The Chronicles

Chronicles of Otis the Bunny: First Flight (Part 4)

He had spent his whole life patrolling the border on foot, and it had never once occurred to him that the correct vantage point for a creature of his standing might be considerably higher up.

It was the hottest part of the afternoon, the kind of heat that pressed down on the garden like a lid, and Otis had retreated to the hutch to do what he privately considered his most important daily work, which was thinking very hard about nothing in particular until it became indistinguishable from sleep. He had eaten his share of the lettuce bed down to a respectable stubble, checked on the clover along his three feet of fence line, and confirmed, as he did every day, that the hydrangea's shade had not moved itself out of spite overnight. All of this had left him pleasantly exhausted in the specific way that only a job well done can leave a rabbit, and he folded himself into the straw with the heavy, ceremonial slowness of an animal lying down to receive an honor. Somewhere in the drift between waking and not, his back paws left the floor of the hutch, and he did not think much of it, the way one does not think much of the first few seconds of anything that will later turn out to be enormous.

Then he was up, properly up, all four feet lifted clear of the ground for the first time in his life, higher than the hydrangea, higher than the fence, higher than he had known there was a higher to be, and the whole garden opened beneath him like a map somebody had finally had the decency to draw to scale. He could see the lettuce bed for what it actually was, a modest rectangle rather than the vast contested province he had always filed it under, and the clover strip revealed itself as scarcely longer than his own body stretched twice over, a discovery that would have wounded his pride if the wonder of the moment hadn't been crowding pride out entirely. He banked, an action he performed with no more technical understanding of banking than a thrown stone has of physics, and watched the fence line, his fence line, the one he had walked and marked and defended in his head against threats that never once materialized, shrink into a simple wooden rectangle with him floating dead center of it like a very self-satisfied planet.

Beyond the fence the world kept going in a way that ground level had always politely declined to show him, yards fitted against yards like tiles, rooftops in tidy rows, a street with a slow car easing along it, and out past the square of somebody else's yard he thought he caught the pale flick of the wild cottontail's tail, small and unbothered, going about business of its own in a territory that from up here looked no more mysterious than his own, just a different shape of the same thing. He filed the sight away carefully in the part of his mind reserved for facts that rearranged everything around them, right beside the afternoon the terrible bark behind the fence had turned out to belong to a dog no bigger than a loaf of bread, and he hung there in the warm updraft turning the new fact over, that the whole enormous unknown he had built his sense of himself against patrolling was, from above, something you could take in with one unhurried look.

He woke on the floor of the hutch with his heart going faster than the moment seemed to warrant and his back legs very firmly, very unglamorously on the ground, and it took him a full, disoriented minute to remember that rabbits, as a rule, do not do the thing he had just spent an afternoon doing. In the morning he thumped down to the fence line out of habit and found himself, for the first time since he'd claimed the ground, glancing upward before he glanced along it, as though some new instinct had installed itself overnight and was still getting its bearings. Mike, refilling the water dish, caught him at it and said, not unkindly, "Big plans up there, Otis?" and went back inside without waiting for an answer he was never going to get. Otis stayed a moment longer at the fence, looking at the same three feet of clover and the same weathered boards he had measured his whole territorial life against, and found that they looked, if not smaller exactly, then differently sized, the boundary of something rather than the whole of it, and he settled in to consider, in no particular hurry, what a rabbit was supposed to do with a view like that.