John DuKipe, the owner of the Beehive, told me there's only one thing I needed to know about rabbits. "The back of a rabbit has good meat and good luck," he explained. "The front of a rabbit is a waste of God's finite space."
"Why is that?" I asked. (It seemed like an innocent question at the time.)
"The back legs of a rabbit is the sweetest meat you'll find this side of a ocelot. And everybody knows a rabbit's foot is good luck. But what a lot of people don't know is that it's only the back legs that's lucky. You'd have to be hare-brained not to carry a lucky rabbit's foot."
I waited for him to laugh at as his little joke, but he didn't even begin to smile.
"So what do you do with the other half of the rabbit, then?"
"Stuff 'em and sell 'em to tourists, mostly." DuKipe pointed to a row of rabbits over the fireplace. "Rabbits. Hell, they're just rodents, really, aren't they?"
