“It’s been such a pleasure to meet you all,” Ruth Shirley sang out. “So long, now! Bye-bye!” She gave a special bye-bye wave to Marie, who burped again, loudly.
“Thank you so much for coming by,” Sally replied, an icy smile on her face. Brad held the door open while the real estate agent waved and cooed.
“Oh, look,” Ruth Shirley said as she stepped outside. “Rabbits! Two little ones, hiding under the steps. How cute!”
“Where?” Carl dashed forward to look. “I don’t see them.”
“They were right here. I must have scared them coming out. They just ran away.”
“Rabbits on a farm, oh boy! Good luck with that.” Mr. Rowes chuckled as he picked up his coat. “Better set some traps before you plant anything, Brad. If you don’t…”
Brad’s eyes narrowed. “I’ll rue the day. Got it.”
Foxy had been staring at Mr. Rowes this whole time. Now she growled fiercely, with her lips pulled back over her gums until all her teeth showed.
“Cute dog,” Mr. Rowes said. “Looks just like a fox. I hope nobody shoots it by mistake.”
As if all that wasn’t ill-mannered enough, Mr. Rowes grabbed an apple out of the fruit basket and bit it on his way out.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The worst thing there is.
“Hold on one minute there, young ’uns!” One of Lester’s long ears stood up straight, and the other one cocked to the side. Lester hadn’t been at Split Rock when the two adventurers got back, but they found him easily enough among the trees, keeping a watchful eye over a new litter of kits who were fresh out of the nest. “You mean to tell me you made friends with that diabolical tail-wagger? That murderous, drool-encrusted barker? That howling hound? That canine killer?”
“She’s a Shiba Inu,” Alice explained. “It’s a special kind of dog.”
“She was nice,” Thistle added. “She wanted to chase me, but she said it was only pretend.”
“She even asked the farmers to give us carrots,” Alice said earnestly. “I wish they had! But then more people came, and we had to hide.” Alice and Thistle had huddled there together under the wooden steps, willing themselves not to die of fright when those two heavy-footed humans stomped right over their heads. They didn’t unfreeze until Ruth Shirley stepped outside again, and that’s when they finally bolted.
Meanwhile, they’d heard every word spoken in the kitchen, between Ruth Shirley and Mr. Rowes and the Harvey clan. They hadn’t understood it all but were confident that Lester would, and had zigzagged so fast across the meadow and back to the wood’s edge that there wasn’t time to be afraid.
“Carrots!” Lester sounded outraged, but he was drooling, too. “So you met the dog and the farmers! My, my. Start talking, you two. No, wait. I’d like Violet to hear this.” He turned to the newly independent litter of baby bunnies. “Lesson over! You’re on your own now, pipsqueaks. Remember what I told you! Rabbitfolk don’t live long—”
“But we can still be careful,” the kittens answered, in tiny voices.
“That’s right. Good luck to you all, it’s been a pleasure,” Lester said, and the three of them went in search in Violet.
They found her in Burrow, napping, but rabbits are light sleepers. Their approach was enough to wake the wise old cottontail, and they gathered beneath the big tree whose tough web of roots encircled and protected their underground home.
“It’s good you made it back alive,” Violet said to Alice and Thistle. “Now, tell me everything. Four farmers, you say?”
“We saw four. I think that’s all there are,” Alice said. “The smartest one is Marie. She’s still in the nest and screeches like an owl, but she’s no danger to us. From the smell of her, she only eats apples.”
“Intelligent. I like apples, too,” Lester remarked.
“These had a different scent mixed in. It was like tree bark, but spicy,” Thistle explained, for of course he’d never smelled cinnamon before. “But Alice, don’t leave out the dog.”
“Oh, the dog, sorry! We already told Lester but I’ll tell it again.” When Alice related how Foxy asked to chase Thistle and offered them carrots, Violet blinked.
“It sounds like a trap,” she said flatly.
“I thought a trap was a box that closes and won’t open again?” Alice asked.
“Or a metal mouth that bites you and won’t let go? Oops, sorry!” Thistle said, remembering about Violet’s ear.
