Along the Way

Long the Way Driveway Nature Watching Sometimes Discloses Things We'd Rather Not Know

When the sun reddens the western sky, the desert day is just beginning for many of the animals that have hidden from heat and view. So, of an evening, my flashlight and I take frequent strolls along my dirt driveway, which S's a couple hundred feet through cactus and creosote. It makes for simple but pleasant relaxation after a day's work.

For the last few nights, the light occasionally caught a litter of baby cottontails hiding underneath bursages or in prickly-pear thickets along the drive. There are, or were, four of these longeared fluffies. Any one, or maybe two, could easily fit into a shirt pocket. When their mother tells them "stay," they hunch down, chin on the ground, ears back, hips high, with their eyes widened as if holding their breath. They're at that fuzzy age before they forget nursing and start chewing all things green.

Last night they ignored their mother's advice and boldly played hop-hop games in the open. They jumped and bumped and tumbled like kids at camp. One show-off even walked in stride, instead of hopping. That was midnight.

At quarter to six this morning, when I walked out to get the newspaper, I looked for the little ones. All I saw was one, but it wasn't behaving like any rabbit young or old. It lay on its side behind a boulder. I leaned across the boulder and reached down to pick it up. Limply it fit into the small of my palm. Its eyes were open but watery. Its sides didn't heave with breath, and already it had lost its warmth to the morning's coolness. Yet I knew it had been dead less than six hours, and since rigor mortis hadn't set in, I suspected less than an hour. I could see no sign of injury, and attributed morbidity to being lost from Mom for the night or being abandoned for some reason only mother rabbits can know. I got the spade and buried it next to the rock, a little sadder and a little apprehensive for the others.

The light focused on the cactus, and it took several seconds for our eyes to adjust. Then, almost in unison, we inhaled that involuntary gasp that stiffens a body for action. In the fringe of the light glided a diamondy-brown pattern. Unhurried, unthreatened, and hungry, a diamondback slowly prowled ahead, constantly tasting the air for warm-blooded prey, for quadrupeds, for small furry things.

At two and a half feet long, it was young, though certainly older than its solo broken rattle.

To see another diamondback! This one was calmly coiled in a quail's dust bath by the root of a prickly pear. It looked contented, and fat.

In our almost two years in this neighborhood, we had seen only three rattlers: one crossing the drive on its hunting foray it too paid us no heed. A second was a 10-inch baby which did buzz, but only when prodded away from its shade. The third was seen nonchalantly crossing the street 10 o'clock one morning. Three in 24 months, and now two in less than 10 minutes and 50 feet! Few of our neighbors would believe any kind of Snakes live in our area.

We returned to the first snake and watched in awe at how it crawled straight as a rod: no coils, no loops, just its head and tail elevated slightly off the ground. It followed its tongue and heat pits through bushes and cacti, across barren ground and around rocks. It searched the prickly-pear gallery where the four bunnies had retreated last night after playing in the drive.

It continued at a leisurely but steady pace maybe 10 feet a minute toward the rock where I'd buried the bunny this morning. Then it began to dawn on me. The limp bunny The watery eyes. . The lack of trauma from an owl or fox. Had I been more alert at sunrise when I picked up the dead bunny, I might have seen one of those two diamondbacks lying nearby maybe even under the boulder watching its prey die, watching some do-gooder human meddle and bury perfectly good food, watching that human within easy striking reach.

We didn't see the other bunnies tonight. But they, as we, are learning that innocents or the inexperienced can't hide from what is, even in the dead of night.

Tonight, after the whirl of work and chores, I asked my wife if she wanted to walk out to see the moon... and maybe the other bunnies. On the way, we stopped to check the budding night-blooming cereus and to marvel at a young saguaro that is bouncing back after some unknown trauma years ago nearly wrenched it off its base. Twenty feet away, the interred bunny had already begun to nourish the earth. We peered into a creosote and admired the saguaro's courage and persistence.

It never even turned its head toward the people peering at it four feet away with their Mag-lights. It didn't coil, and it didn't rattle, neither then nor in the next two hours during which we followed and watched... and hoped it wouldn't find the remaining three bunnies just ahead of its search.

We walked ahead of the rattler to see if we could spot them. And there, not 50 feet up the drive and maybe 30 feet beyond where I'd found the dead bunny, we were startled to