Bunny Trouble

by Jennifer Gray

  Henrietta checked that Ben’s favourite grapes were still on the table. Then she went over to say hello to the animals.

  Coco nudged Fuzzy - they had to try to tell Henrietta what happened! They got up.

  ‘Binny’s gone … !’

  ‘She’s in the copse … !’

  ‘We’ve got to find her … !’

  ‘Before the fox gets her … !’

  But all Henrietta heard was ‘wheep-wheep-wheep.’ Even though she was a vet she thought this meant the guinea pigs were hungry, so she gave them a bowl of cereal before she went to say hello to Binny.

  ‘Binny,’ she called. ‘Binny!’

  Just then Ben arrived home.

  ‘I can’t find Binny,’ Henrietta told him.

  ‘Let’s try again,’ Fuzzy whispered to Coco.

  ‘She’s outside … !’

  ‘In the copse … !’

  ‘Wheep-wheep! Wheep-wheep!’

  Again, Ben and Henrietta didn’t understand.

  ‘Let’s check outside,’ Ben suggested, thinking it was his own idea. ‘Maybe she got out.’ He fetched the pet carrier and they went out of the back door.

  ‘Phew!’ Coco said. ‘That was hard work. There’s nothing more we can do now, except cross our paws.’

  ‘Yes, there is,’ Fuzzy said. ‘We’ve got a rescue centre to save. Pass me the skeleton keys.’

  Eduardo was looking for Binny in the copse’s bluebell patch when he heard the thudding of giant feet. He quickly hid behind a bush.

  He peeped out. It was Ben and Henrietta – Fuzzy and Coco’s owners! They must be looking for Binny! Eduardo breathed a sigh of relief. As soon as they found her, he could get on with making his hammock.

  Ben and Henrietta walked up to the old oak tree. They both looked carefully at the ground. Then Ben walked around the tree one way while Henrietta walked around the tree the other way. Soon they had disappeared behind it.

  Eduardo heard a rustle from inside the bush.

  Suddenly Binny shot across the clearing and disappeared into the long grass.

  Caramba! Eduardo muttered. Ben and Henrietta hadn’t seen her! He would have to chase her back the other way!

  Eduardo left his hiding place and raced after the little rabbit.

  Just then Ben and Henrietta stepped out from behind the oak tree.

  ‘An Agouti guinea pig!’ Henrietta cried. ‘In the copse?

  ‘Let’s rescue him!’ Ben marched towards Eduardo. ‘Then we’ll have another look for Binny.’

  Man! Eduardo felt cross. Ben and Henrietta sounded just like Coco – bossy. He didn’t want to be rescued! Didn’t they know he was a freedom fighter? Then he saw their giant feet striding towards him. Eduardo gulped. Of course they didn’t know. And he couldn’t tell them!

  He ran as fast as he could towards the long grass, but he wasn’t as fast as Binny. He felt Ben’s hands close around his tummy and lift him into the air.

  ‘Hombre! Let go of me! I am Eduardo Julio Antonio del Monte, and I live in freedom!’ Eduardo cried, but all Ben and Henrietta heard was ‘chutter-chutter’.

  ‘He’s probably scared, all alone in this big copse,’ said Ben.

  ‘Let’s take him home and introduce him to Coco and Fuzzy,’ said Henrietta.

  ‘Caramba, I know them already. They are my amigos!’ Eduardo shouted, but all Ben and Henrietta heard was ‘putt-putt’.

  ‘On second thoughts, why don’t I take him straight to Pets2Go and see if Peggy can find out who he belongs to, while you keep looking for Binny?’ Ben suggested.

  Huh? A pet shop?

  Eduardo wriggled and squirmed with all his strength, but there was nothing he could do as Ben popped him into the pet carrier and locked the door.

  8

  Coco Thinks Fast

  Back at number 7, Middleton Crescent, Fuzzy was looking at his website on the computer.

  ‘Coco, this is great! We’ve got three hundred and fifty-seven ticks!’ he said proudly.

  ‘What does that mean?’ Coco positioned the squashy cushion below the table so Fuzzy could jump down.

  ‘It means loads of people are coming to help fix the cages and clean up the rescue centre. The Easter Fair can go ahead. And some of them want to know more about Binny. I’m going to post another message.’

  REMINDER!

  Help fix cages and spring clean the rescue centre ready for the Easter Fair. Tomorrow 10 till 5! Come and meet Binny the Easter Bunny and adopt an animal.

