The Frozen Rabbit and The Fox

Laura was filling up the kettle for a morning cup of coffee when she spotted the dead rabbit through the kitchen window. For a scattered second, she didn’t believe her eyes and then in the next moment she did believe it, because of course – of course – the bloody rabbit was dead.

She abandoned the kettle in the sink with a clang and a slosh of water and stuffed her feet into wellington boots by the back door – they were too small, probably Freya’s – and stumped out into the back yard. It was brittle with cold, the hard ground crested with puffy, candyfloss snow that bunched up into ice underfoot. Flakes were drifting over the cottage. They clung to Laura’s eyelashes and unbrushed hair as she stumbled across the lawn.

The pond was iced over, its depths obscured by a crust of milky white like an eye gone blind with cataracts. The frost-blackened reeds ringed its banks like tangled clumps of lashes. The rabbit was lying splayed at the centre as if somebody had flung him out there. Poor Rupert. There was no hope of rescue, he was unmistakably dead - as lifeless as the loaf of bread in the freezer. Snow speckled his sooty fur. It would shroud him soon. Christ, she might have missed him altogether.

The trees on the far bank of the pond stood in silent vigil under the softly falling snow. Laura stood with her folded arms pressed against her stomach, chewing her lip, staring at the rabbit with a hollowness that went all the way to the soles of her two-small wellies. The gentle quiet felt at odds with the disaster before her; it was tranquil, bloodless. And yet, the kids... once they found out it would be volcanic, a hot explosion of grief and rage and blame.

Freya and Millie loved that rabbit. They were staying at their father’s place that weekend, the first sleepover there since the split. They had been reluctant to go. During negotiations, she had promised to take good care of Rupert and give him fresh hay to keep him snug.

The shadowy lean-to shed where Rupert’s hutch was tucked away felt like the scene of a crime. The shed door didn’t quite fit into the frame. It was pulled to, but there was a gap - big enough for a rabbit to squeeze through. The hutch door was hanging wide. Yesterday, it had been a pain to get the bolt unstuck in the cold to put the hay in and for the life of her she could not remember locking it afterwards. The catch must have come loose during the night, Rupert had escaped and hopped out onto the ice. Presumably, the temperature had killed him.

An odd end. She had figured it would be the fox that got him eventually. It was always skulking around the garden like a bad omen, trying its luck. That would have been upsetting enough but this was worse. This was her fault.

The girls would be home that afternoon. Laura would take the brunt of their grief over this. She had taken the brunt of their grief over everything. Perhaps this time the eruption would leave only her calcified shell in its wake like the victims at Pompeii. Nothing but empty ashes.

Laura’s nightie flapped around her legs as she balanced on the very edge of the pond. Hard clods of earth rolled under her numb feet, threatening to tip her over. She held a garden rake aloft but it was nowhere near long enough to reach the middle. Testing her weight on the ice sent splinters into it. No good. The rake was discarded.

She used the hose pipe then, unravelled to its full length. She threw the nozzle over to the other side of the pond, then clambered over into the tangle of undergrowth, scraping and scratching the skin of her legs, the brushing touch of the snow electric with cold, so she could tie the hose around the base of one of the trees. Then she swept it back and forth across the ice, hoping to knock Rupert closer to the bank where she could reach him – but the coils slid over him and free.

Next, a bucket with a rope tied around the handle cast out like a crab net. It kept rolling wide, snagging in the reeds. The lip of the bucket bumped and scraped over the ice. When, after a long and painful struggle, it did reach Rupert, it simply went over him like a car going over a speed bump. This happened four times before it caught like a grapplehook – she yanked and the bucket leapt and bounced away before rolling to a stop. He was frozen to the ponds’ surface – and he wasn’t coming loose.

For fuck’s sake.

Laura dropped the bucket rope and pushed her hands through her hair. She was somehow both sweating and cold. Rupert remained stubbornly out of reach like a celestial body – he was right there, but he might as well have been the moon for all that she could reach him. The pond did look like the moon, come to think of it. Blank and untouched. She could rush across it, leaving a trail of broken, muddy footprints...but no. She wasn’t sure how deep it got at the middle and the mud would be gritty, icy cold, swallowing her thighs, sucking her in up to her waist. There was no-one else home. Would there be time for her to freeze to death too before the girls and their father came back and discovered her trapped out there?

