The Transformation

For all the sense of safety in a marked path, a trail in the woods is an artificial boundary and the wilderness sees no need to respect it. Humans are full of these little tricks: little candles held against a darkness too vast to truly be conquered; little fictions that render the world less cruel and arbitrary.

To the smaller, simpler minds swarming in the undergrowth just off the marked trees there are no such fictions. The day is a series of leaps from narrowly-avoided death to narrowly-avoided death, and not every jump is made. At every step the hiker takes, marveling up at the peace of the canopy, a thousand tiny stories are slammed to a close in the teeth of the falcon, in the claws of starvation.

That's the cycle of life, the hiker says. He says safe and sage words about the perpetual chain, but the truth is that the world is cruel and capricious and that the only mercy in it is that our minds are, maybe, the only ones sophisticated enough to understand as much, and the only ones sophisticated enough to spin fictions. The rest of the horrible grist mill of existence is fed by dumb creatures who have so little to understand of the world that they haven't even bothered to invent a God to save them from it.

Pan in: a close and slow zoom, down from the motionless pacifist canopy, down into the brush, down into the leaf litter, where the rabbit is cowering with its muzzle flecked with foam and its eyes rolling, winded and forced to a halt. It is a young rabbit. By all rights it should have years ahead of it and many litters, but the function of the rabbit, of course, is to feed the fox and the owl, and they are not so discerning as to feed only on the elderly.

This is not a fox or an owl, though, that has cornered the rabbit. The rabbit knows fox, it knows man and owl and dog. It even knows disease, and to avoid a rabbit stumbling and blind. It does not know what is chasing it now; it doesn’t have a concept of being toyed with and it certainly does not understand the thoughts racing through its head that are not its own. They are as incomprehensible to it as algebra, and it understands only the simplest translations of what is being said to it in the turmoil of its head: small thing, frail thing, what? what? It does not know why.

It knows curiosity, but it does not understand, as a human might, the cold and analytical quality of this curiosity--a superfluous curiosity that has no place in a wild world defined by flight and fighting. It is a distinctly human curiosity. That is the comforting fiction a human would ascribe to it, in the self-aggrandizing way of humans everywhere, because it would be better, maybe, not to think of such a curiosity existing in something that was not human.

The rabbit, as its neurons struggle to process the complexity of what is being said to it in a language it cannot ignore, in a language that implants itself directly in its instincts, hunkers down and goes still.

It is accepting its fate. It is recognizing its place in the grand design of the wild. This is reprieve, at last, from the constant chase. It’s the tranquility that arrives, at last, in the fawn that falls to the wolf.

(The comforting fiction.)

The enormous step that crushes the underbrush eerily makes no sound. It is not quite a paw and not quite a claw and not quite a spider, but some amalgamation of all of their worst qualities, and the rabbit watches it dully, not lifting its eyes up the impossibly long and slender birch-like legs, and so the rabbit does not see the way the pursuer tilts its head in the considering way of a thoughtful child.

It emanates an emotion, an aura of cruelty that is not the mindless and necessary cruelty of the wilderness. It is a monster, and the so-called human emotion it radiates is: what will happen? which is a crueler emotion by far, and one worse than malice.

It turns the rabbit over with its horrible claw, stroking a spider-nail down its velvety ears. The rabbit has succumbed. It does not kick or struggle. It does not understand what should happen to it now. It does not have a word for death, only for fear, but on some primal level it knows, now, that this is the last time it will ever experience fear.

Or perhaps that’s the human invention again, trying to soften the blow of an ending.

In any case there is no human invention here, but something far worse. The pursuer leans down, and nudges the rabbit with a cold and lifeless and toothless snout, and there is a new emotion now, one that is almost but not quite something the rabbit might understand. Delight.

What will happen?

Let’s find out.