It started with a scream.
I was walking down the dirt path that surrounds a pond on the Leslie Street Spit in Toronto. To my right were stands of weeds and wildflowers, and to my left the pond, which was covered with lilypads. At the end of summer, the path was dry and dusty. I was there to photograph butterflies.
I heard a scream behind me, coming from the weeds. Then another, even louder and more insistent than the first. I turned to look, thinking it might be a feral cat in some sort of trouble. A ball of fur crashed through the weeds, went up in the air, and landed on the road with a thump so hard I could feel the vibration through my boots. A full-grown rabbit with a mink on its back. The rabbit was kicking madly, trying to dislodge the mink, but the mink held in place like a burr on the rabbit’s fur. I unslung my camera and started taking photos.
The incongruity of the encounter was obvious: the mink was less than half the size of the thing it wanted to kill. In nature, size is a factor of intimidation. The Bald Eagle terrorizes other birds by its size alone. I could see that the mink would kill the rabbit in the end, but because of the difference in size, it was going to take some time.
The mink’s problem was to find the place on the rabbit’s body where it could sink its teeth in a way that would prove fatal to the rabbit. The mink never let go of its prey, but wound itself around and around the larger body, seeking a way in. First on the back of the neck, then to the throat, the belly, the anus, and back to the neck again.
All the while, the rabbit bleated like a lamb. The initial shock over, the screams devolved into a one-note cry of protest. Each time the mink bit the rabbit, the rabbit bleated. It sounded like a child in the hands of its tormentor repeating the word “No!” over and over.
Just when I thought the rabbit was about to give up, it did the unthinkable. From a prone position in the dirt and with the mink on its back, it leapt three feet into the air. Dust rose from the roadway, and the rabbit went up again. Then it lay quiet. Its eyes were still bright, but the bleating had stopped. The mink burrowed into its throat.
This is the way rabbits die in the wild. Surprised by a mink, coyote, or fox; or seized from above by an owl or a hawk. In Audubon’s portrait of the Red-tailed Hawk, he shows the bird in flight with a rabbit squirming in its talons. There is a patch of blood on the rabbit’s fur, and from behind a stream of urine.
At last, the mink stepped back from the rabbit, then seized it by one foot and flung it across the road. It seized the rabbit again, then tossed it into the weeds and disappeared after it. A rustle in the weeds, one soft cry, then everything was quiet. This is the way nature operates, with a cruelty so absolute, it might be called perfect.