Rabbits and Rosebuds
"There are monsters under the bed," Malcolm cried as he jumped from the rug into the covers.
"No, there aren't," Grandma assured him.
"There are," he insisted, having seen them.
Grandma sighed. "Do you want to hear a story?"
Malcolm nestled under blankets, pulled pillows close around his head.
"Yes," he said, mollified.
Huffy, Fluffy and Puffy conferred with great seriousness in the shade of their favorite rose bush.
"What are we going to eat?" wailed Fluffy.
Puffy looked at her with scorn. She always fell apart in a crisis.
Huffy hopped to the nearest decimated cabbage round and examined its leaves dolefully. As the oldest, and the only male, it was up to him to protect his sisters, to figure out what was wrong and how to fix it.
"Oh!" Puffy exclaimed. "Look at the wonderful butterflies!"
They were everywhere, swarming through the garden, resting on cabbage, flexing their angelic white wings.
Fluffy sighed in delight as one landed on her shoulder. "It's whispering in my ear," she shared, grinning.
Huffy harrumphed in a tone that meant: We have business to do here.
"Something is sneaking in and stealing our food," he summarized. "We need to set up a watch. Fluffy, you have the seven to three shift. Puffy, you take three to eleven. I'll do the midnight shift."
Huffy had learned from his father how to hide from hunting gray foxes, although it took alertness and daring that woke every nerve to the tips of his whiskers and hair.
Fluffy pouted and whined. She hated getting up early. "Puffy, will you switch with me? Please?"
Puffy hopped down the middle cabbage row toward their burrow. "Uh-uh," she voiced contentedly. "I love afternoon sun and the evening show as it lands and falls beneath our hills."
"Marauders," Huffy reminded curtly. "We're looking for thieves, not balls of fire. Or," he added, turning to Fluffy, "flying white angels."
Fluffy looked studiously at her front paws and pulled out a stray strand of grass with her teeth.
"Well," Huffy asked as they gathered a few days later by the rose bush, "did you see anything?"
Puffy shook her head, puzzled. The few cabbages left were disappearing rapidly. "Maybe we'll have to move," she opined despondently.
Fluffy's eyes opened wide in fear. "I don't want to leave home," she cried. "I love it here."
"What did you see?" Huffy demanded sternly.
"Just butterflies," Fluffy reported. "They're so lovely. They court on the wind and leave their greenish-black new babies in rainpockets of our cabbage leaves."
Huffy looked interested. "Then what?" he encouraged her.
"Then what?" Fluffy repeated, trying to remember the odyssey that entranced and hypnotized her.
"Green worms," Puffy offered. "The babies grow to tiny green worms."
"And then?" Huffy asked, excitedly.
"They get bigger," Puffy said flatly.
"What are they doing as they get bigger?" Huffy felt he was finally on the trail of something important.
Puffy thought back carefully, brought up the image of one green worm she'd watched and so liked that she'd given it a name. "It crawled slowly over the leaves and they seemed to disappear under its belly just as it moved along. When it got very fat, it jumped in the air, curled into a circle and fell to the ground where it right away went to sleep."
Huffy wasn't sure he believed all that. His sisters had lively imaginations and couldn't always be counted on to tell the difference between fantastic mind creations and what their eyes really saw.
Huffy concentrated on what appeared to be the only cogent fact, if indeed it was even a true observation. "The leaves disappear under their bellies?" he asked Fluffy for corroboration.
"Uh-huh," she answered idly, listening to songs of monarch butterfly wings as they drifted by her ear on the green chord of a thin morning breeze.
"Fluffy!"
"What?"
"Pay attention! The leaves disappear under the worms' bellies?"
Her eyes widened and her ears dropped down. "The babies are eating our cabbages?" she queried despondently.
"Yes!" Huffy exclaimed in triumph. "We've found our thieves!"
Fluffy and Puffy looked at their large back feet and conferred quickly in undertones.
"Let's move," Fluffy suggested uncharacteristically.
"We can't let him kill all the baby angels," Puffy agreed.
They both looked up.
"We want to move," they said in unison. "We don't like it here anymore."
Huffy laughed and hugged his sisters. He knew them well. They hopped sideways to avoid crushing a centipede, for heaven's sake.
"We'll spray the cabbages with ground pokeweed. Butterflies don't like that and the white angels will leave their babies to grow in rainpockets of other plants. Our cabbage will be safe."
Fluffy and Puffy sighed in relief and rolled back joyfully onto fallen leaves and rosebuds.
"And," Huffy noted mostly to himself, "so will we three."
Or so Grandma said, as she tucked a sleepy child safely into his bed.
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