“Run along,” Mother said. “And don’t get into any trouble.”
All four did.
But this is the tale of Peter Magus.
Mother rabbit was talking to her children: Poisonmaker, Stickpin, Lament, and Peter. They lived in a burrow under a big fir tree just outside the Wizard McGregor’s farm.
The four rabbits ran off to get into trouble. Mother got to work. She operated a still for making pumpkin whiskey. The pumpkins were stolen from the Wizard McGregor’s patch.
Peter’s sister Poisonmaker earned her name from carelessly mixing a bad batch of pumpkin whiskey and distributing it to the badgers, hedgehogs, hares and squirrels of the outer field. Many had died, and there was quite a stink about it among the four-leggeds. But in time it blew over. Everything does.
Peter Magus was the one who stole the pumpkins. It was a big risk, stealing from the Wizard McGregor, because he was a wizard, and a powerful one at that, if you could believe local legend. Peter didn’t have to believe local legend or not, he knew first-hand how dangerous the wizard/farmer could be. Peter’s father had trespassed on McGregor’s farm and paid for it with his life.
“He’s in a pie,” Peter’s mother said matter-of-factly one day, when Peter asked where Dad was.
Peter was the only one of the family of rabbits that used “Magus” after his name. Rabbits don’t use last names. They’re rabbits after all. “Magus” was an invented last name Peter had given himself. It was his aspiration, his goal: he wanted to be a magician, a wizard, a sorcerer. He wanted mystical power and supernatural abilities. His father had wanted the same thing. He’d been at McGregor’s farm to steal magic artifacts and books of spells — not pumpkins.
Peter did steal pumpkins. It entertained him to see, from a distance, the Wizard McGregor stamp and curse when he discovered pumpkins missing. But he was after those same artifacts and books, foremost.
Just like his mother kept her still hidden in thickets and tall grass, Peter Magus had a secret place too. It was his sanctuary, where he stored his sorcery tools and practiced his spell-casting. Most of his tools were bogus: his wand was a random stick — somewhat sinister looking from the right angle, but still, just a stick. On the other hand, Peter had been more successful than his father at stealing wizard-things from McGregor.
Peter’s prize possession — taken from McGregor’s front room coffee table — was a gray and maroon cape, embroidered with magic symbols. Peter Magus felt quite the sorcerer, wrapped in it. (It actually was not a cape at all; it would only work as a cape, for a creature the size of a rabbit. It was actually a tea towel .) Thatsaid, however, the symbols embroidered on it were indeed magic, and they represented functional occult principals.
Peter hopped through a wild field under a cloudy autumn sky. He was a dark-colored rabbit, his fur black and sable. When he wasn’t hopping, Peter liked to stand up on his hind legs.
Back home, the still was cookin’. A mile away, on the other side of a barbed fence, Wizard McGregor tended to cabbages.
I haven’t told you: Peter was wearing a gray canvas sack on his back. His mother had tied it around his neck before he left the burrow. It was the sack Peter used for bringing the pumpkins home. Peter was very good with his ‘hands.’ But imagine the problems of a rabbit carrying a pumpkin for a mile, possibly while being pursued. No: Peter smashed the pumpkins on- site, then crammed the pulpy remains into the sack. With it tied around his neck, he could hop like the wind. He wore the sack the same way he wore his sorcerer’s cape but he wasn’t proud of it.
In his sanctuary, Peter exchanged his sack for his tea towel. Cape. He did look like the Magus he claimed to be, in the light of a small candle, hunched over some spells he’d stolen from Wizard McGregor. Here’s something most don’t know about rabbits: they can read any language. Peter had found spell-inscribed scraps of paper in the pocket of the wizard’s coat where it hung near the kitchen door, and stuck them in the sack. He peered at the pumpkin-stained scraps, and read from them aloud.
This particular spell would be valuable for Peter Magus, if it worked. When he got to look at it, once he was safely home, he realized that it was the spell for putting the scarecrows on Wizard McGregor’s farm to sleep. His scarecrows were fearsome things, vigilant and relentless. They were perhaps, at least for Peter, more dangerous than McGregor himself.
But you couldn’t keep them awake all the time, or they died. McGregor managed the sleep-time of the scarecrows with the spell, using a system that Peter had not yet figured out. He never put the scarecrows to sleep all at once.
