* * *
It was nearly an hour past sunset when Alice declared it was time to go. The moon hadn’t yet risen, but rabbits see better in the dark than people can, and dogs have even better night vision than rabbits. For creatures who go largely by sound and smell, traveling in the dark was not a problem.
Zigzagging, however, was. As soon as they entered the meadow, the two cottontails kept angling off in different directions. Foxy tried to reason with them. “Rabbits, listen,” she said. “There’s only one of me, which means I can only protect one of you unless you stay close. Can you at least zigzag together?”
They tried, but thousands of years of rabbit-brain instinct wasn’t easily overruled. Finally, Thistle agreed to climb on Foxy—the kit weighed barely more than a pound, not much of a burden—and ride on the dog’s back, while Alice moderated her back-and-forth impulse by reminding herself that she didn’t need to evade predators as long as her bodyguard—her body-dog? her Foxy-guard?—was on duty. This cut the evasive maneuvers by half and saved a lot of time. Thistle held on and squeaked with glee as Foxy’s prancing gait bounced them across the starlit meadow, toward the waiting farm.
The chipmunks were already there, about a dozen this time. Chipmunks are punctual to a fault, as planning ahead is at the core of their nut-hoarding, winter-is-always-around-the-corner way of life. They carried the promised seeds in their cheek pockets, which made them comically full in the face.
At the sight of the approaching rabbits, their eyes grew nearly as round as their cheeks. One rabbit loped along in a nearly straight line, just as a predator would, and the other was riding on the back of a—
“Fox!” one of the chipmunks cried, spraying zucchini seeds everywhere.
Thistle placed his front paws on top of Foxy’s head and sat upright as he rode. “Relax, you scaredy-munks!” he cried, full of good cheer. “The dog works for us. No harm will come to you!”
But the chipmunks had already launched a high-pitched verbal assault, squealing insults at Foxy in their needle-sharp voices. It was hard to make out the exact words, as they all shrieked at once, but the phrases “chipmunk-killer, stink-paws, munk-monster” were among them.
Alice feared they’d wake up the farmer-people. There was no time for explanations. “Foxy,” she said with authority, “growl!”
Foxy bowed low so Thistle could slide off. Earlier, Alice had explained that, despite their sincere admiration for Foxy’s peaceful nature, it was the fear of dogs that would keep the other animals from raiding the garden. There would be times when Foxy would have to put on a show of ferocity, even if she had no intention of acting upon it.
This appealed to Foxy’s proud sense of duty, which every dog has, no matter how people dress them up like dolls and take undignified photos for their own amusement. A dog needs a job to feel truly happy, and now, at last, Foxy had one.
“Grrrr,” she growled at the chipmunks, unconvincingly.
“Flea-house, slobber-mouth, skunk-breath!” the chipmunks screamed.
“That is just needlessly rude.” Foxy’s tone was menacing, but her drooped ears showed that they’d hurt her feelings.
“Hush, chipmunks!” Alice scolded. “Do you honestly think we would travel with such a dangerous, bloodthirsty dog if we couldn’t control her? Now, be quiet! Your screeching is enough to attract every owl in the valley.”
That stopped the awful noise, but now the chipmunks were desperate to get as far away from the slobber-mouth as possible. They spit out their seeds in turn, babbling information about what kind they were and how they grew best. Alice was especially excited about the radish seeds, which were tiny but held great promise. The chipmunks had brought some extras, too—herb seeds, green beans, and a few withered peas.
“And, behold,” their leader said with a sweep of his tiny arm, as a terrified chipmunk came forward to spit out the seeds on command. “Swiss chard!”
“Lester will be pleased about that.” Thistle’s tail twitched with glee.
“Yes, it’s quite tasty. Can we go now?” the leader begged, his striped flanks trembling.
“Of course,” Alice said. “Thank you for being as good as your word, and so punctual, too.”
“Chipmunks always are!” he cried as they began to back away, eyes locked on the fur-tongued, puddle-drooling farm demon!
