I once banged myself up nicely, avoiding a squirrel on a local bike path. I was still glad to have missed it. I do have an "I ran over a critter" story with a different twist......

About 1985 I went surf-casting one morning and failed to land any fish. Driving home I suddenly saw a brown blur streak into the road, followed a split second later by a thud from the rear wheel. Crapcrapcrap, I thought, I've killed someone's cat.

I pulled over with dread to find not someones tabby but a big fat cottontail rabbit, rendered instantly dead as Caesar by a perfect albeit accidental head shot. The body was untouched. Now, at the time I had a big goofball of a golden retriever who loved chasing rabbits and squirrels, I suspect only to play with them. I was curious to see his reaction to one up close, so I put the carcass into my fish bag. I got home and called out "Hey, Barney(the dog), look what I've got." Barney gave a sniff and was supremely uninterested.

Not so my 85 year old Grandma. "What are you going to do with it" she asked in her unique English/Italian mix. I said I would put it in the trash. Oh no, she said, "you give that to me." In a minute flat she had tied it by the hind legs to her beloved mulberry tree, whipped out my Grandpa's pocket knife, and was EXPERTLY dressing that thing out for cooking. I could never, and still can't, do it that fast.

She explained to me that as a little girl in the mountains of southern Italy, she would hunt with her teenaged brother. Being a girl, times being what they were, the shooting was man's work. She was allowed however, to field dress the rabbits, and one other task...... Judging by the speed with which she was doing the dressing out, she learned her job well. She continued to tell the story in her sometimes hard-to-follow language.

I realized that she was telling me, in amazingly accurate detail, the cumbersome procedure required to load the obsolete blackpowder muzzle-loading shotgun her brother used. THAT was her other job. Now, she didn't know this, but I had and still have just such an obsolete shotgun, an Italian one at that. I went and got it out, along with the loading paraphernalia. She welled up with tears, and said "Maybe THIS was my brothers?" I could only say "Maybe it was, Grandma".

And don't you know she proceeded to load up that old cannon like a pro, 75 years later.

The rabbit hunting ended when Grandma's brother died, aged 20, on Sept. 8, 1917 in an Italian Army forward field hospital, of wounds received in the fighting on the Isonzo River.



Back to biking........I very often ride past the spot where that rabbit met his demise, and never fail to remember Grandma.