| Chapter Twelve |
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The rain has stopped but droplets still run along the leaves and gather and fall in splotches from the trees and splash onto the soft forest floor beneath. The greyness of the night is slowly turning to colour as the sun arrives in the east, the sky marking a crimsoning path along which he will walk. The burying beetles crawl in single file from beneath the rotten log and scuttle out to complete their work. A raindrop falls from a leaf in the birch tree above and hits a beetle hard on the edge of its right wing case, knocking it clean over. It lies there on its back, scurrying its six legs in the air above it, clacking its mandibles in alarm. A comrade stops and nudges a way beneath the fallen beetle, and with a thrust it is righted again. Solemnly the troupe continues, clambering over mouldering leaves, skirting pine cones, moving along. The severed rabbit head lies where they had left it before the storm broke, staring up at the sky with unblinking eyes. It is a corpseless head, its body stolen away or simply consumed by some passing scavenger. The beetles clamber up the fur jowls of the rabbit and creep between its lips, into its mouth. Once inside they proceed to feed on the engorged tongue and the soft flesh of the cheeks, nipping wefts of flesh and chewing and coming back for more, forming pocks and pockets in places throughout the rabbit's mouth and down the back of its purpled throat. Slowly then the beetles begin to pair up, one clambering upon another's back, and new life is formed of this union and the eggs containing it laid in the damp crevices that will warm as the rabbit head rots and the flesh ferments. The soft bodies will grow and harden and a protective crust will form around them and they will come forth into the world awaiting. Or be carried away as larvae or little more by one tribe or another of woodland ants and mixed in quietly clacking mandibles and consumed, or some other fate may befall them, as some fate or other must. The beetles then pour back out of the rabbit's mouth like natives through a passageway from a communion deep within some vast heathen likeness of their god.
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