Chronicles of Otis the Bunny: The Greatest Hop on Earth (Part 18)
Otis had never needed an audience to feel like the main event. That evening, purely by accident, he finally got one.
It started with no warning at all, the way it always did, a sudden electric charge running through him somewhere between one hop and the next that sent Otis tearing across the garden in a series of tight, joyful loops, ears back, feet kicking sideways in mid air with an abandon that belonged to some considerably less dignified creature than the one who spent his days carefully patrolling a fence line, and he kept it up, lap after gleeful lap, until the last of the light went and his own legs finally overruled him, dropping him into the clover in a satisfied, thoroughly worn out heap.
He woke to a roar, not of wind or thunder but of an actual, delighted crowd, and found himself standing in a ring of golden sawdust beneath a striped canvas ceiling that rose up out of sight into darkness, a single bright spotlight finding him exactly where he stood as though it, too, had been waiting all day for him to show up, and a booming voice somewhere above the crowd announced, with the specific reverence reserved for a genuine main attraction, the arrival of the star of tonight's show under the big top: Otis, star of The Greatest Hop on Earth.
The ringmaster turned out to be a rooster of tremendous vocal range and an even more tremendous top hat, who ushered Otis backstage past a duck rehearsing figure eights on a tiny unicycle and a rather serious looking tortoise practicing what appeared to be extremely patient juggling, and explained, with the crisp efficiency of someone running three acts and a intermission on a tight schedule, that tonight's headline performance would open on the high wire, proceed to the cannon, and close, weather and nerve permitting, with the finale every crowd in this dream apparently came for.
The wire, when Otis stepped out onto it above a crowd gone properly silent with anticipation, turned out to be nothing more than an ordinary clothesline stretched taut between two poles, but the height beneath it had been dream logic's usual generous exaggeration, and Otis found his own paws doing, without any particular instruction from him, the same small, constant balancing adjustments he made every single day crossing the top of the garden wall, an old, ordinary skill that had apparently been rehearsing for this exact moment his whole life without either of them realizing it.
A gust caught him halfway across, tipping him hard to one side to a gasp from the crowd below, and Otis, arms out and every muscle he owned committed to the single task of not becoming a very short, very public fall, rode the wobble out on nothing but the same stubborn balance that had once kept him upright along a fence rail in a real wind, landing the rest of the crossing to an ovation loud enough to rattle the tent poles.
The cannon came next, an enormous, flower painted contraption the crew loaded him into with considerably more ceremony than Otis felt the moment strictly required, and he had just enough time, curled in the dark barrel with his heart going properly fast for the first time all evening, to wonder whether this particular act had been thought through at all, before the fuse crackled and the whole world became a single, glorious, weightless arc across the tent, ears streaming, cape of sawdust trailing behind him, landing dead center in a haystack that had clearly been placed with rather more care than the loading process suggested.
The finale, when the ringmaster called for it over a crowd already on its feet, turned out to be nothing more dangerous than a ring of flowers rather than the flames Otis had braced for, and he cleared it in a single, spotlighted hop that felt, landing on the other side to a roar loud enough to shake sawdust from the rafters, like the exact culmination of every zoomie he had ever run around an ordinary garden for no reason anyone had ever properly appreciated before tonight.
He took his bow in the center ring with the duck and the tortoise applauding from the wings and the rooster ringmaster declaring, in a voice built for exactly this purpose, that Clover Gulch, Downtown, and every other corner of Otis's considerable reputation had nothing on tonight's performance, and Otis, cape of nonexistent sawdust still settling around his shoulders, decided that a crowd, it turned out, was simply what happened when enough people finally noticed what he'd known about himself the whole time.
He woke in the actual clover, night properly fallen now, his own legs still faintly humming with the last of the zoomies that had started the whole evening, and found Katie watching from the back step with the particular fondness reserved for a rabbit who had clearly run himself into a stupor over nothing at all, and Otis, trotting in at last for the night, allowed himself the private, satisfied certainty that somewhere, in some ring he couldn't quite remember the layout of anymore, an audience was still cheering.
Otis is a rabbit. If you keep one, our rabbit care guide covers housing, diet and what all that sudden happy running is about.