Back in 2002, when Margo and I were writing Stories Rabbits Tell, we had a pivotal conversation about the ease of keeping rabbits as pets. We were driving back from a visit to the Bunny Museum, where Candace Frazee had given us a personal tour of her house, which holds more than 20,000 rabbit collectibles. "You know, we're writing about great rabbits are and how much fun they are to live with," I ventured to Margo. "But don't you think they're kind of a lot of work to keep as pets?" Margo laughed and replied, flippantly, "oh yeah, they're a total pain."

I thought of this conversation yesterday as once again I chased Spotty--my four-year-old spotted mini-Rex--around the cul-de-sac in front of our house. Spotty is the consummate escape artist: He's been disappearing regularly since we first picked him up from a local animal shelter when he was just four months old. As a baby he'd jump into the kids' stuffed animal baskets, and then dig down inside so we couldn't see him across the room. Or he'd slip into a closet when we weren't looking, or burrow under the covers of our beds. Everytime he went missing, the kids and I would fret that he'd somehow disappeared for good, but he always turned up eventually.

Now that he's an adult, he has more sophisticated escape plans. He's fast and he's crafty, so he keeps an eye out for open doors. He's twice gotten into the crawl space under our house (by going under the back porch and then hopping through a small hole in the foundation), which meant that I, too, had to crawl into the Terrible Place of Vermin to retrieve him. (We've now done a major blocking job with chicken wire to keep him out, but the first time he went under the house it took us 8 hours to figure out where he was--very scary.) And he often runs into the garage, where there are dozens of nooks, crannies, tunnels, and hidey-holes among our boxes. There he waits patiently for one of us to open the garage door, at which point he dashes out onto the cul-de-sac and leads me on a wild goose chase around our neighbors' cars and front gardens. I never catch him; at a certain point he just decides to humor me by hopping happily back into the garage.

There are days when I'm tempted to say, "oh fine, stay out here" and then stalk back into the house, but of course we love him too much to leave him in such a dangerous spot. Besides, the very qualities that make him so good at escaping (smarts, speed, persistence) make him a very cool little companion. That is, for every time I've chased him around the cul de sac or gone digging through stuffed animal baskets to find him, I've also had a time where he has curled up by my neck as I'm sleeping, or come speeding (ears flat back, eyes earnest, body low to the ground) across the lawn to greet me, or jumped on my head to wake me up. Is it a lot of work to chase him around, in public, from time to time? Sure, but he's worth it. And I bet the neighbors enjoy the whole show.