These young rabbits... must move out if they are to survive. In a wild and freestate they... stray sometimes for miles... wandering until they find a suitableenvironment.
R.M. Lockley, The Private Life of the RabbitIt was getting on toward moonset when they left the fields and entered thewood. Straggling, catching up with one another, keeping more or less together,they had wandered over half a mile down the fields, always following the courseof the brook. Although Hazel guessed that they must now have gone further fromthe warren than any rabbit he had ever talked to, he was not sure whether theywere yet safely away; and it was while he was wondering -- not for the first time --whether he could hear sounds of pursuit that he first noticed the dark masses ofthe trees and the brook disappearing among them.
Rabbits avoid close woodland, where the ground is shady, damp and grasslessand they feel menaced by the undergrowth. Hazel did not care for the look of thetrees. Still, he thought, Holly would no doubt think twice before following theminto a place like that, and to keep beside the brook might well prove safer thanwandering about the fields in one direction and another, with the risk of findingthemselves, in the end, back at the warren. He decided to go straight into thewood without consulting Bigwig, and to trust that the rest would follow.
"If we don't run into any trouble and the brook takes us through the wood," hethought, "we really shall be clear of the warren and then we can look forsomewhere to rest for a bit. Most of them still seem to be more or less all right,but Fiver and Pipkin will have had as much as they can stand before long."From the moment he entered it, the wood seemed full of noises. There was asmell of damp leaves and moss, and everywhere the splash of water wentwhispering about. Just inside, the brook made a little fall into a pool, and thesound, enclosed among the trees, echoed as though in a cave. Roosting birdsrustled overhead; the night breeze stirred the leaves; here and there a dead twigfell. And there were more sinister, unidentified sounds from further away; soundsof movement.
To rabbits, everything unknown is dangerous. The first reaction is to startle,the second to bolt. Again and again they startled, until they were close toexhaustion. But what did these sounds mean and where, in this wilderness, couldthey bolt to?
The rabbits crept, closer together. Their progress grew slower. Before long theylost the course of the brook, slipping across the moonlit patches as fugitives andhalting in the bushes with raised ears and staring eyes. The moon was low nowand the light, wherever it slanted through the trees, seemed thicker, older andmore yellow.
From a thick pile of dead leaves beneath a holly tree, Hazel looked down anarrow path lined on either side with fern and sprouting fireweed. The fernmoved slightly in the breeze, but along the path there was nothing to be seenexcept a scatter of last year's fallen acorns under an oak. What was in thebracken? What lay round the further bend? And what would happen to a rabbitwho left the shelter of the holly tree and ran down the path? He turned toDandelion beside him.
"You'd better wait here," he said. "When I get to the bend I'll stamp. But if Irun into trouble, get the others away."Without waiting for an answer, he ran into the open and down the path. A fewseconds brought him to the oak. He paused a moment, staring about him, andthen ran on to the bend. Beyond, the path was the same -- empty in the darkeningmoonlight and leading gently downhill into the deep shadow of a grove of ilextrees. Hazel stamped, and a few moments later Dandelion was beside him in thebracken. Even in the midst of his fear and strain it occurred to him thatDandelion must be very fast: he had covered the distance in a flash.
"Well done," whispered Dandelion. "Running our risks for us, are you -- likeEl-ahrairah?"*Hazel gave him a quick, friendly glance. It was warm praise and cheered him.
What Robin Hood is to the English and John Henry to the American Negroes,Elil-Hrair-Rah, or El-ahrairah -- The Prince with a Thousand Enemies -- is torabbits. Uncle Remus might well have heard of him, for some of El-ahrairah'sadventures are those of Brer Rabbit. For that matter, Odysseus himself mighthave borrowed a trick or two from the rabbit hero, for he is very old and wasnever at a loss for a trick to deceive his enemies. Once, so they say, he had to gethome by swimming across a river in which there was a large and hungry pike. El-ahrairah combed himself until he had enough fur to cover a clay rabbit, which hepushed into the water. The pike rushed at it, bit it and left it in disgust. After alittle, it drifted to the bank and El-ahrairah dragged it out and waited a whilebefore pushing it in again. After an hour of this, the pike left it alone, and when ithad done so for the fifth time, El-ahrairah swam across himself and went home.
Some rabbits say he controls the weather, because the wind, the damp and thedew are friends and instruments to rabbits against their enemies.
"Hazel, we'll have to stop here," said Bigwig, coming up between the panting,crouching bodies of the others. "I know it's not a good place, but Fiver and thisother half-sized fellow you've got here -- they're pretty well all in. They won't beable to go on if we don't rest."The truth was that every one of them was tired. Many rabbits spend all theirlives in the same place and never run more than a hundred yards at a stretch.
Even though they may live and sleep above ground for months at a time, theyprefer not to be out of distance of some sort of refuge that will serve for a hole.
They have two natural gaits -- the gentle, lolloping forward movement of thewarren on a summer evening and the lightning dash for cover that every humanhas seen at some time or other. It is difficult to imagine a rabbit plodding steadilyon: they are not built for it. It is true that young rabbits are great migrants andcapable of journeying for miles, but they do not take to it readily.
Hazel and his companions had spent the night doing everything that cameunnaturally to them, and this for the first time. They had been moving in a group,or trying to: actually, they had straggled widely at times. They had been trying tomaintain a steady pace, between hopping and running, and it had come hard.
Since entering the wood they had been in severe anxiety. Several were almosttharn -- that is, in that state of staring, glazed paralysis that comes over terrifiedor exhausted rabbits, so that they sit and watch their enemies -- weasels orhumans -- approach to take their lives. Pipkin sat trembling under a fern, his earsdrooping on either side of his head. He held one paw forward in an awkward,unnatural way and kept licking it miserably. Fiver was little better off. He stilllooked cheerful, but very weary. Hazel realized that until they were rested theywould all be safer where they were than stumbling along in the open with nostrength left to run from an enemy. But if they lay brooding, unable to feed or gounderground, all their troubles would come crowding into their hearts, their fearswould mount and they might very likely scatter, or even try to return to thewarren. He had an idea.
"Yes, all right, we'll rest here," he said, "Let's go in among this fern. Come on,Dandelion, tell us a story. I know you're handy that way. Pipkin here can't wait tohear it."Dandelion looked at Pipkin and realized what it was that Hazel was asking himto do. Choking back his own fear of the desolate, grassless woodland, the before-dawn-returning owls that they could hear some way off, and the extraordinary,rank animal smell that seemed to come from somewhere rather nearer, he began.
*The stresses are the same as in the phrase "Never say die."