Whose place is this? That’s the question.

Where does your ground start 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. But that’s not my point. My point is, like last summer, bunnies got into the bean patch. Like before, my husband had to hot-wire it with his floppy, galvanized fencing mesh and no more plants got nibbled down to the quick.

Whose bunnies were they, though? And now what were they supposed to eat? I’m not sure. Apparently they didn’t move on to other people’s beans, because the other day, noticing Buster’s strange behavior down below the garden in the thick grass, I rushed to the spot and found not only the cutest little furballs in various stages of aliveness and deadness but also one of those slithery black things my husband is always happy to find in our woods because they signal 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 is why it seemed up to me to investigate.

Here, along with Buster’s snit, is a clip from another piece of footage. No sound. The video, I’d be showing you wild-creatures porn. The bunny was squealing for its very life.

 

Eventually I walked away. When Paulson came home we told Buster to scram, too. The snake was acting appropriately for a snake and it’s not within our realm to quash its reptilian predilections. Plus why would we mind its assistance in warding off our bean robbers? However, we—well, Paulson—never exhibits this same magnanimity in situations involving that same(?) snake when he finds it thieving in almost the exact same way a little farther down the hill.

Where stands the chicken coop. Where the snake likes to steal, in broad daylight.

In such cases, if Paulson gets there in time, he intervenes instead of looks the other way. He grabs his piece of poplar trunk propped against the coop and does everything in his power to thwart the plundering. 1) If the egg has just gotten snatched, he can poke at the snake, induce it to release its jaws. 2) If its breakfast has reached the snake’s throat, only the pearly end visible, he’ll bang hard on its swollen head till the yolk and white spew out. 3) If there’s only a bulge, maybe 8-12 inches down from the head of the snake, he’ll pick it up with his poplar pole and fling it around. If needed he’ll even drop it onto the electric wire enclosing the chickens’ run, 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 the bucket, some years ago—the time when the snake threw up. It wouldn’t slide neatly inside. Paulson kept flipping it around on his pitchfork (not that pole he keeps handy now), aiming for the bucket, and the snake kept writhing and flinging itself 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 she 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 high enough up the propped ladder to say it’s our ground. It’s not just you whose it’s not. It’s not anybody else’s who’s encroaching. Which puts us in a terrible state of affairs, or quite rich and glorious, depending on who’s talking.