Blowing snow and the impending darkness make travel difficult as we trudge across a frozen pond, we being a tiny little field mouse and an overzealous little rabbit. "We’re almost there, Winnie.” Leo says, for the hundredth time in the last hour.

I sigh as I continue to put one sore paw in front of the other, “The name is James, just for your information and that ’s what you said two days ago.” I remind my restless companion, “You said the moon wasn’t that far away. ‘A hop, skip, and a jump away,’ that’s what you said. In fact, as I recall…”

“Sssshhhh!” says Leo, stopping dead in his tracks and struggling to perk up his floppy ears.

I glare at the cotton ball tail of the adventurous bunny that had been hopping ahead of me. More than slightly put off, I start to tell him off when I hear a slight rustling sound off to our right, somewhere in the forest that we tended to stay on the very edge of. Leaning closer to the trees, I hold my breath and listen closely. I hear sniffing and whimpering and whining. But before I can put all the puzzle pieces in the right place, the whimpering and whining turns into barking. Exceptionally loud barking.

All of a sudden everything starts happening at once. Snow flies, branches crack, a dog barks, multiple feet, both human and dog, start crashing, and a few gunshots are fired, mere inches from where I sit, frozen in fear, and because of the cold. Leo turns around and manages a “HOP ON!” over all the noise. “Hopping is not my forte,” I yell before scrambling up his furry back, “that’s yours!” My voice breaks as the crazy rabbit takes off running through the trees.

Grabbing onto the fur at Leo’s neck, I glance over my shoulder and catch sight of a deranged, droopy-faced dog chasing after us and, a few yards behind him, a man is floundering through the snow, fighting to keep himself upright and keep his hat on his head. “BLUE!” he shouts, still attempting to regain his balance, “Blue! C ’mere, boy!” To my amazement, the cheerless dog slams his brakes so quickly he kicks up a solid foot and a half of snow. “Blue” looks longingly after us as we dash further into the underbrush and then dejectedly turns his tail to us. The second before Leo dives under a bush and into the snow, I watch the dog peer over his shoulder once more before he lowers his head and turns back around. Then he disappears from my vision and from our lives.

I roll off of Leo’s back and flop into the snow, face first. I hear Leo plop down into the snow, exhausted. I raise my head slowly, spitting snow out of my mouth. “Enough excitement for today?” I ask the winded bunny.

“Well, we have been traveling all day,” he says, slowly starting to dig a hole in the snow.

“And the moon will still be waiting for us tomorrow,” I whisper, hoping against hope that Leo does not snap out of whatever trance he has obviously fallen into.

“Yes. Tomorrow…” He snuggles himself up into the minuscule hole he managed to dig. I slink over to the half-asleep ball of
fluff buried under the snow and curl up in the warmth of his foot-long fur.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

As I feel Winnie’s tiny little body cuddle up to me, I can’t help but think that maybe the moon doesn’t have the secret to happiness. It was an idea that had been floating around in my head for a while, but for some reason I couldn’t bring myself to accept it. The moon has to have the secret to happiness. It always looks so content, I tell myself. But what if. What if there was no secret to happiness? What if I reached the moon and it was just as suffocating and depressing as home was? What if...I study the sky and start to feel a little nervous. What if I reach the moon and my life has no purpose anymore?

For as long as I could remember I had been making plans to travel to the moon. At first it was just a young rabbit’s dream, the dream to be great and do great things, but as I grew older and more and more little siblings came along, that threatened to suck the air right out of my lungs, I began to think of it as an escape, a way out. I’d reach the moon and be free and isolated for the first time. Well, isolated except for Winnie.

A mouse named James Winston. It was such a silly, yet dignified name. But no more silly than my name. Leopold Bunker. I suppose if I was a duke or at least a knight or something it would make sense. But I’m not; so usually I either introduce myself as Leo or insist on being called Leo soon thereafter. Winnie, on the other hand, despised being called anything other than his given name. Winnie showed up when I needed him the most. Right after little sibling number fifteen…or maybe it was sixteen? I’ve lost count. But the point is that he’s been there for me through everything. He showed up one night when I was lying on my stump, staring at the moon, and trying to imagine what it had that I didn’t…surely there was something; it always came across as utterly satisfied.

After he appeared that night, and numberless nights after that, we became quite close, and after a little persuading, I let him in on my plans to visit the moon and hopefully find contentedness in isolation. Winnie has always tried to talk me out of it. Telling me that the moon couldn’t possibly have the secret to happiness, that I needed to find it within myself, but I had a tendency to ignore his “words of wisdom.”

