Whose place is this? That’s the question.

Where does your ground stop and mine begin?

 

The dirt under the beans—that’s ours. As are the actual beans. We just ate the last bagful in the freezer from last summer. I don’t mean we ate sitting in the freezer. Shortly the itty bitty blooms popping from this summer’s plants will send out little fetal tails, each sheltering its own fetuses, and in just days the tails will burgeon almost to bursting. Bunnies did get into the bean patch, as has happened before, but my husband hot-wired it with his floppy, galvanized fencing mesh, thus preventing more plants from getting nibbled down to the quick.

Whose bunnies are they, though? And now what are they supposed to eat? I’m not sure. Apparently they haven’t moved on to other people’s beans, anyhow, because just the other day, noting Buster’s strange behavior down below the garden in the thick grass, and racing to the spot, I found new babies, just furballs, really. Not all were alive. With them was one of those slithery black things my husband is always happy to find in our woods, signaling as they do wilderness and nature’s primacy and the flourishing of all that’s good. He likes to think he’s running a wildlife preserve.

He wasn’t around, which left me the one to investigate. So here, along with a bit of Buster’s snit I managed to capture, is a still from another piece of footage that I can’t put here, it being wild-creatures porn. The bunny was squealing for its very life.

 



Eventually I walked away. When Paulson came home he told Buster to scram, too. The snake was acting appropriately for a snake. It wasn’t within Paulson’s realm to quash its reptilian predilections. Plus why would he mind it warding off bean robbers?

He never, though, exhibits this same magnanimity toward any snakes plundering farther down the hill where live the hens. In such cases, if he happens to be around, he intervenes instead of looks the other way. He grabs his piece of poplar trunk he keeps propped against the coop, and 1) if the egg has only seconds ago gotten snatched, he’ll poke at the snake, induce it to release its jaws, or 2) if the food has reached the snake’s throat, all but disappeared, he’ll bang on its swollen head till the yolk and white spew out, or 3) if there’s only a bulge some distance down the gullet, he’ll pole the snake upward and fling it around. He’ll even drop it onto the electric wire enclosing the field, so that when the head or tail end falls to the ground, zap. The snake always goes rushing off.

“I probably bruised it,” he commented after a recent encounter, meaning when he brought down the pole on its body. He wasn’t rueful, exactly.

I was there, holding out a bucket, the time the snake threw up. It wouldn’t slide neatly inside. Paulson kept flipping and flinging it, aiming for the bucket, and the snake kept whipping around perversely. Suddenly there was runny stuff on his pants and his shoe, already scrambled.

He’s honestly fond of black snakes. Just, the eggs are ours. Ours. No, they’re not, but what’s a hen going to do?

The other week he had to get rid of one in his current flock who thought differently. She was eating her eggs herself. He put her in the car trunk and took her to Rosemary, thinking Rosemary could butcher her and give her back, except then the hen fled the cage Rosemary’d put her in. So now she’s free ranging with the rest of the pack and still poaching her eggs.

For all we know she’s also who rode in the trunk to Pittsburgh. (It’s all so complicated—if people don’t name their chickens, unlike Kirsten, it’s easy to lose track.) That hen sitting out the night in the heart of darkness, cowering beneath the weight of the latched lid, and then getting smuggled past a bomb detector, might’ve been traumatized in unseen ways. Maybe her psyche never healed. The egg eating was a delayed reaction. Only these many months later did she decide to lash back.

On the occasions where Paulson fights the snake, everybody loses—it, the hen, us. Mostly, though, we’re the ones high enough up the food chain to claim the ground as ours. It’s not just you whose it’s not. It’s not anybody else’s who’s encroaching, either. Which puts us in a terrible state of affairs, or quite rich and glorious, depending on who’s talking.

 


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