Startled, she sat up straight and looked around.
“Over here,” said the rabbit, sitting back on his haunches
laughing at her, his considerable belly shaking with mirth.
“Are you talking to me?”
“Of course, who else is there to talk to this morning?”
Wendy pulled her lavender beret over her ears to shield them from
an insistent North Wind. Quickly she drew a large brown rabbit
with a bent left ear while still looking directly into his glistening
brown eyes.
“Are you looking for something?
“I’m looking for my brother. Last night Coyote caught
him.”
“Aren’t you afraid Coyote will catch you too?”
“No, Coyote sleeps during the day.”
Wendy snuck a glance at her pad and with a few quick strokes of
her pencil added long whiskers to both sides of his twitching nose.
“What will you do when you find your brother?”
“I’ll sit with him and cry until the sun rises once
again, then I’ll cut a lock of hair from his tail and go home.”
“Why do you sit with him all day?”
“It is the way it is done in my family. The last time I saw my brother
he was hanging from Coyote’s jaws. It’s not the first time Coyote
has taken someone from my family, but he was my twin. I must sit with his spirit
as it prepares to depart.”
With a fuzzy brown paw Bent Ear brushed a tear from his cheek.
He hopped onto the rock to see what Wendy was drawing. He smiled,
a big toothy grin, as he looked at the series of images she had sketched.
“Is that really me?” he asked.
“Yes, it’s you.”
“Don’t show Coyote.”
“I won’t, but why?”
“When I was very young Coyote caught me by the ear and tried
to carry me off, but my brother bit him on the leg. While he was
leaping around in circles howling he dropped me and we jumped down
into our burrow. My ear never straightened out. I don’t want
to remind Coyote.”
With a few more strokes of her pencil she drew two skinny rabbit rears with
short scruffy tails disappearing down a hole.
“You seem so brave to be out here, but you’re still
afraid of Coyote, aren’t you?”
“Yes, but if all I do is think about Coyote I’ll never
leave my burrow. There’s a difference between the fear in front
of you and the fear in your own head. The fear in my head is a creation
of my own imagination. I am wary of Coyote, but today he will sleep
with a full belly in his hole beneath the shade of the coyote bush.”
“Why cut a lock of your brothers’ hair?”
“In my family we keep a lock of hair to honor the dead and
treasure their memory. Even though my brother is gone we still have
memories of the lessons we learned with him, the joys we shared and
the love we had for each other. I will keep it with my other treasures
in a small wooden box carved by the Beavers of Snowy Mountain.”