As I feel the effects of the day gradually begin to suck me into oblivion, I consider Winnie’s arrival, not for the first time, feeling especially grateful that he showed up when he did. But I don’t have a chance to dig deeper than that and put a longer on
something niggling in the back of my brain, before I’m swept up into the peaceful ignorance of sleep.

The first thing I notice when I wake up the following day is that the winds have gotten stronger, and the slight flurries of yesterday have long since been replaced by a full-blown snowstorm. I decide to get up anyway and wake Winnie so that we can be on our way. Winnie’s wide eyes tell me all I need to know about his feelings in regard to going out in this storm. But we need to keep going before we get snowed in for good and have no choice but to abandon our journey altogether.

The insistent winds nearly force me into the ground and I can only imagine how Winnie is doing. I want to tell him to ride on my back, but every time I open my mouth, I earn a mouthful of frosty winds and razor-sharp fragments of ice and snow. And every time I attempt to look up and search for my sourpuss companion, my eyes are nearly blown right out of my head, not that I can recognize anything beyond a wall of pure whiteness. So I'm forced to carry on, battling the gale-force winds to reach the shelter of the forest and hoping that my little buddy can follow without too much difficulty.

Without warning the little mouse appears just ahead of me and makes me do a double take. There is no way he could have gotten so far ahead of me in such a short amount of time. Maybe I was just seeing things. I lower my gaze and shake my head vigorously and blink little particles of ice out of my eyes before looking up again. Squinting and cocking my head right and left, I realize that, sure enough, my little friend is at least a yard or so ahead of me. Wondering how this could have happened without my noticing it, I dig my little legs further into the snow, striving to gain a little speed and catch up with the mouse, hopping and frolicking ahead of me, as if we were in the middle of a warm cheery meadow rather than caught in the middle of an intense blizzard. When I’m able to minimize the distance between us to scarcely more than a foot or so I call out to the bouncing field mouse, “Winnie! Slow down! What are you doing?” Winnie looks over his shoulder, once, twice, then a third time. Catching me totally by surprise, he sprints forward, probably breaking some kind of record in the process, and disappears from sight.

I panic and, after an inner struggle, take off after my best friend, even knowing that he was headed in the wrong direction and that we were no longer pointed towards the moon. Stop. I stop dead in my tracks and examine every inch of space within a number of yards, knowing I had heard Winnie, even though there was no way I should be able to hear his tiny voice over the screaming winds.

I inspect my surroundings once more. Not knowing what else to do, I answer, “W-w-who’s there? What do you want?”

It’s James, you doofus. You need to stop. Searching for the source of the strange instruction, I realize it seems to come from inside my head. But I can HEAR it!

“Winnie? Are you there? What do I need to stop?”

I’m right here, right where I’ve always been. You need to stop chasing something that’s not there. I hop a few more feet and collapse under a bush, thinking.

“What are you talking about?” Silence. I almost literally feel the gears turning in my head as I’m transported back to the day that Winnie first showed up. It was too ideal. He showed up exactly when I was feeling my loneliest, the night I was just going to take off and leave and he talked me out of it. He was always around when I needed to make a life-changing decision. And he always tried to talk me out of leaving, telling me that happiness wasn’t something that I could go out and catch.
 

It’s up to you to decide your happiness. I hear again, and notice that Winnie’s voice is slowly reverting to mine. I’ll always be right here.

A few minutes of silence later I have myself convinced that I made Winnie up in my head, to lend a voice to the side of me that really didn’t want to leave. The side of me that knew, deep down, that getting to the moon wouldn’t provide happiness. I don’t know if that’s what actually happened. But it’s what I tell myself so that I can have a little closure.

The sun shining on my back wakes me up. The wind has died down to a barely-there breeze, and almost all the snow is gone. I look around and shiver, the remnants of snow still coating my fur. In the distance I recognize my burrow, the burrow I had grown up in and, eventually, left for what I assumed was forever. I sit back deliberately and just observe everything going on. For the first time ever I genuinely take notice of the seventeen—eighteen?—little bunnies hopping around, playing and wrestling, some of the more dainty ones sitting under a tree and gossiping and giggling.

I notice the nearly opaque full moon hanging low in the sky, nearly sitting on top of the low hills in the distance. For just a second, I catch a glimpse of something skittering across the face of it and write it off as just the overactive imagination of a frostbitten bunny. But then I hear his voice again. You’re going to be ok, says Winnie.

“The moon is a friend for the lonesome to talk to.”
-Carl Sandburg