Reading Notes: More Brer Rabbit (B)

Title: How Mr. Rabbit Saved His Meat
Author: Joel Chandler Harris
Link: Story link.

Plot:

• Brer Wolf is walking home from a successful day of fishing, when he is distracted by Miss Partridge.
• While Wolf is distracted, Brer Rabbit walks by and steals Wolf's fish.
• Wolf puts two and two together and shows up at Rabbit's house, asking for his fish back.
• Rabbit insists that he doesn't have the fish, but tells Wolf that he can have Rabbit's best cow if Wolf truly doesn't believe him.
• The two head out to the cow pasture and Rabbit tells wolf that a patrol is coming by -- Wolf hides, having had bad experiences with patrols in the past.
• Rabbit butchers the cow and hides the meat. He sticks the cow tail deep in the ground.
• Wolf yanks the tail out of the ground and believes he has pulled it off the cow, which has escaped safely underground.
• Wolf digs fruitlessly at the ground with a pick axe and Rabbit laughs at Wolf alongside his children from his porch.

Brer Rabbit tries to pull the "cow" out of the ground. Illustration by A. B. Frost.

Setting:

• No setting is specified, but it feels very deep south and in the back country. The sun is scorching, life moves slowly, and the roads are paved with dirt here. Wherever just came to mind for you works just fine as the story's location.
• Rabbit's farm is the specific location -- he seems to have a sprawling property in the woods.

Characters:

• Rabbit: Conniving as ever, but we see an odd side of Rabbit here -- he owns other animals and harvests them for food. 
• This strikes me as possibly a parallel for slavery (patrols are referenced) and it was an exceptionally relevant theme at the time, amidst Reconstruction.
• Wolf: Gullible and foolhardy. Why Wolf is insistent on retrieving a cow that he believes is submerged underground -- rather than just eating the household full of young rabbits that lies before him -- is truly a mystery.

Writing Style:

• I loved two things about this particular story: The bizarre mental image of a rabbit trying to pull a "cow" out of the ground and then, once I saw the gorgeous illustration above of that very scene, I was absolutely sold on this tale.
• There are some darker implications of a Reconstruction-era tale about animals owning and butchering other animals, but -- at least on the surface -- the tale is absurd and epitomizes Brer Rabbit's smug, trickster ways.