| Walking Tree had a name which could not be pronounced correctly in English so they gave him the last name of Smith. That never mattered much to him since he always stayed to himself all his life. He grew up on and inherited the farm he currently owns about ten miles to the north of Grants Pass Oregon. It isn’t much to look at but it has served him well for raising rabbits which he sells to various places for various uses. His father raised cattle but back then they owned a considerable more amount of land. Over the years the family was forced to sell off the majority of the land they owned in order to pay taxes on the house and the property where it occupied. They sold the parts which had the most value, which was also the land where they had raised the cattle. After selling off a good portion of the land they once owned, the part that remained was the part with all the trees and forest. So when it came time to pay taxes on what remained of the family property he was faced with figuring out how to make some money with the property he had left to use. He kept himself fed by hunting and fishing and growing various things. A man of few desires the simple life was always a happy existence for Walking Tree. He never married and when his parents passed he was the only one left of his family. He had some distant relatives who lived on a reservation but chose to not seek them out. Existing alone, it was a lonely life but he had never really known anything else. He continued to live there until he was faced with coming up with the money to pay the property taxes or lose the land. He worked at several jobs but hated the nine to five daily hustle. He happened onto the rabbits by accident. He met somebody from Washington state who was making a living raising rabbits. It seemed like a good fit. So Walking Tree invested what money he had saved and began raising rabbits. Everything was good for the first year and a half. By then he was an old hand at breeding and raising the litters. He hadn’t raised the full amount of the money to pay his taxes but he had covered his initial investment and was doing well. Then in the fall of 2018 he had his first visit. Surrounding his property which has a house and an old barn, is nothing but forest. There are all sorts of predators which come around smelling the rabbits but Walking Tree has a set up that protects the rabbits even from overhead predators. His rabbits do live in cages but they are free to wonder around the fenced area during the daytime. The exception being the males that he keeps separated that would otherwise fight. It was the middle of the night when he heard a commotion. The entire pen had been rigged with empty cans so to jiggle and make noise if something ever tried to get into the pen. There was plenty of noise to wake him up. He grabbed his shotgun and rushed out to the cages expecting to see a coyote or fox had gotten into the pen. Instead he saw nothing but the chicken wire that he had surrounded the pen was all in a jumble. A couple of the rabbit cages were flat out gone. Whatever it was that had tore up his pen had carried off two of the rabbit cages. next page |   |