“And we’ll keep to our end of the bargain, too, come harvest time.” It was such a momentous occasion, Alice felt she ought to say a few words. “May these seeds sprout and grow! May the garden prosper! See you in autumn, when the days grow short! Farewell, chipmunks, and—thanks?”
But the dapper little rodents had disappeared into the night.
“All right,” said Thistle, who was excited and nervous, too. “Let’s go be farmers!”
The rabbits began hopping toward the garden, but Foxy stayed where she was, eyes half closed, nose in the air. She’d become distracted by the powerful smell of Spearmint-Flavored GlitterTooth Chew-Bones, which seemed to permeate the whole yard.
“Foxy?” Alice called, once she realized the dog hadn’t followed. “Is it safe to begin?”
Foxy chalked up the minty hallucination to hunger and resolved to ignore it. There would be real Chew-Bones soon enough. “Not quite yet,” she replied, trotting after the rabbits. “See? The lights in the house are on. It means my humans are still awake. They usually don’t wander outdoors at night, but I’ve been gone all day. I wouldn’t be one bit surprised if they came outside to look for me.” Foxy paused, to savor the deep emotional satisfaction of it. “Sweet, sweet humans! I miss them so, but think how happy they’ll be to see me again.”
“How long do we have to wait?” Alice asked.
“Until the lights change. It won’t be long.”
Sure enough, within the hour the yellow lights downstairs went off, and a flickering, blue-toned light shone through Carl’s window. Minutes later, a similar blue light came on in Brad and Sally’s bedroom.
“That’s it. They won’t come out now. Carl’s playing his zombie dinosaur video game, and Sally and Brad are watching something on the television.”
“What’s television?” asked Thistle.
“Aren’t you a country bunny! Imagine not knowing what television is.” Foxy nuzzled the little rabbit, of whom she now felt extra fond since he’d ridden on her back. “It’s a like a small version of the world inside a frame. You watch it to see how things turn out.”
Alice thought about this. “How do things turn out?” she asked.
Foxy waggled her tail, pleased to be the expert. “It depends which channel you watch. On one, people are always cooking. That’s Sally’s favorite. Things always go well there, and everyone eats at the end. Brad’s favorite is very odd; it’s just the heads of unhappy people who argue with each other. I feel sorry for them. It must be dreadful to only have a head. Brad calls it ‘news.’ Carl doesn’t have a channel, just the zombie dinosaur game.”
Ever curious, the rabbits started peppering her with questions. “What are channels? What are zombies? What are dinosaurs?”
“One at a time, dear bunnies! Channels; well, I don’t know how it works, but they’re all different and everyone prefers their own. Dinosaurs are animals, but extinct, which means you won’t be meeting one anytime soon. Zombies are hard to describe. They look alive but they’re not. They’re quite terrifying and everyone is always running away from them.”
“You mean, like the Mauler?” Thistle asked with a shiver.
Foxy didn’t know what the Mauler was, so now it was the rabbits’ turn to explain. When they finished, Foxy flattened her ears. “It sounds like it might be a machine, but there’s one sure way to tell. Does it eat?”
“Yes,” Alice said gravely. “It eats the ground.”
Foxy’s tail unfurled in dismay. “Not a machine, then. How awful! It’ll probably have its own channel soon. And here I thought zombies were only pretend!”
“We’d better get to work,” said Alice, flexing
her paws. The Mauler was the whole reason they were there, after all.
* * *
The vegetable garden was modest by family farm standards, about an acre. It hadn’t been planted in a few years and needed a good digging to loosen things up and get rid of the weeds. Thus, the farmer-rabbits’ first job was to till the soil.
Farmer Crenshaw used to do this by hand with a spading fork when he was young and his back was up to it; in later years he used a gas-powered garden tiller that had been sold to him by an eager young farm equipment salesman by the name of Phil Shirley. Alice and Thistle had eight paws between them; these would have to be tools enough. Foxy offered to help, but a dog’s way of digging is nothing compared to a rabbit’s, and it was more important that she stand guard anyway. The owls could come at any time.