Peter was practicing. The spell wouldn’t have worked from as far away as he was. Peter wanted to use it that night. The spell wasn’t hard for him to read, because he was a rabbit, but it was hard to memorize and figure out how to pronounce. He was supposed to bring a pumpkin from McGregor’s back to his mother before noon. But the afternoon slipped away and he still hadn’t done it. Peter decided to wait till sunset in his inner sanctum, and not return home till that night. He’d get the pumpkin and steal more spells in one trip.
He was anxious as he hopped determinedly toward Wizard McGregor’s farm. Peter’s spells didn’t always work. In fact he’d only been called upon to actually use a few of them in real life.
He’d made some mistakes. There was that poor creature in the marsh that he’d summoned only half- successfully. The results of Peter’s mishandling had been disastrous for the summoned being. Peter visited the wretched outer-dimensional entity every so often, where it hid itself, out in the swamp. It had sad eye-clusters and stumpy half-finished tentacles.
Peter’s plan was to break into McGregor’s tower workshop. It was guarded by a scarecrow that was sure to be the worst one McGregor had. Peter Magus had only gotten as far as the lowest floor of the wizard’s house in his previous break-ins. He’d explored the living room, the kitchen, and a closet. But his goal tonight was bolder. He wanted to sneak into McGregor’s workshop.
Peter was stealthy, and the outer fields of the farm were navigated quickly and without incident. Peter crouched on all fours now in some bushes, his eye on the round tower window. He had his wizard’s cape on, and underneath that, the pumpkin sack. There was no light behind the window. Peter had been spying on McGregor’s house for a long time, and he knew that this was the hour of the evening that McGregor liked to take long, steamy baths on the house’s other side.
Under the tower window, the scarecrow hung from its cross of planks. Peter Magus began his spell. It would only work on one scarecrow at a time. Rather than confront the creature and count on stopping it with a hurried recitation of the spell, Peter planned to murmur it from a distance, and slowly lull the scarecrow to sleep.
To his delight, it worked. The wooden planks of the scarecrow’s outstretched arms slowly swung inward till the straw-stuffed body of the thing folded in on itself.
Peter emerged from his hiding place and hopped past the sleeping scarecrow. These was robust ivy growing along the side of the tower, which, for a tower, wasn’t nearly so tall as it could have been. The climb was easy, and Peter got up to the window in no time. He used the dexterity I mentioned earlier to open the window from outside. Then he slipped into the house.
He would have to work fast. The scarecrow wouldn’t be the only safeguard McGregor had in place. And he had to get the damned pumpkin before he left too. He looked around the room. There were star charts and alembics, a stuffed crow, a polished onyx orb, a magician’s cap, an assortment of wands and staffs, and tons and tons of books.
One wall was all sealed jars of pickled animals and staring blind eyeballs. There were skulls. The thought occurred to Peter: what if his father was here, so bottled and preserved?
He quickly turned his attention away from the jars. There was a cluttered worktable. There were sheets of paper covered with McGregor’s scribbly handwriting, and folders bound with a string, and several stacks of leather-bound books. The books were too large to consider taking. But the wizard’s unbound writing would be perfect. He did have the habit of writing down his spells. Bad memory, perhaps?
Just then the door of the room burst open, and a naked McGregor, covered with suds and brandishing a back scrubber, was behind it.
You know rabbits: Peter was off the table and out the window with lightning speed. He heard the wizard’s voice booming behind him as he scurried down the ivy. Luckily, it seemed to only be ordinary cursing and not a hex.
Peter hit the ground not far from the two crossed planks that held up the scarecrow. The scarecrow was not hanging there. Suddenly it leapt from the darkness and grabbed for the rabbit. Apparently Peter’s casting of the sleep spell had been inadequate. Peter took off for the field, the scarecrow running behind him on its weird spindly legs, a charging cloud of vengeful flannel and dirty used clothes. It almost caught Peter before the rabbit dove into the trench he’d dug under the barbed fence at the edge of the farm.
Peter didn’t stop hopping till he got back to the big fir tree he lived under.
Mother was angry. Not just about his late return. He hadn’t gotten the pumpkin she needed to make the whiskey. To make matters worse, the pumpkin sack had slipped off of Peter’s back as he made his escape.
“Sacks aren’t easily come by,” the rabbit mother said, as she put Peter to bed without supper.
Meanwhile, Poisonmaker, Stickpin, and Lament ate bread and milk and blackberries.