Violet thumped her back feet. “Pretending to be a friend when you’re not a friend is a trap, too.”
“It’s a sneaky kind of trap,” Lester agreed. “It’s an odious bit of trickery, if you ask me.”
“What’s odious?” Thistle asked.
“It means it stinks, young ’un. Like the breath of an owl who just ate skunk for dinner.”
Alice’s nose twitched at the thought. “Maybe it does. But I don’t think Foxy is the one who smells. It was those two other humans, the ones who walked over our heads while we were hiding. They pretended to be friends to the new farmers, but they weren’t.” She looked at Lester. “Do humans set traps for other humans?”
The old cottontail chuckled. “I wouldn’t be surprised. But human problems are not rabbit problems, oh lucky we!”
“What if they are, though?” Alice persisted. “What if the new farmers are about to get caught in a trap?”
“What are you talking about, kit?” Violet asked intently. “Start at the beginning.”
Alice and Thistle proceeded to tell the two older rabbits all they had seen and heard: that a man with a head like a giant egg wanted to take the farm away from the new farmers. That a woman with plumage like the crest of a cardinal was helping him, and that she even brought food as bait. That the more the egg-head man talked, the more the new farmers smelled like fear. All rabbits know that smell.
“The egg-head man said they didn’t know how to run a farm and should let him have it instead. Otherwise it would make them ‘rue the day,’” Alice said. “That’s the part that sounded like a trap. Though I don’t think it’s the kind that bites—well, you know.”
Violet was listening hard, her damaged ear cocked just so. “Indeed I do,” she said. “Go on.”
“Whatever kind of trap it is,” Alice finished, “if the farmers get caught in it, the farm gets caught, too.”
“The egg-head man said something about tearing it all down,” Thistle added.
“Tearing it down! Tearing it down!” Violet’s eyes grew glassy as death. “This is terrible news. Terrible! Lester, do you think so, too?”
Lester groaned with anxiety. “The Mauler!” he finally said.
Alice and Thistle nearly collapsed. The Mauler was the worst thing there was. It was worse than a monster under the bed would be to a human child. It was worse than the scariest supervillain in one of Carl’s comic books, worse than all the zombies in all the zombie horror movies put together.
The Mauler was even worse than a bear, and a bear was the biggest, most frightening animal in the valley. A bear could rip its way through a thorn-filled hedge and tear branches from a tree to get what it wanted. But a bear was just trying to eat and stay alive, which made it no different from a rabbit, or any other animal, for that matter.
The Mauler was something else. It would appear early one morning, yellow as a buttercup, to knock down trees and heave up the ground with its great mechanical jaws. It roared like a hurricane and spewed exhaust, and left vast muddy pits in the earth from which squat, square buildings rose. Or else it turned meadows into strange, hard-surfaced lakes, black as scorched wood. In time, the people’s cars would swarm on these lakes, gathered close and still, and then leave again all at once, like migrating birds.
The Mauler sometimes traveled in a pack, wreaking havoc with others of its kind. It had something to do with humans, and never arrived without one of them riding on its neck. But whether the Mauler served the people or the people were enslaved by the Mauler was never quite clear to the animals of
the valley between the hills. It might not have been perfectly clear to the people, either. But the rabbits knew nothing about that.
“I didn’t believe the Mauler was real,” Thistle whined. “I thought it was just a story, to scare us!”
“The Mauler is real,” Lester said, whiskers aquiver. “All too real. I’ve seen one. I know.”
Alice’s heart thumped fast in her chest. She, too, had thought of the Mauler as an old rabbits’ tale. That it was real was almost too terrible to comprehend.
“The Mauler eats the ground. Eats it right up,” Violet added. Her voice was thick with defeat. “If the Mauler’s coming, we’re all doomed.”
Even as the four rabbits crouched there, a rumbling throbbed in the earth. They felt it first in their feet. Then they heard the mechanical roar and the slow turn of wheels, and a rhythmic bang! bang! bang! as exhaust combusted through a pipe.
The noise grew closer and louder, until the rabbits’ thin ears trembled.