Luckily, the cottontails’ earnest efforts woke a family of voles who’d been sleeping underground, not far from the garden gate. Voles spend most of their lives beneath the earth. Digging is their specialty and there’s nothing they like to do better. This particular vole family had lived in the abandoned garden for months, but as soon as the new farmer-people had arrived they’d arranged to move, as a garden full of traps was no place to raise a family.
Their new burrow was safely away from the farmhouse and on higher ground, too. It was mostly dug and ready to move into, and they’d come back this one last time for nostalgia’s sake, for a final nap and to pick up their cherished trinkets: special twigs and pebbles and so on that they’d grown attached to. Voles are sentimental that way. They don’t see very well (eyesight’s not much use when you live in the dark) and so their inner life tends to loom large.
Being rousted by rabbits put an end to their lingering. It was time to go. But once Alice and Thistle explained what they were doing and why, the voles offered to help out a bit before making their exit. It was awfully nice of them, but it wasn’t often that voles got to show off their digging skills to rabbits, either, and even voles have their pride. In a few hours, every square inch of the garden soil had been turned over until it was fluffy as the seed head of a dandelion. No gas-powered tiller could have done the job better.
Impressed and grateful, Alice offered the voles a share of the harvest as payment, as seemed only fair—but only if they promised not to raid the garden, just as the rabbits and chipmunks had agreed. Her tone was sweet as clover, but Foxy was her ace in the vole, so to speak. The threatening stink of a meat-eater was unmistakable, and the voles said “Yes, yes, of course!” before scurrying to their new residence.
Alice and Thistle touched noses for good luck. It was time to plant the seeds. This wasn’t difficult now that the soil was so well prepared, but it still took time to do right. By the time they buried that last shriveled pea, a warm glow brightened the eastern sky, promising a new day ahead.
It was an hour before sunrise, and the farmer-rabbits were done. They’d worn their claws to the nailbeds with digging and had never been so tired in all their short lives, but they were rightly proud of what they’d accomplished.
Foxy was just as proud. Her empty belly and sense of duty had summoned a spirit of steadfast alertness she didn’t know she had. All night long she’d stayed vigilant. She’d resisted that minty Chew-Bone smell by imagining the bold spirit of Shibas of antiquity rising within her, those agile, fearless dogs who hunted alongside the samurai of long-ago Japan!
Now, as the dawn approached, she had one more duty to perform. It was time to call Doggo to take the rabbits home.
“Dog-ohhhhhhh!” Foxy howled. “Dog-ohhhhhhhhh!”
Although they use it rarely, Shibas have a distinctive, piercing howl, and even a quarter of a mile away in his snug fox den, Doggo got the message.
So did the roosters at Farmer Janis’s place, who were up and crowing a full half hour earlier than they otherwise would have been.
Carl was asleep and didn’t budge, as he was bone-tired from crying half the night over his missing dog, but in the big room where his parents slept, Sally stirred and rolled over, dreaming. She was a pioneer woman in the old west, churning butter and fending off outlaws as coyotes howled in the distance, tending her sourdough starter with one hand and branding cattle with the other. It was a hardworking dream, but Sally liked it, and there was a contented look on her sleeping face as she made little O lips—dog-oh, dog-oh, the coyotes in her dream howled!—and sank deeper into her pillow.
Brad was dreaming of branding, too, the kind he used to do at his old job, not for cattle, but for clients, and the dream was all too familiar … the clients were waiting but his slide presentation refused to work! And he was in his underwear! He hated this dream so much. He used to have it every night in the old days, more rarely since the golden parachute landed. But it still came back in times of stress.
In the smallest bedroom Marie lay in her crib, wide awake, playing with her endlessly fascinating toes. She chortled when she heard the haunting Shiba howl.
“Dog-ohhhhhh!” she sang, so softly even the baby monitor didn’t hear it. “Doggo, hooooooome!”
CHAPTER TWELVE
The prettiest little garden you ever did see.
“Mom, Dad, look! She’s home! Foxy’s home!”
All the Harveys, but especially Carl, were filled with emotion to find their long-lost dog curled tail to nose in a perfectly foxlike circle, snoring on the mat outside the kitchen door. Carl’s emotion was joy. His parents had different but equally strong feelings. Little did they know the pup had been on the property all night.
