I donned my battle gear for the bakery run: Sorels, London Fog wool overcoat, and rabbit fur-lined gloves. I am not above mocking, fell beast! Projecting confidence, despite my wariness, I strode through the wet snow toward my car, alert for the attack I know must be coming.
"Hasenpfeffer," I thought to myself. "Bring it on rabbit, I'll make you into stew," I muttered, like whistling in the dark.
My driveway, where it nears the road, slopes steeply. Surely the foul creature would launch his attack while I was on that portion, strategically the least defensible portion on my walk, a fraught narrow stretch not unlike Gallipoli or Thermopylae. "If only I can make it to the car," I thought, "I'll be able to arm myself with an ice scraper and jumper cables," an urban gladiator in this spectacle of the absurd.
Alas, the creature is a clever strategist, learned in history and cunning of tactics. I would never reach the car before the onslaught. In my heart of hearts I knew this was so.
What happened next was too fast to process. Perhaps you have seen The Revenant? In an instant it was all incisors and fur and blood curdling screams. Instinctively I raised my hands to my face just in time, the razor sharp incisors finding purchase in my left forearm, crushing through soft tissue to bone, tearing sinew and fascia and muscle.
In a state of shock, I felt no pain and threw the beast off me. It attacked again with lightning speed, not giving me a moment to recover my senses, gnawing deadly, teeth dangerously close to my face as I struggled to hold it back, both hands grasping its now bloody fur, streaked with the ferruginous liquid leaking from the gashes in my forearm.I tried to find a weakness but the furry fiend's defenses were impenetrable. I grabbed a hind foot, visions of lucky talismans filling my mind, but it merely dug its other foot deep in my exposed wrist, causing me to yowl in pain and frustration. Again it flew at my face, gnashing its teeth. Again I parried the attack. The super fecund vermin once more found purchase in my left forearm. I started to black out. I could not take much more of this.
It was then that I saw it - my salvation, the nub of a baseball bat, the one I told the boy never to leave in the yard, sticking out of the snow bank, just barely, which I grabbed, life surging again, almost gleefully. I yanked the Easton free and stood, raising myself to my full height, confident, hurling the beast once more from my gaping, ragged forearm, cocking my elbow, a little Joe Morgan twitch, stepping into the snarling rodent which was now enraged and flying at me to finish me off. It may not have been a textbook swing, nowhere near level, a tomahawk really, but in the throes of mortal danger, in the sights of the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog, function trumps form and I sent the beast up, up, and away, over the bungalow across the street, over the great oak one street away, its terrible scream Dopplering away into nothing, perhaps as far as Washington Park.
I stood dripping sweat and blood, panting, my wool overcoat in tatters, my hat on the ground, but, I thought, I am alive! The rabbit that stalked me in Hoyt Park, that found my home, the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog would not defeat me. This would not be my hot gates, the band would not play Waltzing Matilda. I gathered myself and, despite searing pain and a barely functional left arm walked to the car and got the Kouign Amann rolls I promised would be on the table for breakfast Christmas Eve morning. And though I struck the rabbit with Giancarlo Stanton-like ferocity, I sense, no I know, that he is not dead. Who knows where he will turn up next. Perhaps it is time to find the Holy Grenade of Antioch.
 |
| Merry Christmas |
No comments:
Post a Comment