Chronicles of Otis the Bunny: The Great Warren Expedition (Part 8)
Chronicles of Otis the Bunny: The Great Warren Expedition (Part 8)
He would tell it later, if pressed, as the day he charted the entire known world before the dew had even finished burning off the clover.
Otis had fallen asleep in his usual posture of command, sprawled beneath the hydrangea with one ear cocked toward the fence line as though even in repose he might be called upon to defend it, and it was there, somewhere between the third yawn and the low hum of Mike's radio drifting from the porch, that the garden unfolded itself into something enormous. The lettuce bed he knew intimately, every furrow of it catalogued in the part of his mind reserved for territory that was rightfully his, had become the trailhead of a continent he did not recognize, stretching outward in green terraces toward horizons that had no business existing behind a four foot fence. He rose in the dream the way he imagined explorers of old must have risen, not groggy but resolute, already composing the first line of the memoir he intended to dictate upon his triumphant return, and it occurred to him, with the gravity of a rabbit who took such things seriously, that a creature of his standing could not possibly undertake an expedition of this magnitude alone.
He assembled his crew the way he assembled all things of consequence, which was to say with great ceremony and very little consultation of anyone else's opinion. A beetle of considerable shell and no discernible enthusiasm was appointed Quartermaster on the strength of his sturdy build alone. The wild cottontail, who in ordinary life kept a respectful three feet of distance at the fence line and had never once crossed onto Otis's side of the wire, was drafted as Chief Scout of the expedition, a promotion he accepted in the dream with the same wary silence he brought to everything, and Otis found this entirely fitting, since a rabbit who had spent his whole life reading the wind for danger seemed exactly the sort you wanted out front. A robin, recruited for her altitude rather than her temperament, was named Head of Aerial Reconnaissance and immediately began ignoring orders, which Otis noted was, in his experience, precisely what aerial reconnaissance did.
The first true test came at the Sea of the Undrained, a puddle left by Tuesday's rain that had, in the logic of the dream, grown into a body of water with no visible far shore, and Otis stood at its edge for a long moment doing the mental arithmetic he felt a commanding officer owed his troops before ordering them into anything. They crossed it eventually on a raft the Quartermaster beetle had constructed from a fallen hydrangea leaf and a great deal of complaining, and on the other side rose the Mountain, a peak any objective observer would have recognized as the compost heap but which Otis, squinting up at its steaming, formidable bulk, had already privately named Mount Compostia and understood immediately to be the tallest and most consequential summit in all the warren lands. The climb was arduous in the specific way dreams make things arduous, vivid in some details and entirely absent in others, so that Otis experienced with great clarity the loose footing near the top and the noble ache in his hind legs, but could not afterward account for how exactly he had gotten past the middle third of the mountain at all.
It was at the summit that the Beast revealed itself, rising from the far slope in a great coiling hiss with what Otis, in the fullness of the dream, understood to be malicious intent, and he called his crew into the formation he had been privately rehearsing for exactly this occasion, a wedge shape he felt communicated both strategy and menace in equal measure. The Beast turned out, on closer and considerably damper inspection, to be nothing more than the garden sprinkler kicking on for its ordinary evening cycle, and though a lesser expedition might have felt foolish about the whole business, Otis chose instead to log it in the part of his mind reserved for narrow escapes bravely weathered, reasoning that the sprinkler could not possibly have known it was up against a creature of his caliber and had therefore gotten off easy.
He woke to find himself exactly where he had started, under the hydrangea, three feet from the best clover on the fence line, with the wild cottontail sitting in his usual spot at a respectful distance as though he had never once been promoted to anything. Mike glanced over from the porch, watering can in hand. "Big trip?" he asked, not breaking stride, dry as ever. Otis considered the question with the seriousness it deserved and decided that yes, actually, it had been, even if no one else would ever fully grasp the scale of what he had crossed, and as he settled back into the grass he found himself wondering, in the quiet unhurried way of a rabbit freshly returned from somewhere enormous, what other worlds might be folded up small enough to fit inside one ordinary afternoon nap.