We pet sat Stephanie’s rabbit this week while they were out of town. Cabot’s no ordinary rabbit. He’s living the good life in a large pen inside the house with a vast assortment of educational toys. He’s litter box trained, and when they come for a visit it takes them three trips from the pickup to unload all his paraphernalia. That number is just for a few hours visit, for his week-long stay it was at least twice that.
He’s a lop-eared rabbit, mostly white with mottled brownish-grey splotches that would’ve made a nice coat back in the seventies. I think I had one, probably a hand me down in the fifth grade.
“He’s kind of nocturnal. I hope he won’t keep you up at night,” Steph told me on her way out the door.
“No worries,” I said.
Fast forward to 1 a.m. on the first night. Clanking, banging and rattling startled me every time I nodded off. My head came off the pillow at the distinct sound of a critter ripping across the carpet enjoying newly found freedom. Impossible, I thought and convinced myself he was doing something in the cage. Maybe scratching? No way could he be out.
When I heard it a second time I realized if that rabbit hadn’t escaped I had even bigger problems, so I threw back the quilt and lifted my weary body out of bed to see what was going on. Ray was at the station.
The house was eerily silent as I flipped on the light, peered around the doorway and into the empty pen. Ugh. I scanned the floor for Cabot and noticed him beside me at my feet with his head cocked peeking into the room at his unused enclosure. I wasn’t sure if he was mirroring me or mocking me, but that wasn’t important. The important thing was that I was going to have the offender back in custody quickly and easily, or so I thought.
I held my breath and lunged down for the grab. As soon as my hands touched fur, his eyes grew wild and he went into a scratching, spinning, flipping, kicking fit before darting under a nearby chest of drawers. You see, in the two months Stephanie had owned the animal, she hadn’t mastered picking him up yet.
Our Chihuahua Queso was still sound asleep at the foot of my bed.
I stumbled down the hall and threw open my son’s bedroom door. “Matt, get up. The rabbit’s out.”
Then I locked Queso out of the room with the hope of no animals being harmed in this story. At least not by other animals, unless we’re counting humans.
Today’s kinder, gentler pet ownership manuals—aka the internet—advised coaxing the creature into a carrier where it felt safe. This “safe house” was included in the truckload of pet supplies provided by Stephanie. Matt lured Cabot inside the soft pet taxi while I rolled my sleep-deprived eyes.
“He made a loud ruckus a couple of times. I think he lifted the pen and went underneath it,” I said.
We placed a stepladder across the enclosure to weigh it down and happily returned to our beds.
An hour later I was startled awake by a strange thud followed by more thuds. No zipping around this time. It sounded more like things falling to the floor. So I got up again.
This time Cabot was on our desk. He’d knocked off my reading glasses and a few pens. He had chewed off the tip of a pencil and was munching on a computer cable as he looked at me with an innocent look between two droopy ears that seemed to ask, “Care to join me? Just don’t pick me up.”
I stormed back to Matt’s room because this was not the sort of middle-of-the-night fun I planned to have without witnesses and hollered, “He’s out again! This time he’s on the desk.”
Apparently, he had gone over the fence instead of under. Who knew rabbits were climbers? Anyway, the pen was only inches from the desk and he must have hoisted himself onto it.
Matt coaxed the rabbit back into the carrier and dragged the dog crate in from the garage. Cabot’s was confined to maximum security where he spent the remainder of his sentence with us.