They would come home, the girls, and tumble out of his dark blue BMW. He would hang back, filled to the brim with carefully neutral, hurtful pleasantries, smelling sweetly of another woman. Perhaps it would be better to be blue and still, unseeing, with ice in her hair. They could all go and get another rabbit and go home to her instead.

The last time Laura had seen the fox had been the night everything had gone to hell. It had tipped the bins over, rooting through the black bags. She had heard the crash, come out to see – by then, it had been in the doorway of the lean-to shed, sniffing at the gap in the door. She had called out and it had looked back at her, eyes aflame. It had taken her aback, set her hairs on end with those staring eyes, wide and blank as coins, bright with the reflected light from the house. Bold thing, it hadn’t run. It had stared her down and sniffed the shed some more, until she shouted and then finally, picked up a wellington boot and run out into the yard. She had thrown the boot which clumped sadly against the wall of the shed. The fox had slunk reluctantly away, belly low to the ground, black lips peeled back from its teeth in a snarl.

She had checked on Rupert, who was fine – munching food, nose aquiver. She had tried to drag the shed door closed, struggled against it, but it had snagged on the ground again and again and would not close. She’d given up and come back into the kitchen and he had been there, looking pale and solemn. And she had said, “That fox is going to kill that rabbit, I don’t know how many times I’ve asked you to fix that shed door. The girls will be the death of me if anything happens.”

And he had replied, calmly, “Laura, there’s someone else.”

When she thought of that night, she remembered the fox first of all, the creeping thief with blazing eyes, blind and burning in the dark.

One thing, she’d asked for. The shed door had never been fixed. He’d moved out. And now the rabbit was dead.

Fuck it. Fuck it. Why was she out here, killing herself? The girls could come home, cry and scream and prostrate themselves in the snow, and she would say, ask your father. Ask your father why he didn’t fix that door. Let it, for the love of God, be all his fault because that’s exactly what it is.

Laura left the bucket and rake and hose and Rupert where they were and went inside to make a coffee.

Some time later, she had changed out of her bedraggled nightie. She had showered, her hair damp and curled against the back of her neck. She’d put two sugars in her coffee instead of sweeteners, and cream on the scratches on her legs, and a pair of thick socks on. She felt grey and washed out, but warmer. She was rinsing her coffee mug in the sink when she saw it.

A flicker of furtive movement near the pond. She had started, thinking for a wild moment that it was Rupert, suddenly up and moving –but of course, it wasn’t. It was something else.

The fox stole through the thin carpet of snow, low to the ground, russet brush of tail bright against the paleness of the garden. It moved quickly – its gaze was fixed on the pond. It had come for the spoils and this time it would not be denied. It tested the ice and then floated across it like quicksilver. A set of determined jaws fastened tight around Rupert and then came brutal, harsh tugging. In no time at all, it had ripped him free.

Then it seemed to feel it was being watched. It looked up at the kitchen window. Laura caught her breath as their eyes met once again; once again, it stared her down, Rupert’s forlorn corpse clenched in its jaws. Its eyes were not blind or burning now. In the daylight, they were amber and fierce. Laura could have sworn they saw right to the heart of her. It must have seen that it was welcome to the rabbit; for after a time, it dropped her gaze and trotted calmly away.

Thank you, she thought, as it disappeared.

Later, she went and put the rake and the bucket and the hose away. She closed the empty hutch. She left the shed door wide open. There was nothing to fear from the fox now, after all. It had taken what it wanted.

The snow was filling up the wells of her footprints and the paw prints of the fox. In the middle of the pond, tufts of rabbit fur still clung to the ice. From out the front of the house came the sound of an engine, the crunch of rolling tyres. Laura remembered the fox’s gaze on hers, amber and fierce. She breathed deep until the cold ached at the bottom of her lungs.

She went out front to meet them.