Hey. Thanks for picking up. My name's Cody, calling from Gillette, Wyoming. Born and raised here, forty-one years in this county, so I want to start by saying I know this land. I know the animals on it. Mule deer, pronghorn, jackrabbits, coyotes, prairie dogs, rattlesnakes. I've worked wildlife management going on fifteen years. I know what I'm looking at when I see something in a field or on a road at night. I also grew up with the jackalope thing. I mean, you can't grow up in Wyoming and not. There's a statue of one in Douglas, they sell the mounted heads everywhere, every gift shop from Cheyenne to Cody has got one on the wall. And I always treated it exactly like everybody around me treated it. A joke. A tourist trap. Two brothers with a taxidermy hobby and a sense of humor, and the whole state running with it ever since. That's what I believed. I believed that right up until September of 2019.
It was a Thursday. I remember that because I'd stayed late in town for a work thing, a wildlife survey debrief that ran long, and I was irritated about it because I had an early morning the next day. It was around ten-thirty, maybe ten forty-five at night, driving back out on Route 59 heading northeast toward home. Just me on that road. The kind of dark you only get out here, no moon yet, stars clear overhead, nothing on either side but open country and scrubland and the occasional fence line catching my headlights. I had my truck. Biscuit was in the bed, she's my Australian cattle dog, goes everywhere with me. I had the radio on low. Country music. I remember that too, which is weird, the details that stick. I'd just come around a long shallow curve and the road straightened back out. That's when I saw it on the right shoulder, maybe seventy feet ahead of me. I thought it was a cat at first. The size of it. Then I got closer and the headlights hit it full on and I slowed down because I realized it wasn't a cat at all. It was a rabbit. Just sitting there on the gravel edge of the road, facing me.
I stopped the truck about thirty feet back and just looked at it. And I want to be real precise here because I've gone over this a thousand times since. It was a jackrabbit. The body, the legs, the big ears laid back, the overall shape. Brownish, stocky, sitting up on its haunches. But coming off the top of its head was a rack. Not tumors. Not some kind of growth. A rack. Branched twice, symmetrical on both sides, the points no more than six or seven inches high but unmistakably forked the way deer antlers fork. Not bone-colored. A warm darker shade, almost amber looking in my headlights. The thing was just sitting there, completely still, looking at me the way animals do when headlights freeze them up. Biscuit started going absolutely insane back there in the bed. Barking, scrambling, like she does when she smells something she can't place. I did not take my eyes off the rabbit. I was maybe reaching for my phone on the passenger seat, fumbling for it without looking down, and that took maybe three seconds. When I looked back up, it was gone. Not hopped off into the brush. Gone. No movement, no sound, no retreating shape in the dark. The road was empty. Three seconds.
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