Attempts to Capture and Tame a Unicorn (42): Domestication: An Introduction

I've never really told anyone about this but I’ve been here before.  When I was eleven I found an injured rabbit in the woods.  He had been in a rather nasty fight and his hind legs had been so badly gashed he was unable to move very far, or at all to be honest.  I felt for him, decided I could be his saviour and ran home, found a box to transport him in.  Much easier than the unicorn.  Sometimes I used to almost wish I was capable of harming her like that.  It would have made my life so much easier.  Less fun, perhaps, but easier.

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domes'tic  a.  of, in the home; homeloving; (of animals) tamed....

  -domes'ticate  vt.  tame

Never was sure why I looked it up in the Collins English Dictionary and Thesaurus 2 in 1 (1992 reprint, p63).  I knew what it meant already.  Ultimately I didn’t know how this plan would work.  It was all the wrong way round, never mind if I’d done something like it before and succeeded: it was supposed to be capture and tame.  This was a fall back, an almost-last-ditch effort.  Maybe I looked it up for reassurance, to help tell me that was the plan.  Or, at least, one worth continuing for.  "Of, in the home," though.  That really summed it up nicely.  Helped a great deal.

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We lived on the edge of town when I was eight.  Right on the edge where the houses stopped.  On the other side of the evergreen hedge at the bottom of our garden was a large country estate that the kids from our suburbian estate would explore regularly.  On the far side was an old, abandoned cottage that must have once been occupied by an estate worker.  For some reason, very few kids had found this, or maybe they just assumed it was still lived in, which meant I was able to hide the rabbit here because, in the garden, there was a hutch, still in good enough condition for habitation.  Here I kept the rabbit without ever having it discovered.  Those other kids were so uninspired.

I lined the hutch with new straw and heaped a pile of grass in there to start as food and put Randy (yes, I called him Randy; I don't think I knew what it meant at the time; or thought it meant lively or something like what I hoped the rabbit would become once I had nursed him back to health) inside.  Slowly I weaned Randy onto dry rabbit food from the pet shop.  Mainly by force through a lack of choice, though I still fed him plenty of grass through the bars and by hand.  But because I wanted him for a pet, I slowly gave him more pet food and less grass.  I felt that was an important part of the distinction between wild animal and tame.  Whether they ate man made food or au naturel. 

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It was the porridge made me do it.  That, indirectly, had first made me go off with John at that horrible and pointless tangent in the first place.  And now it gave me the idea to first tame.  I had already figured that it was the porridge that had scared the unicorn into employing John as a sneak rather than just a food taster.  Because she had really wanted that porridge I had cooked up but was, for some reason, too scared to try it.  I thought it must surely therefore be the key.  I just needed to get it to her on her home soil to be able to use it as a key to draw her out.

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I had found Randy at the start of the summer and devoted the holidays to him.  Every day I ambled off to spend time with him.  At first I would pick him up and check his wounds, cleaning them.  And then I would hold him and stroke him, trying to let him get used to me.  I put him down too, in front of me to see if he would try and escape.  But he was too injured or shell-shocked to bother and so with me he stayed.  As he started to heal, I built him a run from wire I found lying about so that that he could heal properly, building his leg muscles back up.

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I felt it needed to be about more than just food.  There needed to be a whole setting to it.  Every tamed creature will have its artificial home.  However much it is made to appear like a natural habitat, it is still ultimately manufactured.  Any polar bear living on dirty white stone in 30 degree European heat will tell you that.  And especially a lion living under an oak tree or a guinea pig in a hutch. 

They have borders, basically.  Actual, real and hard, sometimes electrified borders.  Not the natural ones a wild animal will allocate itself, created along the lines of the lay of the land and the climate but fences or walls designed to pen them in.  I, therefore, not only needed a new home for the unicorn but a means of keeping her within its boundaries.  Like with many tamed creatures, a hutch or a cage, or a stable as it would inevitably be, would not be enough on its own.  You couldn’t keep a unicorn in a small box alone.  They need some space to live and to breath.  The clearing would need to gain borders.

I would use food and shelter, then, to try and get her to switch.  I wasn't quite sure how exactly I would manage this.  Or go about it, even.  But I did feel sure I would need to be the third and final ingredient.  Every tame animal has an overlord human behind it.  Whether it's a kitten held by a toddler, Randy in his run or a lion cared for by a whole team of zookeepers.  This plan would need my total commitment.

That part could wait a little, though.  I had to set up and see if she would take to it first of all.

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Eventually he got better and by that time he had warmed to me, the provider.  And we stayed together for years, Randy and I, until I told some other kid about him and he killed him, skinned him, cooked him and fed him to me, telling me it was a chicken he'd poached from the estate's little farm.  Don't worry, I beat the shit out of him, real fucking bad.  In my head at any rate I did.  No, instead I went a bit morbid, stopped exploring the estate and moved along the road that took me to the ouija board.

And so I would embark once more to try and tame through habitat, food and presence.

First things first, though, and I needed a habitat.