Watership Down (Watership Down 1)

'No, it's loose now,' said Bigwig. 'I could shake it off if I hadn't hurt my neck.'

'Try,' said Silver. 'You won't get far otherwise.'

'Hazel,' said Speedwell suddenly,' there's a rabbit coming down from the warren. Look!'

'Only one?' said Bigwig. 'What a pity! You take him, Silver. I won't deprive you. Make a good job of it while you're at it.'

They stopped and waited, dotted here and there about the slope. The rabbit who was coming was running in a curious, headlong manner. Once he ran straight into a thick-stemmed thistle, knocking himself sideways and rolling over and over. But he got up and came blundering on towards them.

'Is it the white blindness?' said Buckthorn. 'He's not looking where he's going.'

'Frith forbid!' said Blackberry. 'Shall we run away?'

'No, he couldn't run like that with the white blindness,' said Hazel. 'Whatever ails him, it isn't that.'

'It's Strawberry!' cried Dandelion.

Strawberry came through the hedge by the crab-apple tree, looked about him and made his way to Hazel. All his urbane self-possession had vanished. He was staring and trembling and his great size seemed only to add to his air of stricken misery. He cringed before them in the grass as Hazel waited, stern and motionless, with Silver at his side.

'Hazel,' said Strawberry, 'are you going away?'

Hazel made no answer, but Silver said sharply, 'What's that to you?'

'Take me with you.' There was no reply and he repeated, 'Take me with you.'

'We don't care for creatures who deceive us,' said Silver. 'Better go back to Nildro-hain. No doubt she's less particular.'

Strawberry gave a kind of choking squeal, as though he had been wounded. He looked from Silver to Hazel and then to Fiver. At last, in a pitiful whisper, he said,

'The wires.'

Silver was about to answer, but Hazel spoke first.

'You can come with us,' he said. 'Don't say any more. Poor fellow.'

A few minutes later the rabbits had crossed the cart-track and vanished into the copse beyond. A magpie, seeing some light-coloured object conspicuous on the empty slope, flew closer to look. But all that lay there was a splintered peg and a twisted length of wire.

PART II ON WATERSHIPDOWN

18. Watership Down

What is now proved was once only imagin'd.

William Blake The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

It was evening of the following day. The north-facing escarpment of Watership Down, in shadow since early morning, now caught the western sun for an hour before twilight. Three hundred feet the down rose vertically in a stretch of no more than six hundred - a precipitous wall, from the thin belt of trees at the foot to the ridge where the steep flattened out. The light, full and smooth, lay like a gold rind over the turf, the furze and yew bushes, the few wind-stunted thorn trees. From the ridge, the light seemed to cover all the slope below, drowsy and still. But down in the grass itself, between the bushes, in that thick forest trodden by the beetle, the spider and the hunting shrew, the moving light was like a wind that danced among them to set them scurrying and weaving. The red rays flickered in and out of the grass stems, flashing minutely on membranous wings, casting long shadows behind the thinnest of filamentary legs, breaking each patch of bare soil into a myriad individual grains. The insects buzzed, whined, hummed, stridulated and droned as the air grew warmer in the sunset. Louder yet calmer than they, among the trees, sounded the yellow-hammer, the linnet and greenfinch. The larks went up, twittering in the scented air above the down. From the summit, the apparent immobility of the vast, blue distance was broken, here and there, by wisps of smoke and tiny, momentary flashes of glass. Far below lay the fields green with wheat, the flat pastures grazed by horses, the darker greens of the woods. They too, like the hillside jungle, were tumultuous with evening, but from the remote height turned to stillness, their fierceness tempered by the air that lay between.

At the foot of the turf cliff, Hazel and his companions were crouching under the low branches of two or three spindle-trees. Since the previous morning they had journeyed nearly three miles. Their luck had been good, for everyone who had left the warren was still alive. They had splashed through two brooks and wandered fearfully in the deep woodlands west of Ecchinswell. They had rested in the straw of a Starveall, or lonely barn, and woken to find themselves attacked by rats. Silver and Buckthorn, with Bigwig helping them, had covered the retreat until, once all were together outside, they had taken to flight. Buckthorn had been bitten in the foreleg and the wound, in the manner of a rat-bite, was irritant and painful. Skirting a small lake, they had stared to see a great, grey fisher-bird that stabbed and paddled in the sedge, until a flight of wild duck had frightened them away with their clamour. They had crossed more than half a mile of open pasture without a trace of cover, expecting every moment some attack that did not come. They had heard the unnatural humming of a pylon in the summer air; and had actually gone beneath it, on Fiver's assurance that it could do them no harm. Now they lay under the spindle-trees and sniffed in weariness and doubt at the strange, bare country round them.

Since leaving the warren of the snares they had become warier, shrewder, a tenacious band who understood each other and worked together. There was no more quarrelling. The truth about the warren had been a grim shock. They had come closer together, relying on and valuing each other's capacities. They knew now that it was on these and on nothing else that their lives depended, and they were not going to waste anything they possessed between them. In spite of Hazel's efforts beside the snare, there was not one of them who had not turned sick at heart to think that Bigwig was dead and wondered, like Blackberry, what would become of them now. Without Hazel, without Blackberry, Buckthorn and Pipkin - Bigwig would have died. Without himself he would have died, for which else, of them all, would not have stopped running after such punishment? There was no more questioning of Bigwig's strength, Fiver's insight, Blackberry's wits or Hazel's authority. When the rats came, Buckthorn and Silver had obeyed Bigwig and stood their ground. The rest had followed Hazel when he roused them and, without explanation, told them to go quickly outside the barn. Later, Hazel had said that there was nothing for it but to cross the open pasture and under Silver's direction they had crossed it, with Dandelion running ahead to reconnoitre. When Fiver said the iron tree was harmless they believed him.

Strawberry had had a bad time. His misery made him slow-witted and careless and he was ashamed of the part he had played at the warren. He was soft and more used than he dared admit to indolence and good food. But he made no complaint and it was plain that he was determined to show what he could do and not to be left behind. He had proved useful in the woodland, being better accustomed to thick woods than any of the others. 'He'll be all right, you know, if we give him a chance,' said Hazel to Bigwig by the lake. 'So he darned well ought to be,' replied Bigwig, 'the great dandy' - for by their standards, Strawberry was scrupulously clean and fastidious. 'Well, I won't have him brow-beaten, Bigwig, mind. That won't help him.' This Bigwig had accepted, though rather sulkily. Yet he himself had become less overbearing. The snare had left him weak and overwrought. It was he who had given the alarm in the barn, for he could not sleep and at the sound of scratching had started up at once. He would not let Silver and Buckthorn fight alone, but he had felt obliged to leave the worst of it to them. For the first time in his life, Bigwig had found himself driven to moderation and prudence.

As the sun sank lower and touched the edge of the cloud-belt on the horizon, Hazel came out from under the branches and looked carefully round the lower slope. Then he stared upwards over the ant-hills, to the open down rising above. Fiver and Acorn followed him out and fell to nibbling at a patch of sainfoin. It was new to them, but they did not need to be told that it was good and it raised their spirits. Hazel turned back and joined them among the big, rosy-veined, magenta flower-spikes.

'Fiver,' he said, 'let me get this right. You want us to climb up this place, however far it is, and find shelter on the top. Is that it?'

'Yes, Hazel.'