Long before white men came to this country, long even before red men came to this country, a lot was going on. There were bald eagles and bison, elk, deer, and beaver, there were raccoons, salmon, pack rats, and prairie dogs playing. Even those like the wolf, the mountain lion, grizzly, coyote, and fox who now eat meat ate things like grass and corn and squash instead of their neighbors.
Perhaps you think this is idealized, but were YOU there? Besides, I prefer the word "idyllic" to "idealized" because it WAS idyllic, it was beautiful, it was romantic, from its deserts to its rocky mountains to its great grasslands and valleys and rivers and sea shores.
Now, in this time the gentlest of all of this country's inhabitants were the telephones.
Great tribes of them spread everywhere from the snowy lands we call Montana to the steamy beaches of Texas. They befriended the other peaceful beasts and lived long, happy little lives playing in the sequoias and the prickly pears, floating down rivers like the ones we call the Platte or the Nishnabotna, sledding in the mountains we know as the Appalachians, climbing the trees in today's Monongahela valley, and always, always talking to the others in their tribe, even talking sometimes to members of other tribes living a long distance away. They were social and soulful and joyful little critters in this land that man didn't even know about yet.
Now, no one knows when or where they came from, whether from the glaciers to the north, the rainforests to the south, or from a distant continent over the seas, but rabbits came to this country. The rabbits were very playful and got along well, no doubt, with their new neighbors, with the bison, the bobcats, the barn owls, the turkeys and telephones, all of them, as everywhere was a nice neighborhood in those days.
But one day some rabbit somewhere for some reason decided to eat a telephone's tail. Now a telephone's tail, you might not know, is like a tongue is to us. The telephones talked to the other telephones with it, and they loved to talk, in fact you could say there was nothing they liked better to do than just talk and talk and talk.
So when the rabbit ate that telephone's tail, the poor telephone sat silent, sulking, sad, and soon the little guy quietly died.
Now this was very sad, though outside of this poor fellow's friends and family members not many would have noticed except that the rabbit loved the taste of that telephone's tail, told all his bunny buddies that there was no grass or flower or twig or bark or stalk that could compare to the taste of a telephone's tail.
And so the rabbits went to taste for themselves and found he was right, it WAS better than any root or leaf or vine they'd ever eaten; and they wanted to eat more.
Imagine the distress of the poor telephones, they were dropping like mosquitos at the first frost of fall as those hungry bunnies just ate and ate and ate! They disappeared so fast that the other animals didn't even know what was happening until it was too late. The bison cried and the passenger pigeons panicked, but folks like the hawks and wolves and owls were mad, they were so mad that they went after the rabbits for their own dinners, and they still do to this day!
Anyway, this is why you don't hear about telephones in Native American legends or in the pilgrims' notes or Lewis and Clark's journals. No people knew they'd existed!
But then a Scotsman named Alexander Graham Bell moved to this country, the country we all know as America now. One day in 1876, he was puttering in his garden when he saw a strange animal unlike any he'd ever seen.
He called for his neighbor, a man named Watson, to come over right away, and they found two frightened little telephones, the last of their tribe, the last of all their tribes!
They calmed the little beasties down and took them inside. They nursed them and cared for them and told all their friends about them. Well, their friends all loved the little critters, so Watson and Mr. Bell were overjoyed when the telephones had babies, and lots of them! So they gave the little telephones to friends.
Soon it seemed everyone wanted one, and today, as you know, nearly everyone HAS one, or even two or even three and the telephones are happy again.
They do, however, shake a little when they live inside those rare houses which also keep rabbits as pets. The rabbits remember something about telephone tails, and when curiosity gets the better of the bunny, it can rekindle that old inbred taste of enemies from their wilderness days.
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