The Ballad of New Moon

A rabbit, bird of prey, cat, and a rural crisis counselor engage in a highly unlikely yard tussle for survival.

In our second spring at Whiskey Jane, we noticed a resident rabbit with a perfect half-moon shape missing from his left ear. We of course referred to him as Half Moon. He also had a family, however, so in keeping we called his female counterpart Full Moon, and one of the more precocious baby bunnies, New Moon. They made regular appearances around the property.

One particular early evening, I sat on the living room sofa working on my laptop as Kara reentered the room from the rear of the house. I looked up to see escalating expressions of shock, horror, and disbelief, distort her countenance as she stood gazing out onto the lawn through the windows behind me. The emotive utterances she emitted I can no longer recall, but they were accompanied by increasingly violent and beckoning hand gestures.

I stood up and turned around just in time to see New Moon high-tailing it towards sanctuary beneath the pumphouse, with a never-before-seen cat in hot pursuit. The young bunny made it under the structure safely as Kara, now screaming in backwoods tongues, launched from the house and broke into an Olympic-like sprint across the lawn.

Purposeful and surprisingly speedy given her lack of footwear and what had to have been tight hamstrings, she cut a direct path across the property - one hand fanned perfectly for reduced wind drag, the other tightly clutching a black-cased late-model iPhone matched in color by her t-shirt, skinny jeans, and long trailing hair. I watched in amazement as she accelerated, almost catching up to the feline predator on the other side of the yard before it realized the true seriousness of her pursuit and vanished into the woods beyond the garden. As she walked back, my saucer-eyed partner began providing the stunning details of the drama's first act, which I had missed. Thus allowing me to paint the complete picture.