"Jackalope" by M. Cummins

"Jackalope"

RUDY SNUCK OUT OF HIS ROOM AT 3 AM. Tucked into his backpack was a flashlight, his phone, some Rice Krispies, and a bottle of Gatorade. Under his covers was a vaguely childshaped lump, just in case he wasn’t back before his parents got up.

The window, his co-conspirator, barely hissed a whisper as he slid it up, then popped out its screen. With his footsteps hushed by the long grass outside his window, nature aided the boy’s escape as he slinked into the treeline.

Rudy had been playing in these woods for as long as he could remember. In his youth, it’d been a treasure trove for him and his friends. Every bush promised hidden boogeymen or buried treasure, and every tree dared them to climb to it’s highest branches. They had started three separate tree forts and finished none. As he got older, though, Rudy spent less time chasing dragons and more time throwing rocks at cans. Recently it seemed more like he went there out of habit than anything else.

The woods at night were unfamiliar though. It was noisy, not quite like he’d expected. Crickets screamed invisibly from the grass. Somehow Rudy felt better this way. Things would be a lot scarier if everything was silent, and if he was scared he wouldn’t be able to do what he had to. Jackson deserved that fat lip. His uncle wasn’t a liar. Rudy would prove it.

He stumbled around in the dark. Saving his battery was his number one priority, but he suddenly got spooked by something moving in front of him. At least, he thought it was moving. His flashlight’s gleam revealed only an old tree stump. It was weird how the shadows swam around him. Shutting it off again the woods seemed even darker and quieter, and only the thought of feeling like a fool kept him from shining his light on apparently mobile tree stumps or rocks.

At least now he knew where he was going. Duck Rock wasn’t hard to spot; its sheer face poked above the tree line at all times, an inviting silhouette in the distance. It got its name because it was generally agreed upon that, at some point, the mound of stone had vaguely resembled a duck. The resemblance had faded, but the name had stuck.

A barbed wire fence materialized behind the trees. The fence had been here as long as Rudy could remember. Quite the opposite of the town’s intentions, the fence had only made Duck Rock more appealing to teenagers, and with little trouble Rudy found the hole clipped in the wire by the older kids.

It was bigger than he thought. From a distance, it only just barely peaked above the treeline, but from here Rudy could see it towering over even the tallest of its neighbors. Hard as it was to decide where to begin climbing, the eager boy settled on a small shelf of stone just a few feet overhead.

Every time he felt ready to jump, he held himself back. Fear was making him hesitate. Well, he was already out here, and he wasn’t going to go back home without at least trying to climb to the top, so Rudy reasoned to himself he should just get it over with. With this line of logic in mind, he leaped, grabbing the edge of the shelf, and hoisted himself up. A few empty beer cans fell off as he climbed. Above him, further than the shelf he had just climbed but still reachable, he saw a second shelf.

It was going to be a long night.

...

“A what?”

“A Jackalope,” Rudy repeated. “My uncle saw one.”

“What the hell is a Jackalope?”

“It’s like a rabbit with antlers.”

The shadows hung long on a late summer evening in the woods of Little River, Wyoming. The friends were walking down a familiar path. Rudy held his arms folded in contempt as Jackson and Seth tapered off their laughing fit.

“That is the stupidest monster I’ve ever heard of,” Jackson said, adjusting his thick-rimmed glasses. his voice had the jaded self-assuredness of a twelve-year-old who'd been rudely awakened to a world without Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, or Spiderman. A stray tree branch took a swipe at Jackson's head as the three ducked around a tree. They'd been squatting in these woods since they were four, but Jackson had grown a full foot this summer and walked like a newborn fawn.

“It’s not stupid and it’s not a monster. It’s a myth. There’s a difference. Right, Seth? I mean, a Unicorn is just a horse with a horn.” For Rudy, the veneer of childhood hadn’t quite rubbed off. At least when it came to this particular myth.

“Don’t drag me into this,” Seth said, taking a step back. The ruddy-cheeked boy had long grown used to his friend’s arguments. He enjoyed the spectacle but never took a side. Rudy felt his face growing hot. Today Seth’s impartiality felt like a betrayal.

“What about Bigfoot?” Rudy said. “If he’s out there somewhere why can’t there be a Jackalope?” The lack of an immediate answer from Jackson meant Rudy’s point had struck home. Bigfoot had escaped the immediate purge of childhood fantasies. The consensus among the boys was that he was out there, somewhere. Like Aliens. Or the Illuminati.

“Bigfoot’s Bigfoot. Besides, you’re not talking about Jackalopes hiding in, like, Yellowstone. You’re talking about your Uncle seeing one. On Duck Rock!” Jackson said, pointing at the decidedly not duck-shaped rock peeking at them from above the treeline. “We can see Duck Rock!”

“My Uncle wouldn’t have lied!” …

Every time Rudy thought he’d made progress Duck Rock seemed to stretch a little taller. Only the thought that he might eventually have to look down kept him moving up. In spite of his misgivings, the rock made itself pretty easy to climb, and despite a scary moment where his foot slipped climbing one of the shelves, he was making steady progress.

