Chronicles of Otis the Bunny: The Foster (Part 12)
Chronicles of Otis the Bunny: The Foster (Part 12)
There is a particular indignity in being handed an apprentice you did not apply for, and an even sharper one in discovering you are good at it.
Katie came out to the garden on a Tuesday with a cardboard carrier that smelled of cedar shavings and somebody else's rabbit, set it down in the grass, and explained, in the overly casual tone she used for things she suspected Otis would not love, that they would be looking after a foster for the rescue for a couple of weeks, just until a proper home turned up, nothing to worry about. Otis, who had spent three and a half years establishing the exact boundaries of the lettuce bed, the shade beneath the hydrangea, and the choicest three feet of clover along the north fence, understood immediately that "nothing to worry about" was the sort of phrase humans reached for right before something worth worrying about. He filed the carrier away in the part of his mind reserved for Omens, right between the vacuum cleaner and the neighbor's cat, and waited.
What emerged, once Katie worked the latch, was not the omen Otis had braced for but something worse: a rabbit perhaps eight weeks old, all ears and feet and no apparent plan connecting the two, who took three exploratory hops into the grass and fell sideways into a flowerpot with the unbothered enthusiasm of a creature who had never once in his short life considered that the ground might be uneven. Otis, who did not remember being that small, and privately doubted he ever had been, watched from the safety of the hydrangea shade as the newcomer, whom Katie had named Biscuit with a carelessness Otis found almost offensive, attempted to eat a stick, abandoned the stick mid-chew to chase a moth, and ran headlong into the very fence post Otis had spent two years polishing with his own shoulder.
For the first four days Otis maintained what he considered a dignified and entirely reasonable distance, thumping once, sharply, whenever Biscuit wandered within eighteen inches of the lettuce bed, and retreating to survey the wreckage of his territory from atop the overturned flowerpot like a general reviewing a battlefield he had not asked to command. Biscuit, for his part, showed no interest in learning the rules of a world he had known for less than two months, treating the clover strip as communal property, the leash as an amusing tether to chew on, and Otis himself as something between a landmark and a very patient piece of furniture, which Otis found, for a rabbit of his standing, almost more insulting than being ignored.
The trouble was that somewhere around day six, without Otis's permission or foreknowledge, the thumping had turned into something closer to instruction: a nudge toward the shade when the sun got high, a low warning grunt the one time Biscuit wandered too near the gap under the fence where the wild cottontail sometimes watched, a full-body block, executed with more speed than Otis liked to admit he still possessed, the afternoon Biscuit toppled backward off the flowerpot and would have landed badly if Otis had not been standing exactly where he happened to be standing. He told himself, in the part of his mind reserved for Otis, that this was merely territorial upkeep, the ordinary maintenance of a garden that happened to have a clumsy new occupant in it, and not anything so soft as concern.
By the time the two weeks were nearly up and the rescue coordinator had called to say a family had been found, Biscuit could clear the flowerpot in one hop, had stopped mistaking the leash for food, and had, with visible pride, mastered the three feet of clover well enough to defend it, briefly, against Otis himself. Katie watched the two of them from the porch step one evening, Otis stationed a careful two feet from where Biscuit dozed in a patch of sun, and said only, "Didn't think you had it in you," with the particular fondness he reserved for moments he did not intend to make a big deal of. Otis did not dignify this with a thump. He simply sat with it, the garden a little quieter than it would be again once the carrier came back out, and found himself wondering, in the part of his mind he had never before needed for such things, what exactly he was supposed to do with a lettuce bed that no longer had anyone to defend it from.
Otis is a rabbit. If you keep one, our rabbit care guide covers housing, diet and the hay that has to be unlimited.