I was alerted to a trapped rabbit’s plight by the dogs’ barking in our garden. However I was in a rush to fetch my daughter and was unable to rescue the bundle of fur. I felt guilty and had a mental picture of coming home to find rabbit fur strewn all over my driveway. When I returned there was, to my surprise, no rabbit fur and no wounded or dead rabbit but two mangled dogs. Brer Rabbit had beaten our two pooches, game, set and match. This bizarre event reminds me of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s book, One Hundred Years of Solitude because the realistic and fantastic coexist in his stories. It also reminds me of the Australian painter, Sidney Nolan, who painted a camel in a tree from a photograph of just such an event.

Similarly, I recall Professor Jos Nel’s story and photograph of himself holding up and pointing a seal on the Namibian coast. Jos’s seal and Nolan’s camel presumably suffered the same fate in that they died in the desert. The bodies bloated and then the skin dried and hardened in the hot desert sun. The result was that the skin retained its animal shape whilst the rest was eaten or rotted away. Jos had just to pick up the skin, shake out the bones, and point the seal.

Animals are often a metaphor, symbol or vehicle to explore an idea in art and literature. My new work ‘Whale’, made from a buffalo rib focuses on movement, balance and the sense of the animal floating. Perhaps, like Herman Melville’s ‘Moby Dick’, it is a metaphor for life. If so, it is a lot more serene than Melville’s interpretation of life. I think of whales as happy masses of blubber, shielded from predators by their sheer size and eating insignificant things. I realise that all of this is ignorance but the feeling counts and my image is one of a peaceful, contented and happy being. I have also completed another of my sand cast bronzes. ‘Linda’ is one of a few sculptures I have made where the body arches and touches earth with only the hands and the feet. I cannot help thinking of Nut the Egyptian goddess of the sky in the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt. However I think that this work has more to do with stretching oneself metaphorically.

Talking of stretching oneself, I gave a lecture at the Oliewenhuis Public Gallery in Bloemfontein which was titled “The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me”. Those who know Roald Dahl’s works will recognise the title and perhaps wonder what the connection between this child’s story and my lecture is, as you can be sure I am not lecturing on literature or animals. The lecture is about me, my work and makes some comparisons with Dahl’s work.

I would have thought that the contest between a rabbit and our two dogs at our home was unfair and had a forgone conclusion. Clearly, it was unfair but ended in the way I least expected it to. Our Labrador had so much blood in his mouth and face that I could not determine where he had been bitten and our terrier had a gaping hole below his eye and a cut nose that required nine stitches. Initially I refused to believe that a rabbit could inflict so much damage and went in search of a more malevolent beast, half expecting to find something like a leopard in our garden, but the rabbit was only animal I could find.

The wounds on our dogs made me think the rabbit was a mythical beast; a kung fu bunny or were rabbit. It was, of course, a rock rabbit or a dassie in Afrikaans. Like its distant cousin, the elephant, it has large teeth, is wild and is not found in the children’s nursery. However, I consider its behaviour docile when compared to the cruelty of our vet’s bill.