J Rabbert Hoppenheimer's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

J Rabbert Hoppenheimer had sworn to build a desert home where no two-legs could cage another rabbit. Tonight he could not even stand. Blood ran down his left leg where the lab fence had torn it open. Behind him, far off, a siren still whined through the dark. He had cut the wire and crawled through. He had run until the lights of the two-leg lab shrank to nothing. Now the sand swallowed each hop, and his vision swam. He pressed his paw to the wound. It did not stop. His hat had fallen somewhere in the escape. His pipe was gone too. The night air bit at his bare ears. He needed shelter before dawn, before the heat or the trackers found him. A rabbit who dreamed of saving his whole kind could still bleed out alone in the dirt. Hoppenheimer dragged himself toward a low rise. He clawed at the slope and found a hollow scooped into the earth. Not deep enough. He kept pulling, breath ragged, until his paw struck something soft. A fern grew there against the bank. Its fronds were the gray of old ash, its roots dark and tangled. He had heard the elders name it. Ashroot. Where it grew, water hid close beneath. Where it grew, rabbits often denned. He scraped past the fern and felt the ground give. A tunnel mouth. Warm air breathed out of it, carrying the smell of dry grass and many bodies. A burrow. He wedged himself inside and slid down the earthen throat until the slope leveled. His leg left a dark smear behind him. Then his arms gave out. "Oh, you poor thing." A soft voice. Paws, gentle and quick, turned him onto his back. A tan rabbit knelt over him in a blue dress and a cream apron. She did not flinch at the blood. She pressed a wad of crushed leaves to his leg and leaned her weight on it. "Hold still. You'll tear it wider thrashing like that." "Trackers," Hoppenheimer managed. "They'll come. I led them... I'm sorry." "You led them to my door, did you." She did not stop working. From a rough wooden cupboard against the tunnel wall she pulled strips of cloth and a clay jar. "Then we'll bind you fast and talk after." She wrapped his leg tight. The bleeding slowed under her paws. "I'm Marigold. This warren is full of little ones asleep down that passage. So you'll understand why I need to know what you brought here." Hoppenheimer breathed. The pain dulled. He was alive, and under a roof of earth, among rabbits like the ones he meant to save. But he had dragged the two-legs' hunt to a burrow full of sleeping children. The siren still rode the wind outside. Marigold tied off the last knot and looked toward the tunnel mouth, listening.