Once upon a time there lived a rabbit high in a mountain meadow. Legend had it that he was blessed by the gods with a green paw, and there he built a cottage and grew a wondrous garden. The tomatoes grew as large as pumpkins in that place, and the lettuce high as a horse’s shoulder. The carrots glowed gold, and cascades of flowers carpeted acres in all the colors, like a silken rainbow.

Even the weeds seemed to bow before the Great Gardener, as the rabbit became known, and dared not grow within that verdant kingdom.

The seasons came and went, for years and years, and all was well for the rabbit. He became rich and prosperous, his fur so luxuriant it seemed to glow, and he was very happy in the solitude of altitude.

Then, one spring, he began to notice a curious thing. There were a great many bees, a great many more than had ever been before, and they buzzed among his flowers in thousands. The hum of their wings was thunderous, and the Great Gardener’s sensitive ears ached with that thrum, day in and day out.

“It’s merely a passing thing,” the rabbit told himself one evening, sitting on the porch of his cottage with a cup of Chamomile, the air filled with the scent of pollen and prosperous vegetables. “They’re merely gathering nectar and soon they will go away."

Spring waxed luxuriant and green into the deep and emerald dream that was summer, and the bees did not leave. Indeed, they grew more numerous, and larger too. Some became the size of quarters, and the drone of their wings made the rabbit wince as they flew busily about.

He tried to tend his garden, yet more and more the bees seemed angry at his presence, flying at his face, bumping up against him. Afraid of being stung, the rabbit would flee, and they would sometimes pursue him mercilessly.

There, in the heart of summer, his brilliant work a vibrant and wild crush of glowing green beyond the window of his cottage, he would often put a paw to his head and fight tears. “Why has this happened to me?” he asked the shadows, staring out through the pane of fluted glass at his small and verdant kingdom. “They’ve ruined everything!”

By late summer the problem had gotten worse, he judged the bees numbers beyond a million, and going outside was taking his life in his paws. The air was filled with a thrumming drone, and a mere walk among his flowers without protection could have proven lethal.

He took to wrapping himself up in his heaviest clothes, layers and layers, and draped a heavy net around his head and put on a large, drooping hat. In such attire he was sweltering though, so hot he was panting and close to exhaustion after half an hour, yet he had to tend to his lettuce and his carrots and his tomatoes or he would starve.

Often in those late and latter days of that nightmare summer, through heat wave after heat wave, he would lament his misfortune, curse the blasted bees and the mocking gods and the withering garden he had grown so lovingly. His best work, it seemed, was in storms now, the driving rain forcing the bugs back to their homes, and he braved the lightning and the deluge to prune and seed, found himself praying for heavy mists and cloudbursts.

One day, fall fast approaching, he heard an ominous and omnipresent drone coming from the attic of his cottage. He climbed the stairs with a sinking heart, a flickering candle oozing glistening, white wax in one paw, certain of what he would find. He was not proven wrong.

The trap door in the ceiling creaked and groaned as he lifted it, and he sneezed in the puff of swirling dust. The hum grew louder, deep and abiding and rhythmic, like a beating heart.

Cautiously, scarcely daring to breathe, he peeked into his attic with his melting candle held high as if in supplication to the demons of dark and forgotten things, and beheld what had become of the highest reaches of his precious house.

There, beneath crossed eves and bewitching shadows, was an enormous hive that glistened golden with a hundred thousand honeycombs, and the bees, the swarm, his nemesis, moved purposefully among them with gossamer wings delicately veined. The sound of the multitude was more like a pulse, a beating heart, a resonance that vibrated in the rabbit’s bones.

He bit his tongue, knew if he screamed the horde would descend upon him. Quietly, ever so carefully, he shut the door to the attic and descended down the ladder as if in a dream.

-

That night he could not sleep, try as he might, so he dressed his best and began to hike down the mountain. Down and down and down, toward the lights of a sprawling town in a valley far below what had once been his paradise.

Dawn was only a few hours from breaking when he finally reached the town gates. A pair of dogs in worn leather jerkins, rusty helms casting bands of shadow over savage, shining eyes, lowered their spears and barked at him.

“Who are you,” asked one, hackles up and gaze possessed of a dangerous gleam in the torch light. His fangs were bared.
The rabbit raised his empty paws, bowed his head. His long ears were flat and he fought tears. “The Great Gardener,” he said, bitterly. “Overthrown, and an exile from my home.”

