"Watership Down" by Richard Adams, Chapters 11-17

Once, hearing an unaccountable noise in front of him, which ceased on the instant, he kept still for a long time; and when at last he moved cautiously forward, found Silver crouching behind a tussock of cocksfoot for fear of the sound of his own approach.

He was bedraggled and exhausted, but it was he who was speaking.

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.

During the morning the digging proceeded in a light-hearted and intermittent way.

It gave Hazel an impression of good feeding, of health and of a certain indolence, as though the other came from some rich, prosperous country where he himself had never been.

He had the air of an aristocrat and as he turned to gaze at Blackberry from his great brown eyes, Hazel began to see himself as a ragged wanderer, leader of a gang of vagabonds.

The other rabbit made no reply, but his look was not that of an enemy. His demeanor had a kind of melancholy which was perplexing.

His lassitude, his great size and beautiful, well-groomed appearance, his unhurried air of having all he wanted and of being unaffected by the newcomers one way or the other—all these presented Hazel with a problem unlike anything he had had to deal with before.

He decided that he himself, at any rate, would be perfectly candid and plain.

Hazel, however, returned and sat pensive at the lip of the hole, looking out at the silent, rippling veils of rain that drifted across and across the little valley between the two copses.

Closer, before his nose, every blade of grass, every bracken frond was bent, dripping and glistening.

But then, if a lot of rabbits were afraid of some newcomers and wanted to deceive them—get them down a hole and attack them—they’d start—wouldn’t they?—by sending someone who was plausible.

Buckthorn, perhaps the most sensible and staunch of them all.

The dancers paused, evidently waiting for some acknowledgment or reciprocal gesture, but there was none.

All had the same rich, opulent smell as Cowslip.

His own companions were still coming out of the entrance burrow one by one and there was a good deal of scrabbling and shuffling.

After a time, all knew that the concourse was not going to turn sour or break up in a fight.

...so this gathering of rabbits in the dark, beginning with hesitant approaches, silences, pauses, movements, crouchings side by side and all manner of tentative appraisals, slowly moved, like a hemisphere of the world into summer, to a warmer, brighter region of mutual liking and approval, until all felt sure that they had nothing to fear.

Then he remembered how Bigwig, after his reconnaissance on the previous day, had spoken of the little white sticks in the grass.

As they came up into the May morning he hopped over the ditch and skipped into the long grass as blithe as a squirrel.

The wet grass glittered and nearby a nut tree sparkled iridescent, winking and gleaming as its branches moved in the light wind.

On the pasture nearby Hazel could see scattered, russet-and-orange-colored fragments, some with feathery light green foliage showing up against the darker grass.

But to the rabbits they were redolent with luxury, a feast to drive all other feelings out of mind.

Rabbits are lively at nightfall, and when evening rain drives them underground they still feel gregarious.

The people of El-ahrairah are mustering for war. They say they are coming to attack Your Majesty’s garden and steal the royal lettuces.

Ever since their arrival most of them had felt out of their depth among these magnificent, well-fed strangers, with their detached manners, their Shapes on the wall, their elegance, their adroit evasion of almost all questions—above all, their fits of un-rabbit-like melancholy.

Ever since their arrival most of them had felt out of their depth among these magnificent, well-fed strangers, with their detached manners, their Shapes on the wall, their elegance, their adroit evasion of almost all questions—above all, their fits of un-rabbit-like melancholy.

He’s upset and overwrought and it’s not light yet.

A length of twisted copper wire, gleaming dully in the first sunlight, was looped round his neck and ran taut across one forepaw to the head of a stout peg driven into the ground.

The projecting point of one strand had lacerated his neck and drops of blood, dark and red as yew berries, welled one by one down his shoulder.

The legs were loose, the belly flaccid and limp.

“O embleer Frith!” cried a squealing voice in the long grass.
At this shocking impiety, the tumult died away.

That warren’s nothing but a death hole! The whole place is one foul elil’s larder! It’s snared—everywhere, every day!

And since they could not bear the truth, these singers, who might in some other place have been wise, were squeezed under the terrible weight of the warren’s secret until they gulped out fine folly—about dignity and acquiescence, and anything else that could make believe that the rabbit loved the shining wire.

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.