The male rabbits began chattering their teeth against another’s, filling the room with a spastic, scratching sound, similar to a full shift of skate blades on a puck chase, cutting fresh ice.“An animal on a farm has no worth if it isn’t useful. I earned my right to survive--I’m named!

It’s never been a matter for me to compare really. First hour of the day calls loudest as the last, no matter what the season.” Terrance said, adjusting his already faded Caterpillar cap, anxiously, clomping mud from his father’s old work boots, a glimmer of steel visible from the wear on one toe and the uncharted map of manhood sketched across the young boys face like a scar in the making.

Assured that there would be a meal set aside for him somewhere, the beagle pulled his mind off the gnawing emptiness in his stomach, mounted the flattened stump, marched into the center and stood, stock-still, on his vein-coiled, burst of speed legs and gnarled paws--listening!

Twilight draped the fertile landscape, like a dampened threadbare sheet, hung over the sun to dry.

Eager toward day!” Striker howled. If Striker could have whistled a tune would have accompanied his ritual salutation, but his teeth were not those of a wandering troubadour, and his own tongue would have been deli sliced at the first “hi-ho”.

Striker counted twenty-eight rabbits pulling the roots at the front of the cage, with at least twenty more rabbits on each side and twenty or so pushing from the back. “I could easily kill them all!” Striker thought, as the ground gave way and everything went dark.

Welcome!” proclaimed, Barrister Homes with the fanfare of a wrinkled ringmaster, his palm frond ears bending like alien tentacles one upwards and one out.

The scent of the sweating rabbits pressing against the cage, filled Striker’s snout, causing him to drip huge drool wads--lathering the rabbits that pushed against the back of the cage with big, moist doggie loogies.