Rabbit Hunt

Attempted murder

Murder is an ugly business, even when a dumb animal is involved, and perhaps especially then. The poor creature can only scream for its life until your very blood, the murderer’s blood, turns to cottage cheese, curdling with guilt and shame. That, at least, was what one thirteen-year-old boy experienced in 1983, hunting rabbits with his two friends among the bleak mountains of the Isle of Skye, or Sgitheanach, as it was sometimes called. To help with their task, they had with them some nets, two air rifles, a bowie knife, a bottle of cider and a ferret in a sack. The ferret was kept caged in order to keep it fresh and mean for its designated role in life: to be put down rabbit holes and chase up the unfortunate creatures towards the light and their doom. The first few rabbits would perish by the teeth of the ferret to satisfy its hunger, and the fearsome beast would emerge from the warren with its little furry face all bloody and exultant, but thereafter it was only the thrill of the chase that kept it busy, and this it did with pleasure, for it was born to terrorise the peaceful grazers of the world. Then, all being well, the beleaguered rabbit would run for dear life straight into the net and become entangled, at which point one of the boys would make a swift end to that already short life with a shot to the back of its head propelled by compressed air only.

After the first few of these, my friends (for the boy was me) grew bored with their part in the killing. They envied the ferret’s hunting prowess, and so they decided to go off and see if they could shoot something of their own, without the beast’s help. It was ironic that to effect this kill, they would merely be replacing animal with machine, and a poor machine at that, but man has only wits and pride for teeth and claws. But what claws they are! When fully grown they are capable of destroying not only rabbits, but whole worlds.

Anyway, my friends went off with their rifles and bianimously decided to leave me with the ferret and the knife. I was naturally unhappy with this division of labour but agreed to do my duty anyway. I covered the nearby holes with nets, let the ferret out of the bag and waited, sulking, for a catch. I seemed to wait an eternity in the desolate silence. Black clouds began to gather, and the smooth hump of Beinn na Caillich, the ‘hill of the old woman’, grew darker. I gathered my coat about myself and felt very lonely, the injustice of my demotion already forgotten to the terrifying emptiness of the Highlands, so chillingly depicted by Neil Gunn in his essay Highland Space. Suddenly, there was a small crash, loud enough in the dense quiet, and the sound of helpless scurrying. A rabbit, not yet fully grown, was caught in one of the nets. It seemed such a shame to kill the young thing, but my desire to prove myself a man and to earn my meat was stronger. I grasped the heavy bowie knife and wondered what to do with it. Stabbing the thing would make an awful mess and decapitating it was just plain cruel. Should I try to wring its neck first? The way the creature struggled in the net suggested not; it was too strong and would probably bite me. And what if it had myxomatosis, the appalling rabbit leprosy that struck during times of overpopulation? Was ‘mixie’, as they called it, communicable to human beings? For a moment I imagined myself covered in pustules and weeping sores, staggering into school like a zombie, while the other children fled, screaming in terror. I woke from my reverie when I noticed that the rabbit, healthy enough by the look of it, had ceased to struggle. I moved towards it, but as I approached, it began to kick and flail again, though with less vigour this time. I wondered if I could let it exhaust itself before killing it somehow, but that seemed both cruel and cowardly. This business of killing something was horribly complicated and not at all like in the films, where men dropped unconscious at the hero’s lightest touch, and bad guys fell immediately and quietly dead, clutching their wounds. I weighed the bowie knife in my hand. The butt was very heavy and would surely knock the rabbit out, at least until the others came back,when they could dispatch it with a rifle. I took the knife by the blade and raised my arm. The creature grew still again, either playing dead or tragically resigned to its death. Either way, its bravery touched me, and my arm now began to dither. I remained that way for a few seconds before finally bringing down the butt with a thump on the rabbit’s head.

But then an unexpected thing happened. Instead of compliantly dying or at least passing out, the rabbit now began to screech with an intensity that seemed scarcely possible for an animal of its size. The sound echoed in the empty hills until the whole glen seemed filled with screaming rabbits. I lifted my arm to repeat the blow, but this time my courage left me entirely. The rabbit continued to scream. Desperate for the agonizing noise to stop, I loosened the net and the animal bolted at a speed that suggested it was not even injured. I flopped down into the heather and let my head fall into my hands, feeling both relieved and miserable. Never mind the kill, I couldn’t even stun a not-yet-fully-grown rabbit! My marks at school had begun to decline lately and I had recently lost my Saturday job at the petrol station, having filled one car too many with the wrong kind of petrol, left the pumps unlocked at night, etc., etc. That was why I had gone rabbiting with my friends that Saturday in the first place, to prove myself capable of something useful, but only to notch up yet another failure. Girls I didn’t even want to think about. While the others were happy ‘necking’ in the football pavilion, I could only watch and dream, too shy and proud even to ask for what other boys simply took.

