The Chronicles

Chronicles of Otis the Bunny: The Night of the Owl (Part 7)

Otis had catalogued every danger in the garden by size, weight, and general nuisance value, and it had simply never occurred to him that the sky itself might need filing.

It was later than his usual hour when Otis was let out into the garden that evening, the sun already gone gold and low behind the fence in the way that meant Mike had lost track of time indoors and was making it up to him with an extra twenty minutes of grass, an unplanned windfall Otis intended to spend the way a creature of his standing spent any windfall, which was to say expanding his holdings. He conducted his rounds with his usual proprietary thoroughness, the lettuce bed inspected and found acceptable (none dared damage it, as usual), the shady patch beneath the hydrangea confirmed still shady, the three feet of fence line with the good clover saved for last, as a reward for a job well done. The leash trailed behind him the way it always did, a formality he observed the way a king observes the existence of Parliament, present in theory, irrelevant in practice, and he filed the lateness of the hour away in the part of his mind reserved for occasions on which the rules seemed to bend in his favor, settling in to watch the light go from gold to grey to a blue with no proper name.

He was midway through a clover stem, weighing whether to eat it standing up or lie down properly the way a creature of his standing deserved, when the grass in front of him went dark, not the ordinary dimming of dusk but a great, soft-edged shape sliding across it in absolute silence, no rustle of leaf or thud of paw to announce it the way the squirrel always announced itself, or the way the dog next door had once announced itself with an enthusiasm Otis still considered excessive. He looked up before he understood why he was looking up, some older and less philosophical part of him making the decision on his behalf, and saw the owl not as a shape in the sky but as a nearness, a wingspan he had no numbers for, low over the hydrangea one instant and gone behind the roofline the next, the whole of it over in under two seconds by his own count, though his count was not to be trusted, given that his heart appeared to be keeping a different and much faster tally of its own.

He had been startled before, certainly, by the neighbor's dog barking through the fence slats, by the squirrel who had once dropped an acorn near enough to his ear to count as a provocation, even, in a smaller way, by the wild cottontail who kept to the tree line and never once approached. But those had all been irritations, territorial arithmetic, disputes over ground he considered settled. This was not that. This had no interest whatsoever in his opinion of the lettuce bed, or of anything else he had ever laid claim to. He was flat against the dirt beneath the hydrangea before he had finished the thought, ears back, perfectly still, in a posture he recognized only dimly, older than any decision he had ever made about lettuce or clover or fence lines, inherited rather than chosen. This was fear, plain and total, the first he had ever felt in a garden he had spent the better part of a year believing he owned outright.

Mike was outside within the minute, drawn by something in the particular quality of the silence that a person learns to read the way other people read weather. He did not ask questions. He crossed the grass at a pace Otis had only seen him use twice before, scooped him up, leash and all, and had them both through the back door and into the ordinary yellow light of the kitchen before the last of the owl's silence had finished settling back over the yard. He set Otis down on the counter and checked him over with the particular briskness of a man confirming to himself that nothing was actually wrong, then said, not unkindly, "Yeah, I saw him too, buddy. That one's not on the guest list," which was as close as Mike ever came to admitting that he had felt it too.

Otis spent that night on the rug rather than in his usual spot by the window, and for the first time in the whole of his tenure in that house he did not resent the closed curtains. He turned the evening over slowly and found it did not fit in the part of his mind reserved for grievances and lettuce, and had to build an entirely new compartment, one marked simply for the fact that the world past the fence held things that did not care in the slightest for lettuce beds or clover or a rabbit's opinion of his own territory, older and larger than any treaty he had ever drawn up in his own head. It did not make him love the garden less. If anything the lettuce bed felt more precisely his than before, its boundaries drawn now against something real instead of imagined, and lying there with his ears finally settling back to their usual unbothered angle, he found himself wondering, for once without dread attached to the wondering, what else the sky might be keeping from him, and when.