Chronicles of Otis the Bunny: The Golden Carrot (Part 15)
Chronicles of Otis the Bunny: The Golden Carrot (Part 15)
Otis had never once needed a reason to dig. That afternoon, the ground gave him one anyway.
The digging had started, as Otis's digging usually did, with no particular goal beyond the simple, satisfying business of moving dirt from one place to another, and it was well into his third hole of the afternoon that his claws struck something small and hard and considerably shinier than anything the garden usually offered, an old, weather-dulled coin he turned over twice with his nose before deciding it was, without question, the single greatest discovery of his career, and he carried it proudly back to his favorite patch of shade, where the weight of a full afternoon's digging and the satisfaction of real treasure eventually pulled him down into sleep with the coin still tucked beneath one paw.
He woke to the creak of rope and the slow roll of a deck beneath his feet, salt air thick in his nose and a ship's wheel taller than himself directly ahead, and it took Otis no time at all to understand, in the specific unbothered way dreams settle such matters, that he was not merely aboard this ship but captain of it, a fact confirmed by the coat draped over his shoulders and the crew already assembled on deck awaiting his orders with the patient expectation of people who had sailed under him before and expected to again.
His first mate turned out to be a hermit crab of considerable seniority named Barnaby, claws crossed behind his shell in a posture Otis found instantly reassuring, and it was Barnaby who unrolled, across the map table with the reverence of a much handled document, a chart marked at its center with a single bold X and a legend, in looping antique script, that read The Golden Carrot, said to be the largest, sweetest, most perfectly orange treasure ever buried by rabbit or crab or anyone else with the good sense to want one.
"Bearings set for Coney Island," Barnaby announced, in the tone of someone who had clearly made that particular joke before and intended to keep making it, and the ship cut out across water so blue it barely seemed real, Otis at the wheel with his ears streaming back in the wind and the particular, expansive satisfaction of a creature commanding considerably more territory than a garden had ever offered him.
The storm found them two days out, waves climbing the hull and rain coming in sideways hard enough to make even Barnaby's usual composure look briefly rattled, and Otis held the wheel through the worst of it with his ears plastered flat and his teeth gritted, steering by nothing but the specific stubbornness that had once seen him build an entire imaginary rival out of a bark on the other side of a fence, until the sky finally broke and delivered them, storm battered but intact, to a low green island exactly where the map had promised one would be.
They followed the trail inland through palms and dense undergrowth that smelled, disorientingly, almost exactly like his own hydrangea bed at ten times the scale, Barnaby reading the map's cramped old directions aloud while Otis kept his nose low to the ground the way he'd once tracked a squirrel across an entire summer's worth of raids, and it was that same nose that caught, well before either of them saw anything, the unmistakable, infuriating scent of a rival crew already ahead of them on the trail.
The rival crew, when they finally caught sight of it clustered around the very clearing the map pointed to, was led by a squirrel of extravagant confidence and an even more extravagant hat, and Otis needed only one look at that particular bushy tail to recognize, with the specific outrage of an old grudge rekindled, the very same garden squirrel who had once raided his patch and gotten clean away with it, now apparently commanding a crew of his own and standing, quite literally, on Otis's X.
"This treasure," the squirrel announced, without so much as a flicker of surprise at seeing his old rival again, "belongs to whoever digs it up first," and the two crews fell to excavating the same patch of sand from opposite sides with a competitive fury that had less to do, by the end of it, with treasure and rather more to do with several summers of unfinished business finally getting properly aired, until both shovels struck the same chest at precisely the same moment and neither rabbit nor squirrel could honestly claim to have won.
The chest, prized open by four paws working in reluctant unison, revealed the Golden Carrot exactly as advertised, enormous and gleaming and undeniably, spectacularly orange, and Otis, staring at it alongside the one rival he'd spent the better part of a year building into a legend, found that splitting a treasure with the squirrel who'd started the whole rivalry felt, against every instinct he owned, considerably better than burying it alone would have.
They sailed for home with the carrot lashed between their two ships and a truce Otis suspected wouldn't survive first contact with an actual garden fence, Barnaby steering them out of the harbor with the same unbothered competence he brought to everything, and Otis stood at the rail watching the island shrink behind them, deciding that a rivalry, properly handled, made rather a good adventure, whatever it did to his fence line once they both got home.
He woke on his familiar patch of shade with the old coin still warm beneath his paw, and looked up to find, on the far side of the fence, the actual squirrel going about his actual afternoon with no apparent memory of any shared treasure at all, and Otis, turning the coin over once more in the ordinary daylight, decided some rivalries were probably more fun imagined than settled, and tucked his single, unshared, entirely real coin a little deeper into the dirt for safekeeping.
Otis is a rabbit. If you keep one, our rabbit care guide covers housing, diet and the digging space every rabbit deserves.