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.
On any ordinary morning Otis would have been asleep by then, sprawled beneath the hydrangea in his usual posture of command with one ear cocked toward the fence line, but this was not an ordinary morning, because Tuesday's rain had left the garden looking unfamiliar. The lettuce bed he knew intimately, every furrow of it cataloged in the part of his mind reserved for territory that was rightfully his, had gone dark and glossy and strange, and past it the ground ran out in wet green terraces toward a far fence that looked, in that low early light, considerably farther away than four feet of wire had any business being. Otis sat up. A lesser rabbit would have gone back to sleep. Otis, already composing the first line of the memoir he intended to dictate upon his triumphant return, understood that the known world had grown overnight, and that somebody would have to go and chart it, and 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 from his own side of the wire with the same wary silence he brought to everything, keeping pace along the fence as the party moved, 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 flat morning light, taken on the look of 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 by going the long way round, a route Otis logged as a flanking maneuver, while the Quartermaster beetle made the direct crossing on 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 that compost is arduous, all loose footing and warm, shifting give, so that Otis experienced with great clarity the noble ache in his hind legs and the two occasions on which the mountain declined to hold him, and chose afterward to leave the middle third of the ascent out of the official account entirely.
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 moment, 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 morning 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 came down off Mount Compostia a good deal faster than he had gone up it and considerably wetter, fur flattened into spikes along his back, and found the expedition already dissolving behind him: the robin gone to a better lawn, the beetle vanished into the mulch without filing a report, the wild cottontail back in his usual spot at a respectful distance as though he had never once been promoted to anything. Katie was already crossing the grass with the old blue towel, the one she kept on the porch rail for exactly this category of morning, and she scooped him up and rubbed him down with the brisk, practiced sympathy of someone who had seen the sprinkler win before.
"Big trip?" she asked, dry as ever, which was more than could be said for him.
Otis considered the question from inside the towel with the seriousness it deserved, and decided that yes, it had been, even if no one else would ever fully grasp the scale of what he had crossed. When she set him down under the hydrangea he shook himself once, thoroughly, and took up his usual posture of command, and it was only then, with the expedition concluded and the continent charted and the morning finally warm enough to dry a rabbit through, that he allowed himself the nap he had been putting off since dawn.
Otis is a rabbit. If you keep one, our rabbit care guide covers housing, diet and the hay that has to be unlimited.