Chronicles of Otis the Bunny: The Day at the Park (Part 11)
Chronicles of Otis the Bunny: The Day at the Park (Part 11)
Otis had spent his whole career defending three feet of fence line from threats that topped out at the height of his own ears, and nothing in that training had prepared him for a threat that arrived at eye level wagging its entire back half.
The park, when Katie finally led him through its low iron gate on the Saturday after the guinea pig had gone home, turned out to be the single largest patch of grass Otis had ever been asked to hold an opinion about, an open green country with no hedges, no fence posts, and no clover he could reasonably call his own, and he understood within the first thirty feet that the leash clipped to his harness was, as always, a formality rather than a restriction, extended now to accommodate a formality of considerably greater scope. He had catalogued the garden down to the last stalk of the good clover and the exact shade of shadow under the hydrangea, and he had assumed, with the quiet confidence of a creature who has never had his assumptions publicly corrected, that any new territory would simply be more of the same, only bigger. It was not more of the same. It was crowded with strangers, upright and four-legged both, and several of the four-legged ones were already looking at him the way Otis usually reserved for a fresh head of romaine.
The first dog covered the distance between them in four bounding strides and arrived close enough that Otis could count the flecks in its nose, a young retriever of some pale gold variety, entirely off its leash and radiating the kind of unfiltered delight that Otis, a creature of his standing, had never once permitted himself to display in public. He filed it immediately in the part of his mind reserved for threats that did not know they were supposed to be threatening, a category he had not required since the wild cottontail first showed up at the fence line and turned out to want nothing more than a look. Otis planted all four feet, squared himself to a dog perhaps eleven times his weight, and thumped once against the grass with what he intended to be a warning and what the retriever apparently received as an invitation, because it dropped its front half to the ground and wagged so hard its whole rear end went with it.
More followed, in the loose, cheerful way that strangers gravitate toward anything small and unbothered in an open field: a beagle who inspected him nose to tail with the thoroughness of a customs officer, a terrier who barked once, got no reaction, and seemed to lose interest out of respect, and an enormous grey shape Otis privately classified as bear-sized until Katie said the word "wolfhound" in a tone that suggested this was a real and common thing to own. None of them, he noted with some private relief and considerable outward composure, seemed to want anything from him beyond the fact of his presence, the way the hen at the farm had wanted nothing from him but an audience, and Otis discovered that a creature of his standing could hold a room, or in this case a field, simply by refusing to be impressed by anyone in it. He sat back on his haunches in the flattened grass and let each new dog take its turn sniffing the air a foot from his whiskers, receiving them the way he imagined a visiting dignitary received a long line of well-wishers, tolerant, faintly bored, entirely in charge.
By the time the sun had dropped low enough to turn the whole field gold, Otis had been introduced to more dogs than he had previously known existed and had survived the experience without once needing to remember what real fear felt like, which he still privately reserved for owls and nothing else. Katie crouched down to unclip the leash she hadn't once needed to shorten and said, "You did better with the dogs than you do with the mailman," which struck Otis as both true and slightly beneath him, though he let it go. He let Katie carry him back to the car in the fading light, ears loose, heart still going a little fast in a way that had nothing to do with fear, and turned the whole afternoon over once more in the part of his mind reserved for territory he hadn't known he wanted, already wondering what a creature of his standing was meant to do with a world this much bigger than a garden.