The Rabbit's Tale

There was a rabbit named Bruce, who wanted to live.

New to this enterprise, and quite unsure of the expectations one might indulge under such circumstances, Bruce busied himself in the study of those surrounding him who, from time to time, provided reasonable expositions upon the subject.

Take the dog, for instance, his faithful friend as far back as he can remember. As a youngster Bruce was captivated by the teachings of the dog: a bone for a bone and a tail for a tail, and love thyself as thy master.

The fox, on the other hand, suggested that some of the dog's teachings, though completely just, were slightly harsh, and upon those grounds offered a more useful framework in which no dog nor fox offered resistance to any other dog or fox, and that bones saved were earned, and that stealing was preferable to borrowing.

Canine (and vulpine) ethics proved to be a useful framework for the educable mind, yet when the science proved that dogs had been once the masters of men, Bruce found it difficult to take anything they reported seriously, so he looked elsewhere for philosophy.

Then he (the rabbit) happened upon a forked-tongue snake, who told him that truth and falseness require one another.

The owl, who was eavesdropping on the conversation as het roosted in an Elm tree interrupted, There is no truth and falseness, only oneness.

All of these philosophies seemed quite reasonable to the rabbit named Bruce. Till one day when Bruce happened to stop to listen to the teachings of a blind naked mole rat. His advice was that we should all begin to bury ourselves under the ground and to hide from the dogs, the foxes, the snakes, and the owls, a lesson that seemed quite reasonable, too, especially from a rabbit's perspective.

In the end, Bruce (who was a rabbit) spent his days frittering from thatch to thatch, nibbling a bit of clover here and there until late one evening a spotted hawk swooped on him as as he mounched on a stalk of soy bean, a little too far out in the field as the sun set in late November.