“Is it here?” Thistle squeaked. “Is it the Mauler?”
But it wasn’t the Mauler, this time. Just the roar of a tractor lumbering along Prune Street, making its slow way to the farmhouse the Harveys now called home.
* * *
The tractor groaned and clambered up the hill like a tired green elephant. The sight of it out his bedroom window brightened Carl’s spirits considerably, and though it wasn’t quite lunchtime, he decided it was worth going outside to inspect.
He’d been hiding in his room—well, he’d been sent there, as punishment for his rudeness to the bald man, but it felt like hiding—for hours, reading comic books aloud to Foxy and Big Robot while his parents talked heatedly in the kitchen. In Brooklyn it would have been easy for Carl to eavesdrop, but this house was too big for that. The Harvey parents were rooms away and down a flight of stairs, barely audible. Carl couldn’t even tell how much of the conversation was about him and how much was about what Mr. Rowes had said.
With no way to track the substance or progress of the debate, he’d decided he wouldn’t come out of his room until he got hungry. By then, his parents would have had time to cool off. But the arrival of the tractor was too appealing to resist.
Foxy was stretched out in Carl’s bed, snoring. No dogs allowed in people beds was a serious Harvey household rule, but she looked so cute with her little fox-orange head on his pillow, he decided to leave her there. He closed the bedroom door behind him, so the dog wouldn’t get caught, and tippy-toed downstairs and out the front door, where he broke into a run.
“Wow!” he said, racing to greet the new arrival and its driver. “Is that a real tractor? Why is it green? Can I touch it? Who are you?”
“Sure it’s real. It’s green because it’s a John Deere, the finest farm machinery money can buy. You can touch it if your hands are cleaner than the tractor. Lucky for you it’s pretty dirty. I’m your neighbor, Janis. Gimme a handshake, kid. Firm, that’s right! Show me what you’ve got.” The woman wore overalls, a neckerchief and work boots, and a wide-brimmed canvas hat. Her shirtsleeves were rolled up, revealing a prominent tattoo on her forearm.
Carl did his best with the handshake. “What’s that?” he said, pointing.
“What, my arm? What, my sleeve? Oh, that! That’s a tattoo. Want one? I’m getting pretty good at them. I’m very artistic, as you can probably tell from my demeanor. Nah, you’re too young.”
She was teasing him, he knew that. Normally he didn’t like being teased, especially by grown-ups, but when it was a grown-up with a tractor he didn’t mind so much.
“I know it’s a tattoo, but what is it?” He peered close. “It looks like writing. It says Farmer at the end.”
“It’s in German. It says, ‘Ich bin ein Farmer.’ I am a Farmer.”
“We’re farmers, too,” Carl said with newfound pride, now that he knew it was the kind of thing people got tattoos about. “We didn’t used to be, but now we are.”
Farmer Janis gave him an appraising look. “Well, congratulations. You do have a pretty nice farm here, kid. You don’t mind if I call you kid, do you? I name all my chickens and I never forget any, but when it comes to people, I only learn the names I have to.”
“My name’s Carlsbad,” he explained.
“Is it really?” Farmer Janis whistled. “I’m definitely gonna call you kid.”
“And I have a baby sister named Marie.”
“That’s all right. I’ll call her kid, too.” She looked around. “So. You and your sister do all the farming around here?”
Carl laughed. “Nooooooo! We’re just kids!”
“In that case,” she said, slipping the keys to the tractor into one of her many pockets, “take me to your leader, kid.”
* * *
Farmer Janis looked right at home at the kitchen table with Kid Marie perched on one knee. She’d been there nearly an hour already, drinking coffee, listening and nodding while Sally and Brad told her the whole story, starting with Brad’s golden parachute and ending with the morning’s unsettling visit from Mr. Rowes.
“So that’s where we stand,” said Brad, leaning back in his chair. “We’re serious about making this place succeed. We’re ready to work hard. We’re good learners. But this freaked us out, to put it bluntly. I think we could use some guidance.”
“We need help, desperately,” Sally said with feeling. “I don’t want to see that Mr. Rowes’s face again—or that awful redheaded woman, either!”
