Chronicles of Otis the Bunny: The Garden, the Squirrel, and the Matter of Trespassing (Part 2)
Chronicles of Otis the Bunny: The Garden, the Squirrel, and the Matter of Trespassing (Part 2)
The squirrel had one paw on the clover, actual clover, from the actual patch nearest the fence, when Otis realized with a cold, sinking horror that nobody in this garden had ever properly explained the rules to anyone but him.
Otis sat at the very edge of the flower bed, ears up, nose working overtime, watching the intrusion unfold with the particular stillness of a creature who has decided that stillness is itself a form of authority. The squirrel did not look up. This was, Otis felt, the first insult, worse than the clover itself: it had not even bothered to notice him noticing. He thumped once, a single sharp warning against the packed dirt, the sound that had reliably ended every disagreement he'd ever had with the vacuum cleaner, the front door, and on one memorable occasion, a paper bag. The squirrel twitched its tail and kept eating.
He had claimed this garden the way he claimed everything, which was to say entirely, immediately, and without consulting anyone. The lettuce bed was his. The shady spot under the hydrangea, where the dirt stayed cool even at the height of summer, was his. The exact three feet of fence line where the good clover grew thickest was, obviously, most emphatically his, and had been since the first afternoon he'd been allowed out here on a leash he chose to regard as a formality rather than a restriction. He did not remember deciding any of this. It had simply become true the moment he sat down in the grass and felt, for the first time, the specific and total certainty that comes over a rabbit in open air: that the world, or at least the fenced-in and reasonably interesting parts of it, existed to be patrolled, catalogued, and defended, and that he was, by temperament and destiny, exactly the animal for the job. The squirrels had never once been consulted on this arrangement. Otis had assumed, generously, that they simply understood.
Today's squirrel clearly did not understand, or worse, understood perfectly well and had elected not to care, which was a category of disrespect Otis did not have a framework for. He advanced two hops closer, low and serious, the binky version of himself, the one who leapt for pure joy at the smell of dandelions, packed away entirely. The squirrel finally looked at him then, straight on, chewing, entirely unbothered, and in that look Otis found something he had not expected: not fear, not retreat, but a kind of frank, indifferent confidence he recognized, uncomfortably, as not so different from his own. It sat back on its haunches, finished the clover at its leisure, and vanished up and over the fence in a single motion Otis's own body, built for sprinting flat and fast across open lawn, could never hope to copy.
He sat with that for a while, in the flattened, freshly bare patch where the clover used to be, ears swiveling after a sound that had already gone. The garden was still his. He believed that as completely as he believed anything, which was to say entirely and without evidence. But it occurred to him, in the slow, grudging way that new thoughts occurred to him, that a garden with a fence you couldn't see over might have quite a lot going on above the part you could reach, and that the squirrel, insufferable as it was, had just shown him a version of the place he had never once considered. He hopped back toward the hydrangea, tail flicking once, filing the whole encounter away in the part of his mind reserved for grievances requiring future action. But some small, unbasked, un-thumped part of him had already started wondering what, exactly, was on the other side of that fence.