a gradual, challenging process that can take months of encounters in neutral territory and car rides. Car rides are often the clincher in forcing bunnies to be friends. (Brian likens it to a scenario where if he and George W. Bush were in a P.O.W. camp together, they may actually become friends.) Stressful situations force bunnies to look to each other for support. Once Tweety and Rudy are bonded they will become inseparable. They will groom each other, play together, sleep together, basically do everything together. Our other two bunnies, Peanut and Maynie, have been bonded since Christmas 2003 and are true, life-long companions.

We sometimes think about what would have happened to Tweety if we hadn't figured out where she was and how to get her out. She would have died of thirst in a very unpleasant place. We might not have ever known what happened to her. We don't like to linger over these thoughts. She is such a special little bunny and it seems inconceivable that she could have become an empty spot in our lives. Brian wonders occasionally if she remembers that we rescued her. That her life had taken a very disagreeable turn and suddenly when it got a whole lot better, her humans were there. We aren't always sure she remembers and doesn't seem altogether thankful when she takes all her comforts for granted and then demands more. And there are the times that she misbehaves as my porous wardrobe can attest. But even though she is the most irritable, haughty, and demanding bunny we have ever had, the fact that we almost lost her and that we saved her from an unthinkable fate, makes us appreciate and value her all the more.

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