The higher he went, the less garbage he saw. Apparently the novelty of drinking beer this high didn’t outweigh the effort you’d spend climbing. Instead of trash, messages polluted these higher steps scratched on the wall by past climbers.

Some were simple with just a name and a date. A lot had the same kinds of things kids write everywhere; stuff like ‘if you’re reading this I just wasted 12 seconds of your life’ and ‘this is high.’ A nearly faded message etched into the rock caught Rudy’s attention. It read: ‘Max was here James is a loser’ Rudy’s heart throbbed. He kept climbing.

…

The two things Rudy always remembered about his late Uncle Max’s old apartment were the smell of cigarettes and the taste of TV Dinners. His Uncle had been sitting with him on a couch that reeked of smoke, two fold-up tables with steaming plastic trays in front of them. Rudy’s brother, Ambrose, was too good to come along with his younger brother. Rudy was grateful; it left more Uncle Max for him. Secretly, sometimes he wished he had been born Max’s son, and that his brother was his cousin instead. He always felt guilty for this thought afterwards.

“So this one time,” Uncle Max said through mouthfuls of lukewarm mashed potatoes, “your Dad ran over a wasp’s nest with his bike, and we had to run. But no matter how hard we biked or how fast we ran once we got to the trailer, those suckers followed us. Your grandpa started screaming at us, ‘you fuckers! Close the door! Now we can’t go outside, I can’t do anything with you two!’ The wasps were buzzing against the windows, they knew we were in there.

“Oh,” Uncle Max said, interrupting himself, “don’t tell your Mom I said that word.” Uncle Max wasn’t married and never had any kids, but Rudy’s Mom always called him a silver fox. His Dad didn’t like that. Rudy couldn’t figure why though. He did have silver hair.

His Uncle had an endless vault of stories: another one with bees where he had frozen them to use for a school project and they thawed out, angry, in the house; another where Rudy’s Dad ran away from home but came back after two hours in the woods. But Rudy’s favorite was the Jackalope story.

“So we were at Duck Rock,” Uncle Max would begin. Rudy immediately stopped eating. This story deserved his full attention. “This was before they put up that fence all around it. You used to be able to go there and climb it whenever you wanted, but now one kid falls off and they fence off the thing forever. If you ask me, too much coddling and you kids turn out soft. Back when I was a kid we got stung by bees and it built character. If you fell and broke your arm, the next time you didn’t fall. Am I right?” Rudy nodded enthusiastically.

“Anyway, it was almost dark out, and me and James had a dare to see who could make it the higher up the Rock. I’d climb a shelf, wait for him, sometimes help him up--you know how your Dad is, gotta let him think he’s got half a chance or he’ll quit. So we’re climbin’ up, and climbin’, and climbin’, and your Dad goes ‘Max! Max, I can’t see anymore. Let’s go home.

“I said ‘you go home,’ and kept going. Even wrote one message for him, not that he ever climbed up again to see it. It was pitch black when I got to the top, but boy, when I tell you you could see everything, I mean it. I could see my house from there, the edge of the woods, the river, the whole deal.” His Uncle paused like he was ending the story. “And then?” Rudy demanded. “And then what?” “Come ooon.” “Oh, right. How could I forget?” Uncle Max said. Like he was imparting a grave secret, his Uncle leaned close enough for his bushy mustache to scratch Max’s ear. “I looked for your brother at the bottom, and he was gone, of course, but right down there, staring up at me, I saw… The Jackalope.”

Even though he already knew, Rudy asked what it looked like.

“It was bigger than an ordinary rabbit and had these big antlers. Like a deer. And once it noticed me looking, it took off into the woods.”

...

Rudy’s flashlight a tiny star, he clawed and pinched his way up the side of Duck Rock as the treetops sunk below him and the wind grabbed at his hoodie. Rudy felt like he must be the first besides the hawks and the robins to climb this high in years. The insects had quieted and the birds were beginning to wake and sing for the dawn. Yearning for the closeness of the top drowned out any whisper of fear. Rudy’s adrenaline numbed the pain from his trembling fingers. The sun was just beginning to peak from behind the mountains as this shaking, exhausted eighth grader hoisted himself onto the flat stone peak, standing in triumph and exhilaration.

The birds grew louder as the sun finally crowned the horizon. The view was everything his Uncle had promised it would be. The forest below was a sea of greens, reds, and browns, and where the autumn colors ended Rudy could see his house, it was true, but he could also see Jackson’s and Seth’s, and the school they went to and the library and his Uncle’s old apartment, all nestled like ants into the brightening hillside. The wide river in the distance was gilded golden in the morning light and past that the plains, like vast carpets of green, stretched as far as the eye could see.

But look as he might from the peak of Duck Rock to the forest below, his eyes searching every bush, every dimple in the canopy beneath, Rudy could not find the Jackalope.

Photo by Tim Caston