Janis burst out laughing. “Ruth Shirley! Aw, Ruth’s all right. You’ll get used to her. You’ll have to. She runs half the organizations in town, and her husband sells all the farm equipment. Ruth’s just trying to make a buck like everyone else. But Rowes … well, he’s bad news, and that’s a fact. Here, take this kid off me, would you? That’s a bumper crop of saliva right there.”
Brad retrieved the drooling baby, and Janis wiped her hands on her overalls. “Look, I’m not going to lie,” she said. “Maybe you guys did bite off more than you can chew. So what?”
As if to demonstrate, she chose a piece of dried fruit from the snack plate Sally had put out and chomped away on it. She chewed, and chewed, and chewed. Finally, she swallowed. “Did you make this?” she said to Sally, who nodded.
“Pretty good.” Janis helped herself to another piece. “Hey, that’s pretty darn good.”
Carl squirmed. “But why take perfectly good fruit—”
“Kid, hold your questions. I’m trying to relate to your parents here, farmer to farmer.” Janis chewed a bit more, then spoke. “You want this farm to make money, right? Here’s my advice. Get some sheep.”
“Sheep?” Brad and Sally said it together.
Janis nodded. “People like sheep. They find them scenic. Of course, that’s because they never got kicked in the ribs while shearing one, or had to force a dose of medicine down a sick ewe’s throat, or chase a ram down the street because the thick-headed bully got loose.”
As he listened, Carl found himself reaching for a piece of the dreaded fruit. Maybe if he pretended it was a gummy bear …
“I thought you didn’t like it,” his mother said, not missing a trick.
“It’s not so bad,” he quickly mumbled. He didn’t want to miss a word of Janis’s fascinating information. The gummy bear self-hypnosis was working, though.
“Janis, you were saying, sheep?” Brad asked, a touch of strain in his voice.
Janis took another piece of dried fruit. “I’m serious,” she went on, chewing with abandon. “Get yourself some sheep. Leave a couple grazing out front, where folks will see ’em. Put a sign on the lawn: ‘Come pet our sheep!’ It’ll attract visitors, and then you’ll have customers to sell your wares to. Sheep are good workers, too. Best lawn mower in the world is a hungry sheep. You know about planting cover crops?”
Marie was fussing in Brad’s arms. He handed her off to Sally, who shoved a pacifier in the baby’s mouth and strapped her into her bouncy seat.
“No, but I hope you’re going
to teach me,” Brad said, wiping the spit off his shoulder. “Are sheep hard to take care of?”
“No more than any other animal. You have to feed them and keep them fenced in and call the vet when they’re sick. Sheep are stubborn. They need to be bossed around. A cow’s obedient, but with a sheep, you have to get physical.”
Sally looked appalled. “Physical, in what way?”
“You whack it on the nose. Hard.” Janis demonstrated by delivering a brutal blow to the top of her own thigh. “Ow,” she said.
“No!” Marie yelled from her bouncy seat. “No hit!”
“You’ll do great in preschool someday, kid.” Janis turned to Sally. “Did you ever watch two rams butt heads? Check it out on YouTube sometime. A sheep’s skull is thick. It takes real muscle to get their attention.”
Both women looked at Brad as if evaluating his ability to swing a club. Carl thought of the strong man in the old cartoons who swung a mallet so hard it blew the bell off the top of the scale. Could his dad do that, he wondered?
Brad flexed his arms like Popeye. “I’ve never pictured myself going mano a mano with a sheep,” he said, with a nervous laugh.
Janis didn’t seem amused. “You learn something new every day on a farm, trust me. As for cash flow, sheep are versatile. You can shear ’em for the wool and sell it. If you dye the wool and spin yarn, you can sell that, too. You could get into the cheese-making business, or supply sheep’s milk to a cheese maker. I know a few; I can introduce you. And when it comes time to slaughter the lambs, don’t worry. There’s a fellow in the next town who’ll do it for you, cheap.”
“Slaughter the lambs?” Carl was on his feet. “You mean, kill them?”
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