Searching for Eyes in the Dark

G asked for days to go searching for wild animals in the dark.  I ducked and weaved, avoided and distracted, deferred, ignored.  Meeting wild animals in the dark, you see, is really not my thing.  Finally, on a foggy, rainy, extra dark evening, I folded.  We put on our raincoats and boots, grabbed our flashlights with perpetually dim-to-almost-dead batteries, and trekked off into the wilds of the neighboring industrial forest.  Duluth Timber is on the grounds of a former slaughter house.  Full of stories of fermenting blood pools waiting to seep out into the slough, creepy abandoned trailers and cars, windowless gray buildings, and stack upon stack of beautiful old beams, waiting to be resurrected. 

I was conflicted the whole time.  I wanted to spot a "wild animal" for Genevieve's sake.  She brought a book home for the library full of googly glowing eyes in the dark jungle of Madagascar and was compelled to see glowing eyes for herself.  Yet, I didn't want to spot a wild animal, because it most likely would have been a startled skunk or scurrying rat - and both of those things are on the top of my list of undesirable encounters.

As we looped our way back through the last row of the lumber yard Genevieve's rapidly wilting dreams came true.  I WILD rabbit darted and jumped, made eyes with our flashlights and fled to the cover of a blackberry bush. 

My best wild animal counter to date.