I felt something brush my leg. I looked down to see the ferret rubbing against me like a cat, bored and tired of the hunt and wanting to go home. Even the ferret pitied me my failure in life, it seemed.

The hunt
About an hour later the others returned empty-handed and ill-tempered.

“How many did you get?” said George MacRae, the elder of the two Georges.

“None,” I quickly confessed my failure.

“Fucking none?”

“Well, one, but it got away?”

“Iutharna gràs!”, he implored the grace of hell to avenge him. “Useless twat, you are!”

“But I didn’t have a rifle.”

“Here,” he said, pointing the non-deadly weapon at me. “I’ll give you one now.”

“Don’t fuck about,” I croaked. “Put that down!”

“No, I’m serious,” he said. “Run!”

The younger George, George Duncan Matheson (sometimes called Seoras, so let’s call him that), giggled and raised his rifle too.

“Run, rabbit, run!” he said, still giggling. He was very giggly, young Seoras, and a constant headache for his three or four elder sisters and his worn-out mother, who struggled for hours every Sabbath to get him to go to church, and then struggled more hours throughout the endless services to keep the naughty boy quiet and stop him destroying church property.

I would have preferred to get the punishment over quickly. Two quick shots to the buttocks, I knew from bitter experience, a comical howl of pain, and it would all be over, but the others had made it very clear that they didn’t want this. The day had disappointed them, and they were still hungry for sport.

“Go on, run!”

Used to giving people what they wanted, or what I thought they wanted, I turned and ran. In any case, I rationalised, this way I might escape being shot altogether.

They counted to twenty to let me escape, and I was surprised to find what speed I was suddenly able to summon. I always lagged behind the others at cross-country running at school, but now I found myself leaving my hunters behind with ease. I headed for a hummock, a giant turd left by a retreating glacier twelve thousand years earlier, that would hide me for a few seconds while I planned the next move that would hopefully put more distance between myself and my pursuers.When I got there, I dropped down into an old peat cutting and waited while I caught my breath, but it wasn’t long before I heard them come whooping, trying to frighten their game out into the open. But now, I felt my heart hammering in my chest and my mouth going dry. Why was I so afraid? Wasn’t this just a game, after all? A game in which I was a willing participant, more or less? The rationalisations, however, failed,and I fled again. But what was I fleeing from? A sore ton (buttocks, rump, posterior, lower back, arse, bum, erse, ass, butt, tush, fanny, tuchus)? Surely I didn’t think I was fleeing for my life? And yet somehow, I was. The whoops grew nearer. My pounding heart drove me deeper into the mountains. The hills grew blacker, and it started to rain. Thunder rumbled in the distance, but there was no lightning yet. I had been having nightmares about nuclear war at that time. Weren’t the so-called ‘mushroom clouds’ as black as the ones that hung overhead now? This was a nightmare. My friends had become predators, stalking me like wolves. No, not like wolves: what animal whooped while it hunted? Predators hunted in silence, for fear of losing their prey, until the moment they were sure of it, and they could move in for the kill. No, Man was no wolf. He was insane. He hunted in packs of millions and killed thousands in one bite. He took a madman’s delight in hunting for hunting’s sake, for the sheer delight of having limitless power over his prey. He hunted for nothing.

Return to civilisation
A good while later, I returned from hiding to find George and Seoras bored, cold, wet and impatient to leave, reduced to talking about a television programme they had seen the night before which, unusually, had been worth watching. It was a long trek back to the road with the ferret and three rabbits, where the bus stop sign and an old telephone booth stood and rusted, a lonely red island amid the ocean of green and grey. Those tiny red booths, designed for one adult to stand in, two at a crush, could actually, by some miracle of contortionism, accommodate four, five and even six bored teenagers, sheltering from the interminable West Highland rain and with nowhere else to go except home. That said, there were other ‘youth centres’ available to us where we could stay more or less dry: the small overhang at the pharmacy’s entrance, the football shed, a tiny hut built with rubbish and flotsam and jetsam on the shore and, my personal favourite, the old world luxury of dark, dusty, tatty compartments on the train when the station master had forgotten to lock them at night.

There were only two buses a day, and we had missed the last, so we all chipped in and telephoned from the booth for a taxi to take us back to Kyleakin, or Caol Àcain, the straits of either the Norwegian King Hákon or the mythological hero Acunn. We often think we know our history but Caol Àcain disproves that. We don’t even know where we are. And who we are? Forget it. Do you know what the world was like when your parents were children? You think you do, because of the few photographs you’ve seen, maybe a home movie, documentaries on television, the odd imperfectly remembered anecdote, a popular song, but all this amounts to is, at most, a nine-volt flashlight beam in the forest at midnight. The past is all darkness now, an inky black midwinter night sky with a scattering of tiny, faint points of light for decoration, and not nearly enough to light your way. But it wasn’t always so. Once upon a time there was a thing that some people call ‘culture’. It was everything you needed to know in life, or indeed wanted to know, that had been handed down from generation to generation since time immemorial, things like how to catch, kill, gut, skin, preserve and cook a rabbit.

