Chronicles of Otis the Bunny: High Noon at Clover Gulch (Part 16)
Otis had defended a great many things in his life that did not strictly require defending. This time, at least, the stakes were real.
The heat had settled over the garden for the better part of a week, dry and relentless, wilting patch after patch of clover down to something brown and disappointing until only one stretch remained green and thick and thriving, tucked in the shade along the fence where the sun couldn't quite finish the job, and Otis had taken to guarding it with an intensity that even he privately recognized as somewhat disproportionate to one patch of clover, dozing each afternoon close enough to smell it, worry curdling gently into sleep.
He woke to dust, real, gritty, sun baked dust, coating a wide main street lined with clapboard buildings that leaned companionably against each other in the heat, a saloon door swinging somewhere behind him and a tin star pinned, with some ceremony, to his own chest, and it took Otis exactly as long as it always did in these dreams to understand that he had arrived somewhere with a reputation already built for him, in this case as the sheriff of a town the wooden sign above the saloon identified as Clover Gulch, the last green outpost for a hundred dusty miles.
The townsfolk, a mixed collection of prairie dogs and quail going about their business in the heat, greeted him with the particular respect reserved for someone who had personally kept the town's one remaining water trough from going the way of the rest of the county, and it was old Prairie Dog Pete, sweeping the boardwalk outside the saloon, who brought him the news that had every citizen of Clover Gulch a little on edge that morning: a stranger was riding in, and he had his eye on the town's last patch of clover.
Otis met the news the way he met most challenges to his territory, with a slow, deliberate nod and the internal certainty that whoever this stranger turned out to be, they had significantly underestimated exactly how much clover meant to the current management, and by the time the sun climbed to its highest, meanest point directly overhead, the whole town had emptied itself onto the boardwalks to watch, in the particular hush reserved for these occasions, as a lanky, dust colored jackrabbit ambled into the far end of Main Street with the unhurried swagger of someone who had never once lost a showdown and saw no reason to expect this one to be different.
"Folks call me Quickfoot Jack," the newcomer drawled, tipping the brim of a hat two sizes too big for him, "and I hear this town's got the last good patch of green for a hundred miles. Seems a shame for one rabbit to keep it all to himself." The two of them squared off in the center of Main Street with the whole town holding its breath, a genuine tumbleweed rolling past at the exact moment dramatic timing required it, and Otis, feeling the full weight of every citizen's expectation settle onto his shoulders, planted all four feet wide and waited for the showdown to begin in earnest.
What passed for a quick draw in this particular territory turned out to be neither pistols nor swords but the oldest weapon either rabbit owned, and the two of them dropped into a thumping duel of such ferocious intensity that the whole street shook with it, foot after foot slamming the packed dirt in a rhythm that had every prairie dog covering their ears and every quail taking cautiously to the air, Otis matching Jack thump for thump with the stubborn, unyielding fury of a creature who had never once backed down from a fence line, real or imagined.
It was somewhere around the fortieth consecutive thump, both of them winded and dust streaked and neither one clearly ahead, that Jack finally broke first, not out of defeat but out of something closer to exhaustion, flopping down right there in the street and admitting, between gasps, that he didn't actually want the clover at all, he'd been drifting from one dried out town to the next for weeks looking for literally any patch of shade that wasn't already somebody's fiercely defended territory, and Clover Gulch had just been the first place worth fighting for in longer than he cared to admit.
Otis, still catching his own breath, found that the fury drained out of him considerably faster once the actual stakes turned out to be loneliness rather than theft, and he extended a paw, still trembling slightly from forty thumps' worth of adrenaline, and offered the exhausted, dust caked drifter something Otis had never once in his life offered a rival before, an actual invitation to share the shade rather than fight for it, an offer Jack accepted with the visible relief of someone who had been braced for a very different ending to his afternoon.
The two of them sat together in the last green patch as the sun finally eased off its worst heat, Prairie Dog Pete bringing out something cold to drink for the whole gathered town, and Otis discovered, somewhat to his own surprise, that Clover Gulch's legendary sheriff had apparently made room in his territory for exactly one dust colored jackrabbit, a development the town seemed to take as an improvement rather than a scandal.
He woke on his own patch of wilted grass with the heat finally starting to break outside, a few real, hopeful clouds building up over the fence line, and found himself looking at his last good patch of clover with rather less territorial urgency than he'd carried into the nap, deciding, as the first fat drop of real rain finally struck the dirt beside him, that a little green was always better shared with somebody who genuinely needed it than hoarded against a drought that, this time, actually seemed to be ending.
Otis is a rabbit. If you keep one, our rabbit care guide covers housing, diet and keeping cool when the weather turns hot.