CHAPTER ONE
A first spring birthday brings a surprise.
The trouble between rabbits and farmers goes way back, no doubt to the first garden that ever was.
This isn’t to say that farmers are bad, or rabbits are bad. Under the right circumstances, a rabbit and a farmer might be tickled to discover the basis of a real friendship between them, if they could ever sit down and put their feet up for a spell, share a glass of lemonade and a fistful of fresh spring clover, and talk things through.
As long as the topic didn’t stray to vegetables, they’d probably get along just fine.
Vegetables! See, that’s the problem right there. When it comes to vegetables, farmers and rabbits have a serious impediment. It’s what you might call a clash of priorities.
Here’s the trouble, in case you didn’t know: Farmers love to grow, and rabbits love to eat.
Maybe that’s putting it too gently. Farmers have to grow; it’s how they put dinner on their tables and everybody else’s tables, too. And no self-respecting rabbit can resist the mouth-watering menu offered by your average vegetable garden. Why, it’s practically a rabbit’s sworn duty to find the loose board in the wooden fence, the damp earth beneath the chicken wire that’s just right for tunneling through, the spare tires foolishly stacked too near the garden gate, like an engraved invitation to climb on up and hop right in.
Once that happens, it’s good night, vegetables. Rabbits eat like it’s a race to the finish. Two half-grown cottontails loose in a garden can wipe out a whole springtime of effort in a single early morning raid.
You can see why this would trouble the farmer, can’t you? And how that farmer might easily start thinking of rabbits as the enemy, and vice versa?
It’s hard to know whose side to be on, in this type of situation.
After all, everybody’s got to eat.
* * *
The farm across the meadow from where Alice and her littermates lived had been empty for years. Two years, to be precise.
To a grown-up human, two years flits by quick as a sparrow, in a “my, they grow up so fast!” kind of way. To a human child, two years is a long stretch of time indeed. It’s the difference between being a third grader and a fifth grader, a little kid or a big one. It’s the endless wait to grow tall enough to ride the bumper cars at the fair.
To an eastern cottontail, genus Sylvilagus, species floridanus, two years is a whole rabbit lifetime, full of joys and sorrows, adventure and friendship, and great-great-great-grandbunnies, too. To a young cottontail like Alice, a farm that had been without a farmer for two years might as well have never had a farmer at all.
Lester was the oldest cottontail in Alice’s warren, and even he only dimly remembered the stooped, gray-bearded fellow in overalls who used to live in the big red house. That didn’t stop Lester from telling stories about the old man, though.
“He was a deadly one, that farmer!” he’d say to the kits (young bunnies are called kittens, or kits for short). The old showboat of a rabbit would flatten his long ears against his head and make his whiskers quake. “A real villain. With his devious traps and his razor-wire fences, sharp as an owl’s beak! All to keep us rabbitfolk out of his garden.”
Lester would freeze like a statue and let his eyes go dead and glassy until every kit within earshot whimpered in delicious fear. Then he’d blink himself back to life and stand up tall on his hind legs, batting his front paws like a fighter. “As if rabbitfolk can be kept out of a garden with good eats inside! Not we, not we.”
“Not we, not we,” the kits would repeat, and ruffle their fur in brave defiance.
Alice would ruffle her fur, too, and flare her nostrils. She’d never laid eyes on a farmer, but she knew full well that farmers and rabbits were sworn enemies, always had been and always would be. All rabbits knew that, from the day they left the nest.
* * *
It was the morning of Alice’s first spring birthday. Rabbits have four birthdays a year, one for each season, so the kits of her litter were three months old in human time. There’d been six kittens born and four had made it this far, two does and two bucks, not bad at all. For any winter-born kit to see springtime was a happy occasion. These kits were celebrating in the usual way, by making their first foray past the thicket of shrubs and laurel bushes at the wood’s edge into the great wide meadow beyond.
Lester had gone with them, and they were glad about it. That silver-muzzled know-it-all loved to scare the young ’uns with his old rabbits’ tales, but there wasn’t a cottontail in the valley more skillful in the ways of being out in the open than Lester. The weather was just fine, and the morning sun sparkled on the dewdrops.
Alice was having a grand old time. A meadow seen from the shady edge of the forest is one thing, but when you’re tearing back and forth in the bright sunny middle of it, leaping high and slapping your hind feet together from the sheer pleasure of being young and alive, that’s a different experience altogether.
The grass spread wide in every direction, and the sky above spread even wider. She play-fought with her brother Thistle, the sweet, undersized runt of their litter, and ran circles through the tender spring greens, stopping now and then for a nibble with Berry, the other buck, a big, impulsive fellow. She touched noses with strong-willed Marigold and then jumped back as if stung with a wild half-twist in the air, to make her sister laugh.
When that wore her out, she flopped onto her side and stretched so long you’d think she was made of taffy. She rolled belly-up and kicked her back feet like she was trying to jump off the sky. She’d never yet felt so open to the world, so small and so big at the same time. If this was what growing up felt like, it was all right.
“Hop on up here, youngster!” Lester commanded.
Alice hopped once, twice, three times—it’s a rabbit’s inborn wisdom to zigzag when going from place to place, for safety’s sake—and landed on a low, wide tree stump the fabled former farmer had never bothered to drill out. She pressed her body close to Lester’s. She wasn’t scared, exactly, but being out in the open had a strange, floaty quality about it. It was nice to have something warm and familiar to lean against.
“You’re missing the view,” Lester said. “Why don’t you sit up and look?”
