Hector takes to ‘The Prairie Dog Capital City’ with uncharacteristic delight. He’s lived a fairly sheltered life, away from other creatures his size. He’s caught glimpses of natural habitats before this but ‘The Prairie Dog Capital City’ is the New York of small mammal ecosystems- according to some sources, anyway.
‘‘The Prairie Dog Capital City’ is the New York of small mammal ecosystems. It has everything a street-savvy prairie dog might desire: reliable infrastructure, relative security, diverse work opportunities, and a growing underground music scene. At least, that’s what on-site researchers maintain. Researchers at ‘The Prairie Dog Capital City’ have a tendency to assert facts about the site that don’t quite reflect prairie dog behavior elsewhere- that don’t quite reflect reality as the average person might otherwise experience it.
Alleged prairie dog music, for instance, sounds a lot like the fearful chittering one might expect when as a human looms over a tunnel entrance and attempts to feed a microphone into a chamber below. Prairie dog socialites look a lot like specimens that have been dressed up in crudely-made costumes and therefore rejected from the general population (as opposed to being ‘a little snooty’). The infamous prairie dog crime syndicate that operated from 2009 to 2015 appears to have been orchestrated entirely by researchers. The heists, the betrayals, the outright murders- they are all projections of schisms that occurred among the research team at the time.
The only honest thing that seems to have happened in ‘The Prairie Dog Capital City’ is the 2019 ousting of a puppet mayor that had been installed by the researchers a year prior. Mayor Squeak, trained in captivity, was eviscerated soon after his arrival in the city. A day later, prairie dogs at the border became aggressive with researchers who attempted to recover the body. These patrols tested negative for rabies- for any serious diseases- but the procedure involved killed the specimens and seemed to fuel the sudden isolationist movement within ‘The Prairie Dog Capital City.’ The entire colony went dark for nine months.
In 2020, the prairie dogs established an open border and a small tourist-friendly area that looks much like any old prairie dog town. It isn’t a particularly popular destination, but the denizens don’t seem to mind so much.’
I don’t think too much about letting Hector off the leash in the prairie dog/human demilitarized area. He’s never shown much interest in escape. Today, however, he dashes out into ‘The Capital City’ proper and when I try to chase him I find a dozen angry prairie dogs leaping out of tunnels around me to bare their teeth and hiss. By the time I’ve made it back over the border, Hector is gone.
I wait two days for the old rabbit to return, wondering whether he’s been killed or abducted or tried in a prairie dog court of some kind or whether he’s just started a new life for himself- one that doesn’t involve long days on the motorcycle and cool autumn nights in a tent.
On the third day, a retired prairie dog researcher sets up camp nearby and presses sample tracks of his prairie dog classical jazz on me: a sure sign that it’s time to move on.
Hector emerges from a tunnel as soon as I start the bike, as though it were the cue he’d been waiting for all along. He seems well-fed and healthy and maybe a little tired too. He settles calmly into his kennel and is asleep before I’ve got my helmet on. I hope this means he’s choosing to be along for the ride, but that’s exactly the sort of sentiment I would project.
-traveler
