Hazel by A. N. Wilson

Hazel’s Search
    Hazel was a brown, sleek, beautiful guinea pig with eyes as glossy and black as raisins. Like most guinea pigs, Hazel enjoyed her food. She was far from slender. To be honest,
Hazel was a very fat guinea pig indeed. In fact, she was so fat that she looked as though she had been blown up like a balloon. Her cheeks bulged. Her black-curranty eyes seemed to pop out of her
ample face. And her body was a sphere, a pudding of glossy brown fur.
    But Hazel was an extremely handsome creature. It suited her to be fat, just as it suits some
people
to be fat. And fat is what she was.
    Hazel was a brown, sleek, beautiful guinea pig with eyes as glossy and black as raisins.
    Hazel liked to explore. When she was in her hutch, she sometimes ran from one room to the next, as though she were looking for something. Life in two rooms becomes more interesting if it can be
turned into an everlasting quest. She waddled into her living room and ate some food. Then she nuzzled about behind the food bowl, as if she were looking for something there. Then she ran back into
her bedroom and burrowed into the hay, as though she had lost something – something very precious.
    When her young owner got her out of the hutch, Hazel liked to explore some more.
    ‘No,’ she seemed to say, turning this way and that on someone’s lap. ‘It’s not here. Let’s try up there.’ And she would scuttle up under someone’s
jersey.
    ‘Hazel loves going up your jumper,’ said one of the children, one afternoon when their mother was out at the shops.
    ‘Yes, she does,’ agreed the other child. ‘She likes to explore.’
    ‘I suppose I do,’ thought Hazel. ‘I like to explore. I wonder what there is down
this
dark passage. I’ll just have a look. You never know.’
    When she went down that dark passage, Hazel felt wool pressing hard against her cheeks, and she heard the girl’s voice crying out, ‘Hazel! What are you doing?’
    ‘She is going up your jumper,’ said the boy’s voice.
    Hazel tried to advance further into the sleeve-tunnel, but it was tight and dark and woolly. Before long, she could feel the girl pulling at her hind legs and dragging her back into the
daylight.
    Hazel wriggled and struggled to be free. She had begun to feel a bit peckish, and she would not have refused if someone had offered her a piece of brown bread or a carrot. (These were her
favourite foods.)
    She found that the girl had put her down on the kitchen floor, and she was able to run about freely. Here there was much to explore.
    ‘Worth a look,’ thought Hazel, as she scuttled to the other end of the kitchen and peered between the bars of a fender. A fire was glowing beyond the bars, and Hazel wondered whether
she might have a closer look at it. Very bright, fire is. Very interesting. On the other hand, it is also … Hazel wondered how she would describe it. Well, hot would be one word. The bars of
the fender almost hurt her nose before she had started to sniff them.
    ‘I remember now,’ she thought. ‘Fire’s hot. Ar well, now that I’ve had a look at that, it is time to search about for … for …’
    What was it that Hazel was always searching for and seeking?
    She ran along the skirting board and listened at a mousehole. All was quiet within, for this was a household with cats. There was no mouse merrymaking there.
    Hazel peered at the bottom of a cupboard. But the door was shut.
    And then, at the other end of the kitchen, she saw another door. This time, it was an open door.
    No one was taking as much notice of her as they should have done when Hazel, very swift, though very fat on her short legs, made her rapid progress towards the open door. She ran! Oh, how Hazel
ran! She ran out of the kitchen and into the tiled hall, through the legs of a chair, and up to a most interesting selection of articles lying higgledy-piggledy by the back door.
    ‘Now,’ Hazel asked herself, ‘what have we here?’
    She had stopped feeling