I sat in the front seat of the old taxi, watching the wet, green desert of moss and heather roll by. The ferret seemed to be sleeping in the sack on my lap, but at some point I felt my trousers getting wet and I cursed. Seoras giggled. I mulled over the events of the day and thought about the Buddha. What strange karma was this, for the failed, faint-hearted hunter to become the hunted? Stranger still that my friends had not wanted to hurt me after all. They were placid now, contented after all with the day’s hunt, and probably sorry they had tormented me so cruelly: they saved me some cider and gave me one of the rabbits they had killed as consolation. From Kyleakin we returned to civilisation on the mainland via the ferry across the straits.

The corpse
The following day I found myself staring at the corpse of the rabbit where I had hung it in the laundry shed the evening before. I wondered where to start, but guessed I should gut it first, as I had done before with fish. I went back to the house and fetched the biggest kitchen knife I could find, steeling myself for the task ahead, the gutting of an animal bigger than the biggest fish I had caught and with a much harder skeleton. I split the soft gut lengthways, thrust in my hand, wincing squeamishly, and wrenched out a handful of innards. I was immediately struck by the stench, which was like nothing I had smelled before. Fish entrails don’t smell of much, though perhaps I was just used to them. These however, made me retch a little. It was something like ‘rotting flatulence’, the very scent of death, in fact, and I was glad when I had got the bulk of them out, wrapped them in newspaper and thrown them in the bin. Then I washed my hands like Lady Macbeth and returned to the scene of the crime, only to find myself once again paralysed by indecision, staring helplessly at the disembowelled corpse. I realised then that the gutting had been the easy part and that I had not the meagerest knowledge of how to skin a rabbit.

Skin a rabbit! That was what my grandmother used to say to me when she had undressed me for bed. She had been born in 1903 and she had known how to skin a rabbit, pluck a chicken and a great many other things. If only I could ask her, but she had been in the ground for two years. My being born in 1970, I was more likely to know how to operate a ouija board than flay a dead animal, but I didn’t know that either. Of course I should have asked George or Seoras, but there my boyish pride hindered me. With hindsight I should have tried and improvised anyway. At least then I might then have learned something, but instead I just stood and stared. I did as all those do who were never taught anything useful by parents and grandparents too concerned with preserving their superiority over their fast-growing offspring. Or rather, I didn’t do.

A few days later I decided to try and skin the rabbit anyway, regardless of my ignorance, but found the hole where its innards had been full and writhing with maggots. I threw the corpse in the bin, consumed by a squirming mass of emotions: disgust, shame, guilt and self-loathing.

The coming world
These were the dying years of the twentieth century, and soon there would be no more ferry, no working telephone booths, no typewriters, no rabbiting and no nuclear war. An enormous bridge would sprawl across the caol and the three television channels would double, triple, and then explode in number. The telephone booths would become urinals, and instead, people would carry their telephones, which were also tiny computers, in their pockets, each one with more processing power than the enormous machines that had cracked the enemy codes during the Second World War or even those that had sent the first rockets to the moon. In due course, every one of those tiny devices would be connected to every other in the world, not by wires, but by the magic of ‘satellites’ circumnavigating the Earth, not like Magellan, in three years, but in three hours. In addition, a global network of small, hot machines pumped digital information and misinformation, truth and lies, fun and horror into every other small machine 24 hours a day, 365.25 days a year. The Armageddon the boys had been taught to fear and expect at any moment was swapped for Armageddon by fire, drought and flood, not caused by the tiny atom, but by mighty Earth. In the meantime, however, life went on. People carried on as though there had never been another world before this, and yet another before that, and so on, and perhaps it is better that they do so.

But then again, is it? Perhaps we should be thinking carefully about the world before this one, or even better, the one before that. Maybe even three or four worlds ago, because we might find ourselves back there much sooner than we care to think. Wasn’t the real reason I couldn’t kill the rabbit that I wasn’t hungry? Had never been hungry? Intellect is the opposite of nervous reflex, which automatically instigates a muscular action. Intellect, on the other hand, with all its delicate feelings and refined arguments, inhibits action, but intellect and its inhibitions will quickly evaporate when the exquisite spice of hunger has been on your lips for three days, possibly in a time when even days of hunger and, God forbid, hours, as it often is nowadays, will no longer be called ‘starving’. It might even seem a luxury.