  ‘There. That should do it.’

  PLUMP!

  Fuzzy landed on the squashy cushion and rolled off.

  ‘Oh, Fuzzy, you are clever at computers!’ Coco gave him a hug.

  ‘Thanks,’ Fuzzy said, blushing.

  ‘We need to find Binny and tell her!’ Coco exclaimed.

  Just then they heard noises in the garden.

  ‘Quick, Coco, it’s Ben and Henrietta!’ said Fuzzy.

  The two guinea pigs scampered back to the hutch.

  ‘Hide the keys! I’ll do the door,’ said Fuzzy.

  CLANG!

  Fuzzy pulled the door shut while Coco wriggled under the straw as far as she could with the satchel.

  ‘Here comes Ben,’ Fuzzy said with relief. ‘He’s got the pet carrier.’

  ‘He must have caught Binny,’ Coco said. ‘Thank goodness.’

  The two guinea pigs peeped out of the hutch. Ben was closing the back door carefully behind him with one hand. In the other hand dangled the pet carrier.

  ‘But where’s Henrietta?’ Coco asked.

  Fuzzy shrugged. ‘Maybe she went to give Alan the cat a stroke. It doesn’t really matter as long as Binny’s all right.’ He breathed a sigh of relief. ‘It would have been awful if she missed the Easter Fair when so many people are expecting her. I can’t wait to tell her about the website.’

  Just then they heard a sound that made their blood freeze.

  ‘Help me, amigos!’

  It was coming from the pet carrier.

  Coco shot a horrified look at Fuzzy. ‘Oh no!’ she cried. ‘It’s not Binny. Ben’s captured Eduardo instead!’

  Ben placed the pet carrier down on the floor beside the guinea pigs’ hutch. ‘I’ll go and get my car keys,’ he said, to nobody in particular.

  ‘Car keys?’ Coco repeated faintly. ‘Where’s he going?’

  Eduardo sat down heavily beside the door of the pet carrier and poked his nose through the bars. ‘He is taking me to prison,’ he sighed sadly.

  ‘Prison?’ Fuzzy repeated. ‘What prison?’

  ‘PetsGo2 Prison,’ Eduardo said. He slumped down on his back and stared at the ceiling of the carrier in despair.

  ‘Oh no,’ Fuzzy gasped. ‘What on earth are we going to do now?’ He scratched the crest on his head.

  Coco thought hard. Even though Fuzzy was brilliant on the computer, he wasn’t always very good at working things out. And Eduardo was too busy feeling sorry for himself to come up with anything sensible. She would have to do the thinking, as usual.

  ‘I know!’ she said. ‘You can escape. With your skeleton keys.’

  ‘My skeleton keys!’ Eduardo repeated. ‘That’s it, señorita! Quick, amigos. Give me my satchel.’

  ‘I’ll get it.’ Fuzzy scampered to the pile of hay in the corner of the hutch and burrowed into it.

  ‘Where on earth are those darned car keys?’ Ben was still searching and was talking to no one in particular. He started opening and closing drawers.

  It was a race between Fuzzy and Ben. Who would find their set of keys first? Coco held her breath. She told herself to keep calm. Ben was always losing his car keys. It usually took him ages to find them. Eduardo had plenty of time to escape.

  ‘Hurry, Fuzzy, my friend!’ Eduardo urged.

  ‘I can’t find the satchel,’ Fuzzy complained, flicking bits of their bed into the air with his paws. The hay was dense and tangled. Each stalk seemed to have been twisted in a knot around the next one. ‘Coco’s hidden it.’ />
  ‘You told me to!’ Coco protested.

  Just then Henrietta came in. ‘It’s no good,’ the guinea pigs heard her say. ‘I can’t find Binny.’

  Coco felt her heart beat faster. How were they going to tell Binny about the website if they couldn’t find her? And that wasn’t the only thing worrying her. Henrietta was much more sensible than Ben: she would almost certainly know where to find the car keys. Fuzzy would have to hurry.

  Ben burst into tears. ‘I hate to think of Binny out there all alone,’ he wept. ‘That poor defenceless little bunny.’

  ‘Pah!’ Eduardo spat. ‘Poor defenceless little binny? Are you kidding me? You should see what she did to that fox!’

