Watership Down, стр. 14

12. The Stranger in the Field

To come to the end of a time of anxiety and fear! To feel the cloud that hung over us lift and disperse-the cloud that dulled the heart and made happiness no more than a memory! This at least is one joy that must have been known by almost every living creature.

Here is a boy who was waiting to be punished. But then, unexpectedly, he finds that his fault has been overlooked or forgiven and at once the world reappears in brilliant colors, full of delightful prospects. Here is a soldier who was waiting, with a heavy heart, to suffer and die in battle. But suddenly the luck has changed. There is news! The war is over and everyone bursts out singing! He will go home after all! The sparrows in the plowland were crouching in terror of the kestrel. But she has gone; and they fly pell-mell up the hedgerow, frisking, chattering and perching where they will. The bitter winter had all the country in its grip. The hares on the down, stupid and torpid with cold, were resigned to sinking further and further into the freezing heart of snow and silence. But now-who would have dreamed it? — the thaw is trickling, the great tit is ringing his bell from the top of a bare lime tree, the earth is scented; and the hares bound and skip in the warm wind. Hopelessness and reluctance are blown away like a fog and the dumb solitude where they crept, a place desolate as a crack in the ground, opens like a rose and stretches to the hills and the sky.

The tired rabbits fed and basked in the sunny meadow as though they had come no further than from the bank at the edge of the nearby copse. The heather and the stumbling darkness were forgotten as though the sunrise had melted them. Bigwig and Hawkbit chased each other through the long grass. Speedwell jumped over the little brook that ran down the middle of the field and when Acorn tried to follow him and fell short, Silver joked with him as he scrambled out and rolled him in a patch of dead oak leaves until he was dry. As the sun rose higher, shortening the shadows and drawing the dew from the grass, most of the rabbits came wandering back to the sun-flecked shade among the cow parsley along the edge of the ditch. Here, Hazel and Fiver were sitting with Dandelion under a flowering wild cherry. The white petals spun down around them, covering the grass and speckling their fur, while thirty feet above a thrush sang, "Cherry dew, cherry dew. Knee deep, knee deep, knee deep."

"Well, this is the place all right, isn't it, Hazel?" said Dandelion lazily. "I suppose we'd better start having a look along the banks soon, although I must say I'm in no particular hurry. But I've got an idea it may be going to rain before much longer."

Fiver looked as though he were about to speak, but then shook his ears and turned to nibbling at a dandelion.

"That looks a good bank, along the edge of the trees up there," answered Hazel. "What do you say, Fiver? Shall we go up there now or shall we wait a bit longer?"

Fiver hesitated and then replied, "Just as you think, Hazel."

"Well, there's no need to do any serious digging, is there?" said Bigwig. "That sort of thing's all right for does, but not for us."

"Still, we'd better make one or two scrapes, don't you think?" said Hazel. "Something to give us shelter at a pinch. Let's go up to the copse and look round. We might as well take our time and make quite sure where we'd like to have them. We don't want to have to do the work twice."

"Yes, that's the style," said Bigwig. "And while you're doing that, I'll take Silver and Buckthorn here and have a run down the fields beyond, just to get the lie of the land and make sure there isn't anything dangerous."

The three explorers set off beside the brook, while Hazel led the other rabbits across the field and up to the edge of the woodland. They went slowly along the foot of the bank, pushing in and out of the clumps of red campion and ragged robin. From time to time one or another would begin to scrape in the gravelly bank, or venture a little way in among the trees and nut bushes to scuffle in the leaf mold. After they had been searching and moving on quietly for some time, they reached a place from which they could see that the field below them broadened out. Both on their own side and opposite, the wood edges curved outward, away from the brook. They also noticed the roofs of a farm, but some distance off. Hazel stopped and they gathered round him.

"I don't think it makes much difference where we do a bit of scratching," he said. "It's all good, so far as I can see. Not the slightest trace of elil-no scent or tracks or droppings. That seems unusual, but it may be just that the home warren attracted more elil than other places. Anyway, we ought to do well here. Now I'll tell you what seems the right thing to me. Let's go back a little way, between the woods, and have a scratch near that oak tree there-just by that white patch of stitchwort. I know the farm's a long way off, but there's no point in being nearer to it than we need. And if we're fairly close to the wood opposite, the trees will help to break the wind a bit in winter."

"Splendid," said Blackberry. "It's going to cloud over, do you see? Rain before sunset and we'll be in shelter. Well, let's make a start. Oh, look! There's Bigwig coming back along the bottom, and the other two with him."

The three rabbits were returning down the bank of the stream and had not yet seen Hazel and the others. They passed below them, into the narrower part of the field between the two copses, and it was not until Acorn had been sent halfway down the slope to attract their attention that they turned and came up to the ditch.

"I don't think there's going to be much to trouble us here, Hazel," said Bigwig. "The farm's a good way away and the fields between don't show any signs of elil at all. There's a man track-in fact, there are several-and they look as though they were used a good deal. Scent's fresh and there are the ends of those little white sticks that they burn in their mouths. But that's all for the best, I reckon. We keep away from the men and the men frighten the elil away."

"Why do the men come, do you suppose?" asked Fiver.

"Who knows why men do anything? They may drive cows or sheep in the fields, or cut wood in the copses. What does it matter? I'd rather dodge a man than a stoat or a fox."

"Well, that's fine," said Hazel. "You've found out a lot, Bigwig, and all to the good. We were just going to make some scrapes along the bank there. We'd better start. The rain won't be long now, if I know anything about it."

Buck rabbits on their own seldom or never go in for serious digging. This is the natural job of a doe making a home for her litter before they are born, and then her buck helps her. All the same, solitary bucks-if they can find no existing holes to make use of-will sometimes scratch out short tunnels for shelter, although it is not work that they tackle at all seriously. During the morning the digging proceeded in a light-hearted and intermittent way. The bank on each side of the oak tree was bare and consisted of a light, gravelly soil. There were several false starts and fresh choices, but by ni-Frith they had three scrapes of a sort. Hazel, watching, lent help here and there and encouraged the others. Every so often he slipped back to look out over the field and make sure that all was safe. Only Fiver remained solitary. He took no part in the digging but squatted on the edge of the ditch, fidgeting backward and forward, sometimes nibbling and then starting up suddenly as though he could hear some sound in the wood. After speaking to him once or twice and receiving no reply, Hazel thought it best to let him alone. The next time he left the digging he kept away from Fiver and sat looking at the bank, as though entirely concerned with the work.