The Martlet

My friend Shane hit a rabbit with his car.

Out in Tsawwassen, not far from the ferry terminal, we were driving home after a late night poker game. A small shadow darted into the road, then quickly disappeared beneath the hood of his car. Shane hit the brakes, bringing his car to a jolting stop in the middle of the highway.

It was 2 a.m., and we sat in silence for a moment.

“Dude, I think I just hit something,” said Shane.

I thought the mysterious little creature must have escaped. I hadn’t felt any impact, there was no noise. One moment it was there, the next it was gone. I thought we should just keep going.

Shane, however, being an animal lover, decided that he had to know whether or not he’d been responsible for the death of an innocent.

He turned the car around and started heading in the opposite direction, his high beams on. After a couple moments, we saw a small fluttering object in the road.

Sure enough, there it was. A small, gray bunny still kicking its legs in vain. We climbed out of the car, and by the time we reached him he was lying still. It was bizarre to see this tiny rabbit, frozen in mid stride, its one unblinking eye staring accusingly up at us.

Beneath the bunny’s mouth was a small smattering of red jelly blood, but otherwise it looked unscathed.

We looked at it for a long time, standing beside each other in the road. There was no traffic, and a gentle ocean breeze was the only soundtrack to this rabbit’s final moments. Here, illuminated by the lights of Shane’s car, was death sprawled out in front of me.

Finally, Shane had an idea. All summer he’d been working on an organic farm, and had been endeavoring to trap a pesky rabbit that had been destroying their produce. He’d become interested in the idea of hunting and cooking his own food, and thought this intruder would make a nice first dinner. However, all summer long he’d never been able to get his hands on it.

“I think I’m going to take this home and cook it,” he told me, nudging the corpse with his finger.

I was revolted by the idea, and told Shane with a series of fake gagging and puking noises. Eating road kill, who does that?

But then he started to talk about it. People had done it for thousands of years. What made this any different? How is the wheel of a car any different than a bow and arrow, or a club? Its body was perfectly intact. Leaving it in the middle of the road seemed like a huge waste.

“This is food, Will. Perfectly good food. I’m going to eat it.”

After a while, I became convinced that I’d seen Shane do weirder things. He went into his trunk and retrieved some paper towels and a plastic bag. Carefully, he rolled up the rabbit then laid it to rest in his trunk. Then he drove me home.

The event happened weeks ago, and when I returned to UVic for fall session, being surrounded by hundreds of bunnies made me me sad to think about their slain brother. I decided I was going to find out whatever happened to that rabbit.

As it turned out, Shane looked up some YouTube videos on skinning and cooking rabbits. Then he called his chef friend Ian, and convinced him to help with preparation. Shane went over to his house with red carrots, beets, potatoes, fresh rosemary, fennel, mint, an apple, some celery and two yellow plums–the perfect ingredients for rabbit stew.

But once Ian and Shane started to inspect the rabbit (which was then curled up in the fetal position), Ian felt the stomach. It was soft rather than hard.

Ian explained that Shane would have had to gut the rabbit right away after killing it. Enzymes in the organs keep working after death, and can eat away at the lining, then spew fluids into the body cavity, spoiling the meat. It was 15 hours after Shane had hit the rabbit, and there was a good chance this had happened.

Shane and Ian talked about how easy it is to take for granted getting meat from the grocery store, but how it’s a totally different thing to think about killing and eating an animal. They agreed that they weren’t sure if they could actually go through with it.

Finally, they decided it wasn’t worth the health risk. Shane went into the backyard to bury his little companion. He grabbed a shovel and headed out into the field, but then saw a coyote in the distance, chasing its tail.

“I decided right away this was the perfect solution,” Shane told me in an e-mail. “I was kind of bummed out that the rabbit died for no reason, but now I could give him to the coyote for a meal.”

He left the rabbit there out in the open, happy that his friend had not died in vain.