  ‘Yes, but Ben doesn’t know that,’ Coco pointed out. ‘Hurry up with those keys, Fuzzy.’

  ‘I’m trying!’ Fuzzy panted from under the straw. He could see the satchel but he couldn’t quite reach it. He was fatter than Coco and she could get into parts of the straw he couldn’t.

  Henrietta handed Ben a tissue. She was not prone to bursting into tears herself but she always kept the tissues handy in case Ben did. ‘I think I saw her tail disappearing under the old oak tree. I had a poke about with a stick. There seems to be some sort of burrow down there.’

  ‘Bunny’s in my burrow!’ Eduardo howled in anguish. ‘I have to get back there before she does any damage.’

  ‘Quick!’ Coco ordered. She was beginning to feel really anxious about Eduardo. If Henrietta thought that Binny was safe, it wouldn’t be long before the subject got back to taking Eduardo to the pet shop.

  ‘Got it!’ Fuzzy’s front paw made contact with the strap of the satchel. He gripped it firmly and began to pull. ‘Darn it, now I’m stuck!’

  Ben blew his nose loudly. ‘Do you think Binny might have found some other bunny friends?’ he sniffed.

  ‘Yes, I do.’ Henrietta said firmly. ‘So stop feeling bad about her and get this little chap off to the pet shop instead. Peggy will look after him. That will make you feel better.’

  Coco saw Henrietta’s sensible shoes coming towards the hutch. She saw Henrietta’s knees bend and her hand reach towards the pet carrier.

  ‘Fuzzy!’ she chattered. ‘Now!’

  ‘Coming!’ he panted.

  ‘But I can’t find the car keys,’ Ben complained.

  Henrietta’s hand hovered over the handle. ‘Have you tried your pocket?’ she suggested, turning to look at Ben.

  ‘Here!’ Fuzzy reached the door of the hutch. He passed the satchel to Coco.

  Coco opened it and took out the skeleton keys. She got ready to throw them to Eduardo.

  Eduardo held his paw out between the bars of the pet carrier door.

  ‘Here they are!’ Ben took out the car keys from his pocket. ‘They must have been there all the time. Silly me.’

  Henrietta looked down again. Her hand closed on the handle of the pet carrier.

  ‘Throw them, señorita!’ Eduardo cried.

  Coco thought fast. It was too late to throw the skeleton keys. If Henrietta saw her she would think it was very odd for one guinea pig to be throwing a set of miniature keys to another guinea pig. Worse still, she might take the keys away. If Henrietta did that, then Eduardo would still end up in the pet shop and she and Fuzzy wouldn’t be able to get out of their hutch to rescue him!

  ‘No.’ She sat on the keys instead so that Henrietta couldn’t see them.

  ‘Then I am doomed!’ The pet carrier rose into the air. ‘Goodbye, amigos. It’s been nice knowing you.’

  Henrietta’s sensible shoes followed Ben’s trainers into the hallway and up the stairs.

  There was silence in the kitchen.

  ‘Uh-oh,’ Fuzzy whispered finally. ‘Now what?’

  Coco put the satchel around her neck.

  ‘We’ll fix that lock so we can open it without a key like we did before,’ she said. ‘Then first thing tomorrow we’ll go to Eduardo’s burrow and get Binny.’ She took a deep breath. ‘And then we’ll go to the pet shop and rescue Eduardo!’

  9

  The Easter Bunny

  ‘I was naughty because I was sad, and I was sad because I wanted to be a pet, and I was jealous of you because you were pets. I never meant to get you into trouble and I never meant to get Eduardo sent to the pet shop!’

  The next morning, inside Eduardo’s burrow under the old oak tree, Coco and Fuzzy listened carefully to Binny.

  Ben and Henrietta had been woken early by a text from Peggy at Pets2Go saying that a large queue of volunteers had arrived to fix the cages and help clean up the rescue centre. The website had worked! As soon as Ben and Henrietta left the house, Coco and Fuzzy had let themselves out of the hutch with one of Eduardo’s skeleton keys and rushed to the copse to find Binny.

  Poor Binny had spent a miserable night on her own in the burrow. She had been too scared to return to the house.

  ‘I wasn’t scared of the fox,’ she explained. ‘I was scared that everyone hated me because I’ve been so horrible. I felt just like I did the last time, when I was left on my own in a box outside the rescue centre.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Fuzzy said. ‘I was left on my own too, in an old shed at the bottom of an overgrown garden. But then Ben found me and now I have a lovely home, and so will you. I promise.’

