The Man With The Rake

The startled man awoke. A cacophony of noise from outside told him something was trying to get into his young daughter's chicken coop.

The man's daughter had picked out each chick carefully putting much thought into which ones she would purchase online. She had waited, counting the days for the package of newly hatched chicks to arrive. She had treated the chickens more like friends over the last 8 months. She had even taught one a card trick, consisting of picking the red heart out of a combination of other cards and identifying it with a peck.

The man headed toward the door as quickly as possible. He had gone to sleep downstairs after consuming a few glasses of wine earlier in the evening. Sleeping downstairs was a good thing. He was able to hear the commotion and actually do something. If he were upstairs he may not have heard anything until was too late. If he was upstairs, however, he would have had a gun nearby.

Well, he didn't have time to go up and get a firearm. He looked for something as he hurried through the downstairs garage, toward the door closest to the chicken coop. The best weapon he could come up with at 2:30 am was a garden rake.

Armed with no more than a rake the man moved toward the chickens. There are black bear in the nearby area, and he would have fought a bear if he had to over his daughter's chickens, but a bear had never been sighted on the property.

Instead of a bear, the man saw a medium-sized fluffy yellow dog facing the coop. The dog would go back a few feet, run toward the coop and ram headfirst into the chicken wire, wait a few seconds then do it again. The dog was so intent on the chickens that he did not notice or care about the man with the rake, approaching from behind.

All the man knew was anger and the thought that any second the dog would bust through the wire and start devouring chickens one at a time.

The man had built that coop with his daughter. Carpentry was not one of his talents. He had gotten so far with the coop but had hired a handyman to finish the coop due to the deadline of getting the chickens in it. The handyman must have looked at the improper state the coop was in and finished, attempting to duplicate the efforts of the man. The coop had ended up looking shoddy and the daughter had questioned her father as to its worthiness to house her prized pets. He had assured her that, though it didn't look so great, it was plenty safe.

He moved quickly to the dog and swung the rake, tine side down, as hard as he could.

He swung it as one would swing a golf club. The man had never played a game of golf in his life, but he swung hard. As he later mused on the whole event the man would in his mind envision the swing happening with perfect form as he had seen Tiger Woods do on TV.

Had anyone seen the swing that early morning, they would have likened it to a half-drunk man with a rake, swinging in a sleepy, staggering way.

The rake hit yellow dog in the side and the dog fell over with an OOOF sound.
The man simultaneously lost his balance and fell to the ground with a similar OOOF.

The man and the canine were dazed, laying on their side staring into each other's eyes about 14 inches away.
They stared for what seemed like a very long time but wasn't more than 6 slow seconds.

The man was the first to move. As he began to get up, the yellow dog realized he must be in trouble and ran away as fast as he could.

The man thought to himself "that dog won't be back anytime soon", then he went back inside and slept.

Morning came. His daughter came in from outside. She was crying.

"Daddy she said" sobbing "last night something got Petunia".

Petunia was the Rabbit in a hutch on the other side of the house. The rabbit hutch sat 3 feet off the ground on wooden legs. Petunia had a place for shelter within the hutch but for some reason, maybe fear, the rabbit had run around in the cage allowing an animal to go under the hutch and bite up through the wire.

The small, new, dime-sized hole in the bottom of the hutch revealed what had happened.

The animal had chewed through the wire. The rabbit may have died before that of sheer fright. It may have still been alive.

The animal was able to bite the fur around the rabbit's neck and pull hard.

Except for the rabbit's furry little head, the entire pelt of the rabbit had been pulled off through the tiny hole in the wire.

The man's daughter found her rabbit with no fur.

There were dog tracks around the hutch.