AN ENDANGERED SPECIES

The bicephalous jackalope leads a complex and short existence due to only one of its heads being materially real. Though it may at first seem cumbersome, this grants it an evolutionary advantage over its better known cousin, the common jackalope, as the second head allows it perceive threats both mythical and extinct.

Despite the expedient rate at which they breed, they face coyotes and carnivorous tumbleweeds, lynxes and lechuzas, jackals and jabberwocks; yet not even the Wildjagd itself poses as great a threat to their kind as man. 

Humans have long trapped all manner of leporidae with devices intended to snare and break and drown, but rarely if ever are two-headed jackalopes found in these contraptions. Too rarely are they here in our consensus reality, more often slipping through their system of burrows between fiction and nonfiction. During the rare occasions that they feel safe, their antlers are tuned to a very specific hum, one that guides them back to a firm footing upon the Earth we all know.

The craftiest hunters of these creatures are those who construct traps for them from the great sprawl of possibility that is storytelling. They write out their deaths with all manner of rubegoldbergia, conceiving of great networks of satellites and centaurs sharing information, reinforcing the Fourth Wall itself with barbed wire, introducing contradictions into the library sciences, and so on and so forth. They spill much more ink than blood in this ill-conceived effort, all just to gather their little heads for a mount.

It is much wiser to let these gentle creatures live. So long as the monstrosities we can imagine pursue them, they aren’t hunting us.