Wild rabbits inhabit our neighborhood in an abundance not even doctor Doolittle could imagine. My two sons and their friend John “found” one under a bush.
John’s Mom calls to tell me this, and share her instruction that they had to let it go in an hour. “I told them they can’t keep it,” she says. We decide to stick together. “By the way, they’re walking over to your house.”
“Great. They think I’ll give in after they show me how cute it is.”
“It is cute,” she says.
I head out the front door and here they come, Lucas cradling something the size of a tennis ball in his palms. I bend close and they hold their breath. “No,” I say. Protest rises all around. “It is not injured,” I say, “It needs to go back.” Then “No, don’t name it. It’s a wild animal.” Then “No, it does not need carrots.” Finally “Go back to John’s and put it where you found it.”
They do.
I go back to what I was doing in the basement. Scratch, scratch, flick, skittle. Bang. The 10 foot deep window well under the deck is not covered quite all the way. I try to adjust my eyes, but see only pink hands, or paws, or feet against the window. I run upstairs. My husband has just come home. It is 4:00, the day before July 4. “I don’t know what it is,” I say. He heads downstairs with that “Here We Go” look on his face.
“It’s a skunk,” he says, “maybe you should have kept the rabbit.”
All three boys come back and light up like happy-bulbs when we tell them. They run down to look.
“Let’s name him Jerome,” says Gabriel.
“I thought we don’t name wild animals,” says Lucas.
But Jerome sticks.
We begin to brainstorm ideas on how to get rid of Jerome. We call two pest control companies. One says skunks are climbers. One says they can’t climb at all. Lucas googles skunk-window-well-climb and reports that skunks can manage slats, or graduated steps, or burlap.
First we have to take the deck apart. Board by board we expose Jerome to sunlight and he is none too pleased. He stamps his front paws, he paces, he raises his tail. We implore Gabriel and John to hold their questions about skunk behavior, implore Lucas to help hold the boards.
Next, we retreat to the garage, retrieve a 2 X 8 X 10 piece of wood and proceed to rip the hallway rug into strips, which we nail – every two inches – to the wood.
Ever so slowly we lower the make-shift skunk-ladder down into the window well.
Jerome does not notice. Jerome is hot and spent. Jerome curls up in a ball unimaginably small and shakes. We go inside, creep toward the basement window and watch. He can’t see us, but he can hear us. He pokes his nose out and up, and peers, tries to make himself smaller, then gets up and again searches around his small prison for escape. He claws the window; he claws the metal; he claws the gravel. But he does not notice the ladder. It wasn’t there his first go-around, or his second.
They boys are perplexed. Why isn’t he climbing out?
After dark, I go down and spy. He no longer hears me near, and is heaving breath so deeply he looks like a black and white balloon, inflating, deflating, inflating, deflating.
I call everyone. “Look how tired he was.” We suppose rest may give him new perspective, may give him strength to give escape a go, may allow him to see something he didn’t see before.
After all, in the moments we least expect it, in the moments we know we are goners, or trapped, or hopeless and sunk-deep, someone may just lower a carpet covered ladder.
We might not even notice it, not even know its there. We may first need to curl up in a ball and sleep a while, still awhile, re-inflate.
In the morning we found the carpet on the ladder slightly frayed and Jerome gone home. Good for him. He found the way out. It’s always there; sometimes you just need to rest hard in order to find it.
