Ninus |nēnoōs|

About three years ago, the girls each got a rabbit, one named Ninus the other named Bunny. The first summer, we let the rabbits run around free in the yard during the day. In the evenings, I would go out and catch them, and put them in their hutch for the night, safe from the fox. Overtime, they became faster and harder to catch, and as we approached fall, the days became shorter. Finally, one late afternoon in September I found myself running around in the rain trying to catch rabbits. Ninus was always easy pretty easy, but Bunny would do anything to avoid being caught. I think I chased Bunny around the yard for about an hour, before she disappeared into the bushes. By that time, the sun had set, it was dark and I was soaking wet. I left Bunny to hide in the bushes and called it a night. We never saw her again.

The girls were only mildly upset. I think I took it worst. The consequence for Ninus was that she lost her freedom - we decided to keep her locked up in the hutch. The days of running wild in the yard were over. Ninus spent the fall and winter caged in and alone.

By the time spring came around, I felt really bad for Ninus. The girls had completely lost interest, and she would just sit all day with her nose pressed against the chicken wire, looking out at the big open yard. I decided to see what I could do to make her life better. I bought a bunch of chicken wire and made a fenced in area next to her hutch where she could play. I then cut a whole in the side of the hutch and built a ramp down to the play area. Ninus loved it. She could now run in and out anytime she wanted, she could eat dandelions (and rose bushes) and dig holes in the dirt.

She started digging a pretty ambitious hole in the center of her play area. After a while she got bored with the hole, so I tried to encourage her. I ended up making a big hollowed out mound built with rocks and bricks and sod. She could sit on top of the mound during the day, and crawl inside at night. Ninus picked up the torch from there. She spent the next several months under the mound, digging a burrow for herself. At times I could actually hear her, underground, 10 feet way from the mound entrance. Anyway, Ninus was having fun, and I started getting teased for the amount of time I spent on her. She became known as my rabbit.

When the next winter came Ninus abandoned her hutch for the fancy burrow she had dug. A field mouse took over the hutch, and would share Ninus's food in the morning. From the house we actually watch the two of them hanging out around the bowl of rabbit food. Ninus began to live a "natural" like, she'd spend the days above ground, and nights underground, safe from the fox.

The really fun thing about her, though, was that she was very social, when anybody went down to visit her she would run over and stand against the fence and wait to have her ears scratched. When the next spring came and the girls were out playing in the yard, I noticed that Ninus was very attentive to everything they did. She was watching them. I decided to try an experiment. I cut a small door in the fence so she could run out into the yard. I watched for a while, but she didn't seem interested. I went up to have lunch on the patio with girls.

About ten minutes later, we saw Ninus hopping across the yard. She explored for a while, then hopped up the steps to the patio, sniffed our feet, stood up by our chairs to have her ears scratched, and then fell asleep beneath the lunch table. As she roamed the yard over the next few days, we realized we didn't have a rabbit - we had a dog! She would follow the girls around the yard, hop into the house to explore (and shit all over the floor), scratch at the back door to get attention. Friends would come to visit and be amazed that a rabbit would hop right up to them to say hello. Everybody who saw her commented on how extremely unique she was.

There was a problem though. As soon as Ninus discovered freedom, she abandoned the burrow. I had hoped that she would continue to spend her nights underground, but it is warmer now, and she was more inclined to sleep in the middle of the yard beneath the moonlight. Luckily, since her last flight with freedom 2 years earlier, a mange epidemic had wiped out all of the foxes in the area. We talked about it, and decided to let Ninus live a free and happy life. We knew the foxes would eventually come back, but that could take years, and she was enjoying herself like never before.

For the next several months this happy little bunny became a part of our family. In the mornings when I came down to the kitchen to make breakfast, not five minutes would pass before Ninus was pawing at the back door. We couldn't take a step outside without her hopping at our heels. The only scare at all was when she disappeared for a day. We looked for her everywhere, and it turned out she had slipped into the seldom used garage when the door was open and then someone closed door without realizing she was in there.

The more attached we became to her, the more we worried about a fox coming along one day. But we really didn't want to take away her freedom just to keep her safe. So she stayed free and happy through the summer and into the fall. And then, one morning, just about the time that I got my cancer diagnosis, Ninus didn't come to paw at the door. The girls went to school and Mathilde and I had to spend the day in the hospital. By the time we got back in the evening, it was dark out, and were preoccupied enough to forget about Ninus.

The next morning, Ninus again didn't come to the door to greet us. After the girls left for school, I put on my boots and went out to look for her. A few days earlier, we had had a light snow that had melted quickly. I thought it strange at first when I saw there was still some small patches of snow in the grass. As I came closer, I realized it wasn't snow, but bits of white rabbit hair scattered around in about a ten foot wide circle. Ninus shed a lot, so having a tuft of rabbit hair floating around, or caught in a bush was not unusual, but this was A LOT of hair. My heart sank.

I looked all around the yard for a long time (and in the garage), but I couldn't find any other traces of her (or of a fox for that matter). There was no blood anywhere, but that didn't really mean anything, a fox could have grabbed her pretty quickly and run off. And that was the only thing I could think of that could have happened. My guess was a fox snuck up on her while she was sleeping. He grabbed her and she kicked and struggled, causing the hair to be shed and spread around the yard. The fox ran off, jumped over the fence, and that was it.

As I raked up the hair (so the girls wouldn't see it), I think that was the low point of my entire cancer ordeal. I basically knew I had cancer, but was just waiting to have it confirmed. And there I was raking away the last remains of the silly, happy, and free little rabbit that had hopped into our lives. My rabbit. I'm not a superstitious person, but I couldn't help making a connection - trying to make it mean something. I couldn't really figure out how to make the death of Ninus mean anything good, though. After a while I started referring to her as my "sacrificial rabbit". That was the only positive twist I could put on. I thought that was the end of it.

Yesterday, we were out in the yard cleaning up a bit before spring. We decided to move Ninus's empty hutch further to the back where it can't be seen from the house. Mathilde pulled down the remains of the fence, and I decided to tear down the big mound of dirt that I built to serve as the entrance to her burrow. I was also curious to see how many different tunnels she had constructed. Once I got the top off the mound, I could see there were several tunnels going off in different directions. In one of the tunnels I saw a mat of hair and what I thought was tuber. I assumed the hair was part of an old bed, but I got a stick to use to investigate the tuber. It wasn't tuber. It was the bone of Ninus's hind leg. At first I though the fox had somehow eaten Ninus in the burrow, but that made no sense, there was no way the fox could have gotten. As I looked closer, I realized there wasn't just the bone of her hind leg - her entire carcass was there, right at the entrance to the tunnel. She had been in her burrow the whole time I had been searching the yard. No more than two feet away from me if I had just looked.

We still don't know what happened to Ninus. Maybe the fox got a bite of her, but she managed to get to the safety of her burrow - only to die from her wounds. Maybe there was no fox at all, and she died from something else entirely. I don't know, but I don't think its a better end to the story. I wish I had taken the top off the burrow back then and found her. She may have already been dead, but maybe not. Maybe we could have saved her- then it would be easy and all to tempting to make it mean something. As it is now, I choose to believe it doesn't mean a damned thing. It just kind of makes me sad, and I miss that rabbit.



The picture below is of Emily and Ninus in 2005, when they were both "babies"