The Rabbit Under the Branch

The storm was still going when the call came, and the woman who phoned us had to shout over the rain. A tree had come down onto her rabbit hutch. She had got the mother out. She could not get the baby out, and she could no longer hear it, and that was what frightened her most.

We found the garden drowned and loud. The fallen tree lay across the wreckage, its branches spread over the smashed hutch like a hand pressed down. Under the lowest branch, half sheltered by a tilted panel of the hutch roof, something small lay pressed into the mud, not moving at all.

She was a baby Dutch rabbit, a few weeks old, black and white in the pattern of her kind, though the white was grey with mud and the black plastered flat. The branch had come down across the wreckage and pinned her small shelter shut with her inside it. She was not crushed. That was the mercy. The branch held the roof panel above her like a fallen door, and there was just enough room beneath it for her to lie and breathe, and not enough room to get out.

Rain found its way under the panel in a steady drip, and her whole body trembled in long, unbroken waves, the deep shivering of the very young and the very cold. Her ears lay flat and heavy with water. Her eyes were half-closed. When I knelt in the mud and spoke to her she did not startle, and she did not try to run, because running takes strength she no longer had. She only lay there, breathing in quick, shallow pulls.

A baby rabbit has almost no reserves, and she had been under that branch for hours, through the worst of the storm, in a nest that had stopped being a nest and become a trap of mud and broken wood.

We did not lift the branch straight up. A fallen limb under tension can roll or spring, and the last thing she needed was the panel dropping further. First we shored it. My partner drove blocks under the branch on both sides of her shelter, wedging them firm, so it could not settle lower whatever we did next. Then we built the lift the slow way: a stout lever under the branch beyond her, a fulcrum of stacked blocks, and pressure applied a little at a time, each gain locked in with another wedge.

I lay flat in the mud on the other side, where the gap would open, a dry towel ready, my hand as close to her as the wood allowed, talking the whole time. When the lever took the strain the branch rose perhaps a finger’s width, and the panel beneath it shifted and scraped, and wet bark fell in a small shower onto the towel. She flinched, one weak kick of a hind leg, and then lay still again, trembling.

The complication came with the second lift. The branch rose a little more, the gap was nearly wide enough, and I had just begun to slide the towel under her when the far end of the lever slipped in the wet mud. The branch dropped back those few hard-won centimetres with a soft, sickening thud against the wedges. The wedges held. The panel did not come down on her. But her shelter closed again to what it had been, and for a moment nobody moved. She had gone completely quiet underneath, and I lay with my face near the gap and talked to her until the small, shallow breathing started again.

We reset the lever on firmer ground, packed stones under the fulcrum, and lifted again, slower than before. This time the gap opened and stayed. I slid the towel beneath her, gathered her against it, and drew her out backwards through the mud and the drip, one hand under her whole small body. She weighed almost nothing; most of her weight seemed to be water. She lay in my palms limp and shaking, eyes half-closed, too weak to struggle, and I put her inside my jacket against my chest, where the warmth was.

Under a tarp my partner held against the rain, we dried her with soft towels, a little at a time. The shivering eased slowly into smaller tremors. Her mother, safe in a carrier nearby, thumped once, and we let the baby rest where she could hear her.

The vet checked her at the clinic that evening: no broken bones, nothing crushed, only cold to the very bottom of her and exhaustion. They warmed her by degrees, gave her fluids, and kept her in a quiet box lined with hay. By the next morning she had eaten a few green leaves and sat up in the tucked shape rabbits take when the world is acceptable again.

She went home to a hutch rebuilt against the house wall, under the eaves, far from any tree. Her mother was already there, and the baby went to her without hesitation.

We named her To — the Vietnamese word for nest. It seemed honest: the fallen branch tried to keep her, and lost.

I think about that garden sometimes, when a storm comes in hard and the trees begin to fall. I think about how a nest is the whole world to something that small, and how quickly the world can fall on it. And someone happened to be standing in that kitchen doorway, listening under the rain for a sound that had stopped. And someone happened to call instead of waiting for the weather to ease. She sleeps in dry hay now, against her mother, under a roof that holds.