This picture is from yesterday, but the scene was more or less the same this morning:
A rabbit had hopped into our yard, to eat the spilled seed under the bird feeder (or something over there– it’s like a Disney movie sometimes, with all manner of happy little woodland creatures), so we let the dog out. She spotted the bunny, and sloooooowly crept across the patio toward it, moving very quietly so as not to disturb her prey.
Eventualy, some invisible-to-humans line was crossed, and the rabbit took off for the back part of the yard, with Her Majesty in hot pursuit. There are a number of gaps in the fence, and I assumed it made it into the neighbor’s yard, an assumption backed up by the fact that the dog was just sitting and staring through the fence. So I went upstairs…
A few minutes later, Kate yelled up the stairs, “She killed it!”
“What?” I said.
“There’s a dead rabbit on the patio!”
And, indeed, there was a dead rabbit on the patio. And one extremely proud dog in the kitchen. And we thought we were being sarcastic when we called her a mighty hunter…
I have no idea how she got it, but she apparently got one of the many local bunnies. At least, it was very recently dead– I didn’t conduct a detailed forensic investigation, or anything, but my tentative hypothesis that one died of natural causes, and she just found the body was not borne out. It didn’t appear to be made of cheese, either, though it must’ve had a brain made of cheese to get caught like that.
She’s now all confused, because she had a bunny, and left it right here, but now it’s gone… But, at the same time, she’s very smug, because she caught a bunny.