Sing, o terrestrial muse, of the jackalope (Lepus cornutus Leidy 1873). Its existence, while improbable, is not impossible, but it follows that the extinction of such a creature is likewise unprovable, unverifiable, unfalsifiable. When the English first set foot upon the shores of this vast shaggy continent, the jackalope roamed in infinitely large herds through the deciduous forests of the east, the bunch grass prairies of the midwest, the wrinkled edges and scrub deserts of the west. Every February 26th, shortly after the datura seeds had begun to ferment on the bough, the skies would ring out with the clash of bucks wrangling for the right to mate, the cooing that signified that a doe had chosen her partner, and the ecstatic giggling of the couple. So passionate were their comminglings that, despite the small size of the participants, their wrestling and wrangling excited the globe itself into creating geomagnetic anomolies such as the Mima Mounds, earthworks, and as-yet undiscovered tunnels and secret passages that crisscross this continent, like nodes in an electric net, coiling and roiling like a slow-motion lightning along fault lines, pulsing like heartbeats along certain barely-recognized runways across the land. These otherwise inexplicable phenomena are the legacy of the cornute lagomorph whose ghosts only, alas, haunt this now sadder land.
One can shoot a bison from a train, but one can kill a jackalope just by building a railroad. Lepus cornutus may be the only species wiped out by the Protestant work ethic. Without someone to admire their antlers, these fine ornaments drop away; without hunters to catch them, skin them, and convince their beloved to wear that skin, the jackalope’s kin grow infertile, impotent, become extinct. Invisible from the windows of the speeding train, the jackalope’s population dropped precipitously shortly after the machine, like some phallologocentric juggernaut, crashed through the garden gates, and not even an infinity of windbags full of purple prose can resurrect them from their common grave.1 [continued]
