Center Hill

One afternoon in the spring when he was nearing five years of age, Herndon Henshaw saw a movement within the depths of a large copse of shrubs at the edge of the yard. He walked over and peered into the darkness of the shrubs but was unable to locate the source of the movement, so he got down on hands and knees and crawled slowly into the shrubbery. The canopy was thick and closed so that the shaded floor of the copse was open soil covered with a light sprinkling of long-fallen leaves. Across the open chamber beneath the ceiling of leaves, among the supporting pillars of the shrubbery trunks, he saw a rabbit. The rabbit seemed to be an extraordinarily large one. Hern sat down to watch it.

The animal was only ten feet away and was looking directly at him, yet instead of running away, it took three small hops toward him and continued to look at him calmly. Within the dim light of the shaded chamber, its liquid, deep brown eye glowed softly and seemed to extend inward to a great depth. The guard hairs of the rabbit’s coat stood in splendid separation, individual and vibrant as though each had its own life. They shone with a light that seemed not merely reflected but immanent, generated from within. The entire creature seemed the center of a palpable energy field that radiated its force like the rays of sun shining out from behind a cloud.

As Hern sat enthralled with the first rabbit, a second just like it hopped forward from the depths of the chamber and kept coming until it sat beside the first. It, too, seemed perfectly calm in its nearness to Hern. The atmosphere around Hern seemed charged and alive with energy emanating from the rabbits, the shrubbery trunks and leaves, from the very soil around him. The world had become a place far more strange and exciting than he had experienced before, though his previous experience had seemed extravagant.

He felt now that he could crawl over and touch the rabbits, feel their soft and vibrant fur, look more closely into the depths of their liquid eyes. They sat looking as he approached, as calm as before, and he believed they would sit for him, that they had been changed from wild animals to his friends by a transformation of the surrounding world. He felt the usual rules wouldn’t apply anymore. Yet the relations of predator and prey are ancient and iron clad and felt with special acuteness on the prey side of the issue, and though the animals allowed him a close approach and only hopped away, finally, in a calm and leisurely manner, but hop away they surely did.

Hern didn’t mind their leaving but recognized it, instead, as the proper outcome of the adventure. Regardless of the strangeness and depth of this new world of infinite things, there was nowhere wild rabbits could afford to let people come up and take hold of them. Hern said none of this to himself–indeed, throughout the episode he had said nothing whatever to himself–yet he understood it implicitly. He looked around the chamber once more in the vibrant light, then turned and crawled back into the familiar dooryard that would never again seem quite so ordinary.