Alice rose halfway, until she could see over the tallest grass. So that’s what the big red farmhouse looked like! She’d heard the place talked about so many times she’d thought she had a pretty good notion of it, but to a young rabbit with no experience in such matters, big and red was the broken wheelbarrow some human-person had dumped in a forest clearing and left to rust.
The real-life farmhouse was nothing like a wheelbarrow. It was tall as a good-sized tree and scarlet as a holly berry, with white-painted trim around the windows and doors and along the roof’s edge. It gave the words big and red a whole new meaning, and Alice realized how off the mark her imaginings had been.
For instance, she’d never imagined the farmhouse would have a giant, square-cornered truck sitting in the driveway, with its back wide open and people swarming in and out. They were man-people with thick arms, and they moved furniture and boxes off the truck and through the front door of the house. Back and forth they went, with purpose, the way ants carry crumbs back to the anthill.
It was Alice’s first glimpse of a human.
“Lester,” she said, whiskers aquiver. “I thought you said the farmhouse was empty.”
“I know what I said, youngster.” He thumped his back feet, a sign of irritation. “When I said it was empty, that’s because it was empty. Now it’s got people crawling all over it.” Lester didn’t sound happy about this, but he didn’t bolt, either, so Alice knew not to be alarmed. If the sight of people was an emergency, he’d either freeze or bolt. That’s what rabbits did when danger was near.
And Lester was a bona fide expert about people, as he’d once nibbled and shredded his way through a box full of mail-order catalogs and yellowed paperbacks that had been left by the roadside. It was a real treasure trove of information, judging from the things the old rabbit knew, or claimed to.
The other kits sensed a change in Lester’s mood and gathered close to the stump. Thistle was too small and scared to jump up next to Alice, but Berry and Marigold weren’t. They hopped up and huddled against one another to watch the goings-on down by the farm.
At the back of the truck, three men struggled with an item that was bigger than they were. They grunted and groaned as they finally got it out of the truck and onto a wheeled dolly, which they pushed into the house.
“That, my young friends, is what is known as an armoire.” Lester flicked his ears forward twice, for emphasis. “Arm. Waahr.”
“Arm Waahr,” Alice repeated, learning it. “What’s it do?”
Lester flipped his ears to one side. “An armoire is a thing to put other things in. People do love their things.”
After a while, the men returned, pushing the empty dolly. One shoved a hand in his pocket and offered what he found there to the others. They each took a piece, put it in their mouths, and began to chew.
Alice’s nose twitched as she tried not to sneeze. Even half a meadow away, the harsh, minty smell was stronger and sweeter than any mint she’d ever nibbled, and she’d nibbled plenty in the weeks since the snows had melted and the early-greening plants had peeped through the soil.
The men chewed and chewed, but didn’t seem to swallow. Probably something to sharpen their teeth, she thought.
Soon the man-people went back to work. Boxes, lamps, dressers, more boxes. Lester’s ears flipped to the other side. “Look. There’s a bed. That’s what people use for a sleeping burrow.”
Alice stood up all the way, to see this bed-burrow. “That’s big enough for ten people, at least,” she exclaimed.
“You’d think. But people are funny. They mostly sleep in ones and twos, even in winter. Now that bed is big enough for two.”
The movers were having a hard time squeezing a king-sized mattress through the doorway. But they got it in.
“How many farmers does that make?” Thistle asked from the ground, too nervous to keep count.
“Three, so far,” Lester said. “Looks like we’re in for a real infestation.”
Something less big, with bars on all four sides, came out of the truck.
“Is it a trap?” Berry blurted. Marigold and Thistle squeaked with dismay, and no wonder. Most animals will flinch at anything that looks remotely like a cage.
Lester’s tail twitched, but his voice stayed calm. “No, not a trap. There’s a word for it, let me think … crib! That’s it. It’s a sleeping cage for a baby people.”
The kits took this in with a collective shiver. Baby rabbits slept all together in shallow nests dug by their mothers, lined with grass and leaves and soft fur plucked from the mothers’ own bellies. But perhaps baby people were dangerous in some way, and needed to be kept apart.
They all pondered this, until Marigold piped up. “Baby people are so…”
“Ugly!” All four kits said it at the same time, and laughed. You wouldn’t have been able to hear them, of course. No human ear could. Even a belly laugh from a rabbit in the throes of utter hilarity is quiet as the whisper of wind in the trees.
Still, it’s a well-known fact that rabbits have terrific senses of humor. Less well-known is that their favorite thing to joke about is baby people. It’s not nice, but can you blame them? Even the cutest baby people are nowhere near as cute as the least cute baby bunny rabbits, and every rabbit knows it. They’re conceited about it, to be honest.
Alice laughed along with the others, but she wasn’t sure how to feel about this turn of events. Farmers in the big red house! Baby people in sleeping cages! It was a lot to take in.
Lester hopped off the stump, and the others followed. Caution had overtaken them all since seeing that crib, and their zigzags back across the meadow were somber and silent. They didn’t stop until they reached the place where the shade of the treetops cooled the grass beneath their feet. They’d be harder to see here in the shadows, and closer to good hiding places, too, and that’s all pretty important to a rabbit.
Alice blinked and hunkered down into a loaf shape. “Lester, will it be good or bad to have farmers in the house again?” she asked.
Lester didn’t answer right away. When he did, he sounded wise as the Great Rabbit himself.
Text copyright © 2020 by Maryrose Wood
