Madam Clotilde. The feather detective
She lived on the fourth floor, got up with the first sunrays, woke the whole family up, hurried the kids so they wouldn’t be late for school, and, going outside, chatted with the neighbours while keeping order in the garden. One fussy lady! Her day started very early, but when the clock struck 9 PM, wherever she was, she hurried back to her little house, got under the feather blanket so that only her nose was seen, and everything around her became unimportant.
Ah, I’ve totally forgotten to say that Madam Clotilde is a small ginger rabbit dachshund with a sharp, foxy nose and long, thin, always-wiggling tail. Her little house is a dog carrier in which her human mom and dad bought her from a breeder. Since then, she grew a lot, but she could still fit inside, filling almost all the space.
It was one of the most usual days. Madam Clotilde, as always, woke up earlier than the others, checked her plate for something tasty that might have got there overnight, but alas! That’s a pity. She drank some water and went to check on her owners. They were, as usual, dreaming deeply. Her human Dad was snoring almost imperceptibly. She jumped on the bed with her front paws, trying to be as loud as possible to look closely into her human Mom’s eyes because she often didn’t sleep but only pretended to, wanting to stay in bed a little longer. Clotilde stared at her Mom. “She must be really sleeping”– she decided and tried to touch her Mom’s face with her tongue, stretching it and her face that far so to lick and wake her finally up. But her back paws were slipping treacherously, and Clotilde plopped down on the floor, her paws flying in different directions. She got up and looked once more at her Mom and Dad, but it seemed that she couldn’t wake them up today. “Boring” – she thought, and headed to look for some fun.
And there was some fun to do. Stepping indifferently over a bitten rubber goose with a whistle, she headed next room towards a lonely sock on the floor left so carelessly by her human Dad the other day. What a smell! She was biting into it, throwing it in the air, catching it again and biting it while trying to rip it into pieces. In the heat of the game, she suddenly heard a sound – her human Mom got up to brew herself some coffee. Clotilde left the sock and rushed to the kitchen. Pausing halfway, she turned back to the sock and artfully tossed it up. In a second, there was a sound of a bite, and there the sock was, hidden properly under the feather blanket in Clotilde’s house. Why give Mom a reason to be nervous in the morning?
