Muffy Catches the Bus (At Last)

The next morning, M awoke to find herself in darkness. It was terrifying mostly because there was no reason for it, and she thought she was back in her burrow anyway. She stretched out, and her ears brushed against the hard rock she had been nestling against, which quickly reminded her about where she was, and where she had to go that day.

But this disturbing darkness was at first, inexplicable. M rubbed her eyes and blinked anxiously at the landscape before her but her vision was greatly dimmed. It was as if something huge was standing in her way and blocking out all light from the sun. Little by little though, her eyes adjusted themselves, and she could make out some shapes hovering about in the middle-distance. They were, in fact, the Assistants, who had spent all night at Blea Tarn, toying with their cameras. And this morning despite having had little sleep themselves, they were avidly constructing an enormous edifice, a replica of their large format cameras, but perhaps a thousand times larger. "Bigger is better!" she heard them shout repeatedly in their monotonous, chanting voices, like the US Marines sometimes did in the movies while in basic training. M shook her little white head in disbelief. They were building a camera to take lifesize images of the landscape. Apparently unhappy with the 4x5" negatives they had toiled all night to make, the Assistants thought that this was the one sure way to grab the attention of the photographic world, and perhaps even make it to the cover of "Amateur Photographer" magazine.

M grabbed her rag bundle and hopped furiously towards the road, until she felt the sun's rays warming her little tail once more. She was relieved that she was finally out of the shadow of that gargantuan thing sitting in the field. For the Assistants were constructing their camera mostly out of wooden planks, and now, seemed to be debating what to do next - they had just scoured eBay on their WiFi laptop, trying to find a suitably-sized lens to fit their super-large-format camera but this search was fruitless. And they thought that you could find anything on eBay! Their disappointment was evident in the way they had started to sulk, ignoring each other and taking pains to avoid each other's gaze.

So M gradually lost interest in them and and waited patiently for the bus to arrive, finally glad to be leaving Blea Tarn and the Assistants behind, as they had ruined the landscape she used to know with their giant carbuncle that blocked her once-unimpeded view of the mountains. How many carrots had they squashed underfoot, M would never know, but all this did not matter, as she heard the hum of a distant engine and saw the promising glint in the roof of an approaching bus in the distance. Next stop - Windermere! And from there, M would find her way to the train station so she could head down South. Her tail was tremulous in anticipation; she had no idea what fate awaited her down South, but plain old rabbit instinct informed her that Miffy was probably carousing down there with rowdy undesirables (no doubt friends of the Photographer himself), and discarding her clothing to sunbathe naked in Silent Valley (which was a favourite rabbit holiday destination, a rabbit-Biarritz or Alicante). The bus screeched to a stop and opened its doors to disgorge a pair of sunburned backpackers, and M managed to hop on frantically just before the doors closed - she slipped in unnoticed and settled herself underneath an unoccupied seat. The view from there was non-existent, but it was only a short ride to Windemere so it didn't matter. M nibbled on some more left-over carrot to try and stave off her car-sickness. From now on, she realised, her life was going to get a little more interesting....