Chronicles of Otis the Bunny: The Trip to Somewhere New (Part 5)
Chronicles of Otis the Bunny: The Trip to Somewhere New (Part 5)
Otis had always assumed that the wider world, should he ever be foolish enough to require one, would have the good manners to resemble his garden, only larger. He was not prepared for it to be an entirely different garden, run by an entirely different management.
Mike carried him out to the car that morning in the soft-sided box reserved, in Otis's private filing system, for Grave Occasions, and Otis met the indignity the way a visiting dignitary meets a delayed connecting flight, with a stiff patience that suggested he was doing everyone a favor by not complaining more. The car itself was a betrayal of physics he chose not to examine too closely, a low hum and a swaying that had nothing to do with wind or weather, and he spent the first ten minutes of the drive bracing all four feet against the floor of the carrier as though the vehicle might, at any moment, admit it had made a terrible mistake and stop. It did not stop, not for a long while, and by the time it did, Otis had filed the whole experience, the vibration, the doppler moan of passing trucks, one pothole he chose not to dwell on, into the part of his mind reserved for Things That Happened To Him Rather Than Because Of Him, a section of considerable and growing length.
The place he was carried into was not his garden, a fact obvious within seconds and one he resented having explained to him by his own whiskers. It belonged to a friend of Mike's, a small backyard farm with a low rambling yard that Otis estimated, generously, at eleven times the size of his own, dotted with a coop and a fence of a completely different design philosophy than his own, the air thick with hay and old wood and something warm and feathered he had not yet met. He set his paws down on grass that was, he noted with the wounded precision of a man auditing a rival's books, not remotely as good as his own clover, and understood, with a mixture of outrage and a thrill he was not proud of, that for the first time in his adult life as a creature of considerable standing, he was a guest.
The hen arrived at a march rather than a walk, chest out, the way a landlord arrives to inspect a tenant she already suspects of something, and she regarded Otis with the flat, unbothered stare of an animal who had settled every question of territory on this property years ago and had no intention of reopening the file. She informed him, in no uncertain clucks, that the near side of the coop was hers, that the dust bath by the fence post was hers, and that the shade under the wheelbarrow was hers on account of it being Tuesday, and that whatever he was, exactly, he was welcome to stand there and be it quietly. Otis drew himself up to his full and not inconsiderable height and attempted the low, warning thump that had cowed lesser creatures at his own fence line, only to discover that thumping accomplishes very little on packed dirt, and even less against an audience who had, by his best guess, personally seen off a fox. It was, he had to admit, watching her strut the length of her yard as though she had surveyed and notarized every inch of it herself, a little like looking in a mirror that clucked.
What followed was less a battle than a series of increasingly cautious circles, Otis staking his claim to the shady patch by the coop with what dignity he could muster, the hen allowing it with the magnanimous air of one who had never much wanted that patch anyway, and somewhere in the middle of it the two of them arrived, without ever discussing it, at a truce built entirely out of mutual respect for the other's absolute certainty. Otis thought, not for the first time that afternoon, of the cottontail who kept his distance at his own fence back home and had, so far as Otis knew, never once been driven anywhere in a car, and felt a small, unfamiliar swell of something like worldliness, the same rabbit who had once considered the three best feet of his own fence line worth defending to the death now conceding an entire farm to a hen without so much as a formal protest.
By the time Mike scooped him back up for the ride home, the sun had gone low and gold over a fence line that was not his, and Mike, buckling the carrier in with the particular gentleness he saved for after Otis had clearly had A Day, said only, "You survived meeting a chicken, champ. Try to contain the pride." Otis said nothing, being a rabbit, but he rode home lower in the carrier than he had on the way out, less braced against the world and more turned over inside it, filing the hen away carefully in a new part of his mind he had not needed until today, reserved for Other Creatures Who Are Also, Somehow, The Main Character, and understood, in the drowsy stretch before sleep took him, that the fence he had spent his whole life defending was smaller than he had thought, and that somewhere beyond it there were apparently other worlds entirely, each with its own small, self-important sovereign, and he wondered, not unhappily, what the next one would be.