  ‘But everyone hates me.’

  Binny’s tears fell on the earth floor. Fuzzy carefully dried her face with a large leaf.

  ‘No, they don’t,’ Coco said. ‘We wouldn’t have come to find you if we didn’t care about you. And you made friends with Banoffee’s children. They’re all really worried about you. So were Ben and Henrietta. The only reason they stopped looking for you was because they thought you’d found a rabbit burrow and met some other rabbits. They didn’t realize that the burrow was Eduardo’s.’

  Binny’s face crumpled.

  ‘Eduardo!’ she gulped. ‘We need to help him. We need to get to the pet shop.’

  In spite of everything, Fuzzy and Coco smiled at one another.

  ‘We knew you’d want to help, Binny,’ Fuzzy said. ‘Besides, you’re expected at the Easter Fair.’

  He told her about all the ticks he’d had on his website.

  ‘You mean all those people want to see me?’ Binny asked in awe.

  ‘Yes, Binny, they do,’ Coco said.

  ‘Then I’m going to be the best-behaved Easter Bunny in the whole world.’ Binny beamed, but then her expression changed. ‘But how are we going to get there?’

  Just then Terry popped his head into the burrow.

  ‘You coming or what?’ he demanded. ‘I just fixed the Sat Nav in the truck.’

  Fuzzy drove the truck. He knew the way from when Ben used to take him to work so he had someone to talk to during his lunch hour. That was when the rescue centre first opened. Now Ben usually had cats, dogs, hedgehogs and a donkey to talk to while he ate his sandwich.

  They drove through the park, along a footpath, round the back of the supermarket car park and past the old people’s home. No one saw them. Finally the truck bumped along the alleyway at the back of the high-street shops.

  They pulled up beside some dustbins. A pile of chewed wood was stacked next to them.

  ‘That looks as if it’s from the cages that I chewed,’ Binny said.

  ‘That means the clear-up must have begun,’ said Coco. ‘The volunteers must be mending the animal cages!’

  Sure enough, when Binny and the guinea pigs crept up the garden at the back of the rescue centre they were delighted by what they saw. Peggy, Ben and Henrietta were carrying the animals through a gate from the pet shop next door and putting them in pens on the grass.

  Helpers of all ages were busy decorating the outside of the building with bunting, ready for the Easter Fair. And from inside came the noise of sawing and hammering. There was even a smell of fresh paint.

  Other volunteers were busy in the garden, setting up tables with food and drinks. There was even a tombola stall and a place to
buy Easter eggs. Ben came out into the garden to see how things were getting on. A child ran up to him with a banner.

  ‘Where shall I put this?’ he said.

  Ben uncurled the banner. His face fell slightly. In large sparkly letters it read:

  EASTER BUNNY

  ‘I’m afraid the Easter Bunny isn’t coming,’ Ben said, a little sadly.

  ‘But my dad said it was on the website.’ The boy sounded disappointed. ‘I really wanted to see her.’

  The animals listened intently from behind a big bush.

  ‘OK, Binny,’ Coco said quietly. ‘This is it. Go on. Go to Ben.’

  Binny hesitated for a second, but only for a second. Then she raced towards Ben and leaped into his arms.

  ‘Binny!’ Ben cried. ‘How did you … ?’ But he didn’t have time to finish his sentence because just then the children who had seen Binny started to chant:

  ‘We love Binny! We love Binny!’

  Coco squeezed Fuzzy’s paw. He squeezed hers back. They didn’t need to say anything because they could both see how happy Binny looked. Now everyone was cheering: ‘We love Binny! We love Binny!’

  ‘Pssst!’

  The noise came from near the tombola stall.

  ‘Have you forgotten your old amigo?’

  ‘It’s Eduardo!’ Coco cried.

  The guinea pigs scurried towards the tombola. They stopped dead.

  ‘Poor Eduardo!’ Fuzzy whispered.

  Eduardo was strapped into a dolly’s buggy. He had a baby’s bonnet on his head and – worst of all – he was wearing a baby’s nappy!

  He had a terrible frown on his face.

  ‘He doesn’t look very happy,’ the little girl pushing the buggy said. ‘I don’t think I want this one.’

  ‘Good,’ said Eduardo, although of course the little girl didn’t understand.

  He scowled even harder.