Chronicles of Otis the Bunny: The First Afternoon (Part 13)
Chronicles of Otis the Bunny: The First Afternoon (Part 13)
There had been an afternoon, once, when none of it belonged to him yet, and the strange thing about remembering it now was how small the memory made him feel, in the good way, the way a photograph of a smaller house can make a large one feel earned.
It was the particular slant of the light that did it, low and gold across the lettuce bed at half past four, the kind of light that had nothing whatsoever to do with anything and every year seemed to fall across the garden in exactly the same stripe, and Otis, sitting in the middle of territory he had long since stopped thinking of as anything other than his, found himself thinking instead of the first time he had ever sat in this garden at all. He had been four months old and perhaps two pounds of rabbit, clipped to a leash he had not yet learned to treat as ceremonial, and the garden had seemed to him then not like a garden so much as a country, unmapped and faintly hostile, thirty feet of fence line stretching off in each direction like a border he had no paperwork for. He remembered standing very still near the patio for a long time, ears up, cataloguing threats that turned out later to be a wind chime, a beach ball, and Katie's shadow, and filing each one away with tremendous solemnity in the part of his mind reserved for Things That Might Be Hawks.
He remembered, too, the exact moment he had backed into the hydrangea's shade for the first time, not out of any wisdom but out of sheer panic at the beach ball, and how he had crouched there in the cool dark under the leaves for a full ten minutes before it occurred to him that nothing was chasing him and that the ground under a hydrangea was, notably, several degrees cooler than the ground anywhere else, a discovery that had taken him four months to make and that he now considered, frankly, embarrassing to have taken so long over. And he remembered the clover, one small experimental leaf of it, nosed at and abandoned twice before he worked up the nerve to actually eat it, the way a creature of no particular standing eats something for the first time, braced for it to be a mistake. It had not been a mistake. It had, in fact, been the beginning of an ongoing and largely one-sided negotiation over three feet of fence line that he had since come to regard as settled law.
What struck him now, turning it over the way he turned over a good leaf before committing to it, was how little that first-afternoon rabbit had known, not just about the garden but about himself, about the fact that he was the sort of animal who would eventually stake claims and defend them and greet a hen and a foster guinea pig and a cottontail at the fence with the easy authority of someone who had never once doubted his position, when the truth was he had spent his first afternoon here doubting almost everything, including the beach ball. He did not feel embarrassed by that rabbit exactly. He felt something closer to fondness, the way a creature of his current standing could afford to feel fondness for a smaller and more anxious version of himself, now that the anxious version had turned out, against odds he had not been aware he was facing, to have done rather well.
Katie found him still sitting there when the light had gone from gold to ordinary, ears relaxed, in no apparent hurry to be anywhere else in a garden that offered him, at this point, nowhere left to hurry to. "You've been sitting in that same spot for twenty minutes," Katie said, not really a question, more the sound of a woman who had also, in her own way, watched this particular rabbit grow into himself. Otis did not answer, on account of being a rabbit, but he took the observation in and filed it, not with the hawks and not with the clover, but somewhere new, a part of his mind he was only just now getting around to building, reserved for the strange comfort of having somewhere to have grown up in at all, and he found himself, not for the first time, mildly curious what he would make of this exact spot four months from now.
Otis is a rabbit. If you keep one, our rabbit care guide covers housing, diet and the hay that has to be unlimited.