The dogs exchanged glances. Both recognized the rabbit by his voice and scent, then, but were troubled by his words.

“Enter,” said the dog who had challenged him.

-

He thought of beseeching the Mayor, but the fox was due for re-election come the first snow. The priest would be aloof, and the factor had never been his friend…rather a rival, for he controlled all the crops of the lowlands and considered the rabbit one his greatest enemies.

That left only one other, a squirrel who called himself only ‘Alchemist’.

It was still some time until morning, though, so the Gardener leaned against the shack of the squirrel, amidst the moist loam and fetid mushrooms as a soft wind blew from the east.

“Tomorrow,” the rabbit promised the stars of the fading night with a shiver.

He didn’t think he could sleep, yet he did, and deeply. It had been a long time since he had felt safe from the bees.
The Great Gardener’s dreams were troubled though. Giant carrots grew eyes and teeth, and tomatoes red and ripe burst open in red ruin, only to reveal great masses of-

-

“Wake up old friend,” said the squirrel, shaking the rabbit.

The rabbit opened his eyes, his mouth dry and his pulse roaring. His face felt dreadfully hot. “At last, it’s you,” he said, forcing a smile. It was slanted and crooked, but it was true.

“Come inside,” said the Alchemist, his bushy tail twitching. “I’ve made tea, and we can talk.”

Talk they did, over cups of steaming rosemary and pine cone crackers and childhood memories, for both had been friends from almost birth countless springs ago and still were.

When the Gardener finished his story, the squirrel glanced at a shelf where there sparkled in the morning sun many bottles of glass and crystal. “There is a poison, that could purify your land,” the Alchemist began.

“No,” the rabbit said, cutting him short. “I don’t want to kill them. I just want them gone. They’re…they’re just in the wrong place. I don’t blame them for being them, even though they’ve made me suffer so.”

The squirrel smiled sadly. “What you need then, you can have for nothing. Your answer is smoke.”

“Smoke?” the rabbit echoed, confused. “How would that help?”

“It calms them, at first,” said the squirrel. “If there’s enough of it, though, it drives them off. Where there’s smoke there’s fire, and fire is both life’s birth and its death. Smoke steals strength from the spirits of the air, clouds the senses, and forces a great fear upon small things that cannot think beyond the moment.”

-

The following week the rabbit returned home. His garden still infested, he avoided it, hiked the hills and slopes of the mighty mountain instead. He gathered thin and wispy things, bundles of dead ferns and brittle sticks and the fallen feathers of the birds of prey and those of the bush. He bound these together with twine, bushel after bushel, until a great pile of such bushels twice as tall as he sat casting a long and slender shadow in his front yard.

When he judged he had enough, he waited for nightfall, then pulled a firestone and a fang shaped fleck of obsidian from his pocket.

“This is it,” he told the stars, snatching up one of the bushels he had made. He went inside his cottage, wrapped himself in layers, put the net over his face and pressed on the flimsy hat. To his attic he climbed fearless, a crazed smile on his face.
They were there of course, paid him no mind as he climbed into the rafters and struck the spark.

The bushel began to burn, wept copious clouds of smoke.

Before the end he was covered in the swarm, their angry buzzing a freight train in his ears. His clothing crawled with twitching stingers left behind by the dying bees covering the floor in a writhing carpet, yet after a short time the vast majority of the multitude began to flee through the roof. They left a massive cone of honey crawling with larvae behind, and the rabbit howled like a wolf in his triumph.

In the days that followed he brought fire and smoke to every hive he could find, beating back the multitude with fury and fume, driving them from the mountain meadow. He was so thorough not a single bee remained to grace his garden by late fall, and the rabbit finally felt safe…at peace, just days before the ferocious frost brought upon it the yearly Withering.

-

Winter came and winter went, the rabbit safe and warm in his cottage with great stores of lettuce, carrots, and tomatoes. He sat smug before his friend, the fire, in a tall and cushioned chair, in an aura of grim peace only a conqueror can know. “I’ve beaten the bees,” he’d often say to himself as the snow fell and fell, staring into the crackling hearth with a hearty carrot in one paw and a beloved book in the other. “At last, they’re gone for good.”

Then Spring came again, but the Gardener’s garden did not grow again. It was all dirt and weeds and ashen memories, and at the last did the rabbit realize that-

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Once upon a time there lived a rabbit high in a mountain meadow…