Last Days of the Dog-Men by Brad Watson

little thing. It’s not even a rabbit. It’s a bunny .”
    I felt pretty bad about shooting it, too. Mary hadbegun to toss the rabbit up into the air. Ivan shook his head.
    â€œHey,” he said to Mary. “Hey!” He took the rabbit from her and she leapt up into the air after it, playing.
    â€œLeave it,” Ivan said. “Sit.” She looked at him, cocked her head. “Sit!” She sat and looked away, out into the field where she’d caught up with the rabbit.
    Ivan put the rabbit into his jacket’s pouch, and we walked back to the house, Mary sniffing at Ivan’s jacket and pawing at the backs of his legs. We flushed a few birds on the way but didn’t take a shot. When we reached the house we followed the gravel drive around back and walked to the bridge over the creek. We took out the five birds and the rabbit and set them on the bridge timbers next to the railing, blocking Mary out with our arms. She stuffed her snout beneath Ivan’s armpit and stayed there for a moment, her nostrils working.
    â€œWhat are we going to do with the rabbit?” I said.
    â€œI guess we’ll clean it,” Ivan said. “We may as well eat it. We might as well eat our little rabbit brother.”
    â€œI don’t really want to clean it,” I said.
    Ivan gave me the birds and said he’d clean the rabbit. As I cleaned the birds I dropped the feathers and entrails and the heads into the creek and watched them float downstream. Ivan dumped the rabbit’s viscera into the stream, too, so Mary wouldn’t get into it. He tacked the skin high on a broken branch, and Mary sat beneath it looking up, not knowing whether to jump at it or not. She rose and sat and rose and sat, restlessly. Ivan came up behind me and stuck somethinginto my back pocket. It was one of the rabbit’s feet. I pulled it out and looked.
    â€œPretty grisly,” I said.
    â€œUnlucky rabbit,” Ivan said. “He takes on all your bad luck for you now.”
    â€œOkay.” I tucked the foot into the fob pocket of my jeans.
    W E WENT IN AND PULLED OFF OUR BOOTS, STOKED THE coals in the hearth and added wood, and poured a little whiskey while we sat in front of the fire drying our socks and pants leggings. We had a couple of stiff bourbons. Then we went into the kitchen to put together a meal. Ivan took the rabbit out of the refrigerator and we looked at it. Maybe it was the old anatomy charts in school that showed the muscle, the elliptical bands of sinew overlapping one other, symmetrically joined. I couldn’t stand to look at it.
    â€œIt looks human,” I said.
    Ivan looked at me, then set the rabbit on the counter and studied it.
    â€œChrist,” he said. “You fucker. Enough about the rabbit.”
    He laughed. We both laughed so hard we had to set our drinks down and lean against the counter and wheeze it off.
    â€œI don’t know how to cook it,” he said. “Let’s just put it on the fire. There’s a spit in there.”
    He took the rabbit into the living room and pushed the spit through it and placed the ends of the spit into the cradles. I went back into the kitchen to whip upsomething for the quail. I don’t have the same kind of problem with birds. It’s all those grocery store fryers, I guess. Conditioning. I wrapped the quail in bacon and set them in a dish of rice and mushrooms and chopped green onions and slid them into the oven, and dropped some fresh green beans into the steamer. I’d come back in and turn them on last.
    We sipped the whiskey and dried our socks and every few minutes one of us got up to turn the rabbit. After a while it began to lighten and then to brown. Mary lay on the carpet and watched it with us.
    Pretty soon I was more relaxed than I had been in over a year. Outside the tall windows that looked out back in the dusk, great flocks of birds flowed in a fluctuating stream across the sky. I thought of how