Bunny and Clyde
When the invasion begins, you need a man with a gun he’s prepared to use.
What a fortnight it’s been for surprise guests. Bright yellow daffodils have been popping up all over like tiny, swaying suns; snow-white hyacinths that have a fragrance so sweet, you’re glad for a nose; and the profusion of blossom has made the bees swoon and swarm.
But hold on. What’s that over there on the lawn? A bloody rabbit! And not just one, but three!
According to the Gardener – and though he’s an absolute gent, he is much practised in the dark arts of exterminating vermin – if you see one rabbit, there’ll be many more quietly wolfing your broccoli and nibbling at your peonies.
So an early-morning sighting of three of the little blighters on the lawn, taking the air as bold as you damn well please, suggests we may have a Watership Down-giant- warren situation.
In contrast to the White House’s approach to North Korea, I decided that early-morning Twitter threats were unlikely to bring matters to a swift and satisfactory conclusion. I did briefly wonder if the cat was up to dealing with it, but she is more flâneur than feline huntress.
No, this was a job that needed to be sorted out with the sort of violence that only a man with a gun he’s prepared to use can deliver.
You might not know it to look at me, but I have killed men and thought nothing of it. Also, I have dispatched many Nazis. Unfortunately, this was all done on something called PlayStation 4. In the real world, I’ve never killed something that breathes. Was I really up to shooting something the size of a fully grown rabbit? Rather than think about it, I drove into town to buy a gun.
Although I’ve never had a firearms licence, I have at various times fired shotguns at clays and .22s at targets. Once, in rural Queensland, I shot a cactus with a highly illegal automatic weapon that the grazier I was staying with used to keep the roos down. The thing made me deaf in one ear for an afternoon, and guilty for life of the coldblooded murder of a succulent.
As a child, I owned a junior-sized air rifle. There still exists, I believe, a photo of me proudly holding it while also holding a rabbit up by its ears. That might have counted as previous experience if the rabbit in question hadn’t been my sister’s stuffed toy bunny; my little rifle could have taken an eye out, but it wasn’t much good for dispatching more than tin cans.
Forty years on, I trooped into the local gun store to buy another air rifle – shockingly, you still need only a driver’s licence to own one – that had to be rather more lethal than my first.
“Do you know how to zero a scope?” said the gun-shop bloke as I paid. “Er, no,” I said. “It’s pretty easy. I use a chair.”
Well, there was no way, after the cactus business, I was shooting up a chair, though after watching a number of YouTube videos, I concluded that he meant use a chair to steady the rife because – big surprise – zeroing a telescopic sight is not a breeze. Especially when there is a breeze.
One YouTube guide, posted by a gun nut from Wisconsin, said to sight the rifle out of the wind because “if a fly goes by and farts at [the air-rifle pellet], it’s going to affect it”.
One rare, calm morning, I spent an hour taking the gun nut’s advice in a process that involved more misses than bullseyes. I am now armed, but not entirely sure whether I’m dangerous. Fortunately, the gods of hunting intervened on my behalf the following morning. We spotted the cat, which has done nothing all winter except demand food and then sleep it off, madly flicking something about on the lawn. We rushed out to inspect the corpse.
There, lying at her feet, was a dead rabbit.
I am now armed, but not entirely sure whether I’m dangerous.