Foxy was so deep in an exhausted sleep she didn’t hear her boy coming until it was too late. Carl seized her and held her so tightly she yelped. “Did you smell the GlitterTooth Chew-Bones, girl? Did you?” he said, arms locked around her neck. “Is that how you found your way home? I knew it would work, I knew it!”
Foxy really deserved a lot of credit. Even with the yard booby-trapped, nothing could deter her from her watchdog duties, not until her rabbits (she thought of them as hers now, just as she thought of the Harveys as hers) were safely turned over to Doggo and on their zigzag journey home.
After they left was a different story. Bleary-eyed with fatigue but also obsessed, she’d followed her madly twitching nose around the yard. By the dawn’s early light she found one, then another. When she realized what her boy had done—and she knew it was Carl who’d done it, as the scent of his unhappy tears was prominently mixed in—she was deeply moved. What heart-tugging proof of her value to the household! And what largesse on Carl’s part, to scatter such a wasteful quantity of the precious treats willy-nilly, outdoors, all for her!
She was too tired to do a proper count, so she divided the pile roughly in two. Half she buried for Doggo. The rest she gobbled up. She hadn’t intended to eat so many, but it had been a long, hungry day and night, awash in the tantalizing scent of small prey animals. By this point her appetite was tugging the leash, as it were, and there was no reason to hold back.
Soon her belly was stuffed and her breath was so minty fresh she could have passed for a dental hygienist, if she’d been human. She was filthy and exhausted and as happy as she’d ever been.
“How lucky I am, to have been born a Shiba!” she thought, yawning widely, with a spearmint-flavored burp. She briefly considered scratching at the kitchen door so she could enjoy the comfort of her fancy dog bed, but it was too early to wake her humans. Anyway, the idea of spending the sunrise hours outside after a whole night out-of-doors appealed to her, as she’d never done that before. Once the Harveys got hold of her, she suspected she might not get the chance to do it again.
The doormat was flat and rough, but it didn’t matter. She spun around three times before lying down, as was her custom, and fell asleep at once, cushioned and warmed by her own luxurious fur. She would have slept there for hours, dreaming of samurai adventures, but forty-five minutes later Carl came stumbling outside in his pajamas and woke her with his cries of joy and too-tight hugs. Within moments Brad appeared with a brand-new
collar, buckled her up, and dragged her inside the house.
They tempted her with a freshly opened can of her prescription food from Dr. Yang, and Carl waved still more GlitterTooth treats in front of her overwhelmed nose, but she couldn’t force herself to eat another bite.
Carl wanted his parents to call a vet right away. Brad promised they would certainly do so if Foxy hadn’t regained her appetite by dinnertime. After that it took exactly five minutes for Sally to take the lavender-scented shampoo out of the cupboard and place it menacingly near the sink.
“That dog,” she said, wrinkling her nose, “needs a bath.”
* * *
The voles told the squirrels, the squirrels told the jays, and soon every animal in the valley had heard some version of the unbelievable tale: a young rabbit named Alice and her runt-sized brother had attacked the farm on the far side of the meadow and taken it back from the farmers. They commanded an army of chipmunks and had a pair of trained foxes working for them, too!
Ordinary rabbits could never do such things, the other cottontails said, so Alice and her brother must not be ordinary rabbits. On that they all agreed. Some thought a warren meeting should be called to discuss the wisdom of having these otherworldly creatures living among them. No prey animal wants to draw attention to itself, after all. Only bad things could come of being noticed.
Violet pooh-poohed the question, and her opinion carried enough force to end the debate, or at least postpone it for a while. It had only been a week since the warren meeting where Alice volunteered to go to the farm. Then, Violet had taken Alice for an eager young kit, too curious for her own good, perhaps, and too oblivious to danger, but the young were often like that.
Now she wondered if there wasn’t something unusual about Alice after all. An army of chipmunks was a ridiculous notion, but anyone with a nose could smell that a fox and something very like a dog had been shockingly near Burrow—yet not a rabbit had been taken. It was strange, to say the least, and Violet intended to do some quiet rumination about it herself, before speaking her mind to anyone.
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