Authors: Richard Adams
It was not until the dappled afternoon began to grow cool that Hazel woke suddenly, to find Kehaar beside him. The gull was strutting from side to side with short, quick steps and pecking impatiently in the long grass. Hazel sat up quickly.
"What is it, Kehaar? Not a patrol?"
"Na, na. Ees all fine for sleep like bloody owls. Maybe I go for Peeg Vater. Meester 'Azel, you getting mudders now soon? Vat for vait now?"
"No, you're right, Kehaar, we must start now. The trouble is, I can see how to start but not how to finish."
Hazel made his way through the grass, roused the first rabbit he found--who happened to be Bluebell--and sent him to fetch Bigwig, Blackberry and Fiver. When they came, he took them to join Kehaar on the short grass of the riverbank.
"This is the problem, Blackberry," he said. "You remember that when we were under the down that evening I said we should have to do three things: get the does out of Efrafa, break up the pursuit and then get right away so that they wouldn't find us. This plan you've thought up is clever. It'll do the first two things, all right, I'm sure of that. But what about the last one? The Efrafan rabbits are fast and savage. They'll find us if we're to be found and I don't believe we can run away faster than they can follow--especially with a lot of does who've never been out of Efrafa. We couldn't possibly stand and fight them to a finish--we're too few. And on top of that, my leg seems to be bad again. So what's to be done?"
"I don't know," answered Blackberry. "But, obviously, we shall need to disappear. Could we swim the river? No scent then, you know."
"It's too swift," said Hazel. "We'd be carried away. But even if we
did
swim it, we couldn't count on not being followed. From what I've heard of these Efrafans, they'd certainly swim the river if they thought
we
had. What it comes to is that, with Kehaar to help us, we can break up a pursuit while we're getting the does out, but they'll know which way we've gone and they won't leave it at that. No, you're right, we've got to vanish without a trace, so that they can't even track us. But how?"
"I don't know," said Blackberry again. "Shall we go up the river a little way and have a look at it? Perhaps there's somewhere we could use for a hiding place. Can you manage that, with your leg?"
"If we don't go too far," replied Hazel.
"Can I come, Hazel-rah?" asked Bluebell, who had been waiting about, a little way off.
"Yes, all right," said Hazel good-naturedly, as he began to limp along the bank upstream.
They soon realized that the woodland on this left bank was lonely, thick and overgrown--denser than the nut copses and bluebell woods of Sandleford. Several times they heard the drumming of a great woodpecker, the shyest of birds. As Blackberry was suggesting that perhaps they might look for a hiding place somewhere in this jungle, they became aware of another sound--the falling water which they had heard on their approach the day before. Soon they reached a place where the river curved round in a bend from the east, and here they came upon the broad, shallow fall. It was no more than a foot high--one of those artificial falls, common on the chalk streams, made to attract trout. Several were already rising to the evening hatch of fly. Just above the fall a plank footbridge crossed the river. Kehaar flew up, circled the pool and perched on the hand rail.
"This is more sheltered and lonely than the bridge we crossed last night," said Blackberry. "Perhaps we could make some use of it. You didn't know about this bridge, Kehaar, did you?"
"Na, not know, not see heem. But ees goot pridge--no von come."
"I'd like to go across, Hazel-rah," said Blackberry.
"Well, Fiver's the rabbit for that," replied Hazel. "He simply loves crossing bridges. You carry on. I'll come behind, with Bigwig and Bluebell here."
The five rabbits hopped slowly along the planks, their great, sensitive ears full of the sound of the falling water. Hazel, who was not sure of his footing, had to stop several times. When at length he reached the further side, he found that Fiver and Blackberry had already gone a little way downstream below the fall and were looking at some large object sticking out from the bank. At first he thought that it must be a fallen tree trunk, but as he came closer he saw that, although it was certainly wooden, it was not round, but flat, or nearly flat, with raised edges--some man thing. He remembered how once, long ago, sniffing over a farm rubbish heap with Fiver, he had come upon a similar object--large, smooth and flat. (That had, in fact, been an old, discarded door.) It had been of no use to them and they had left it alone. His inclination was to leave this alone, too.
One end of the thing was pressed into the bank, but along its length it diverged, sticking out slightly into the stream. There were ripples round it, for under the banks the current was as swift as in midstream, on account of weed-cutting and sound camp-sheeting. As Hazel came nearer, he saw that Blackberry had actually scrambled on the thing. His claws made a faint hollow sound on the wood, so there must be water underneath. Whatever it might be, the thing did not extend downward to the bottom: it was lying on the water.
"What are you after, Blackberry?" he said rather sharply.
"Food," replied Blackberry. "Flayrah. Can't you smell it?"
Kehaar had alighted on the middle of the thing, and was snapping away at something white. Blackberry scuttered along the wood toward him and began to nibble at some kind of greenstuff. After a little while Hazel also ventured out on the wood and sat in the sunshine, watching the flies on the warm, varnished surface and sniffing the strange river smells that came up from the water.
"What is this man thing, Kehaar?" he asked. "Is it dangerous?"
"Na, no dangerous. You not know? Ees poat. At Peeg Vater is many, many poat. Men make dem, go on vater. Ees no harm."
Kehaar went on pecking at the broken pieces of stale bread. Blackberry, who had finished the fragments of lettuce he had found, was sitting up and looking over the very low side, watching a stone-colored, black-spotted trout swim up into the fall. The "boat" was a miniature punt, used for reed-cutting--little more than a raft, with a single thwart amidships. Even when it was unmanned, as now, there were only a few inches of freeboard.
"You know," said Fiver from the bank, "seeing you sitting there reminds me of that other wooden thing you found when the dog was in the wood and you got Pipkin and me over the river. Do you remember?"
"I remember shoving you along," said Bigwig. "It was jolly cold."
"What puzzles me," said Blackberry, "is why this boat thing doesn't go along. Everything in this river goes along, and fast, too--see there." He looked out at a piece of stick floating down on the even two-mile-an-hour current. "So what's stopping this thing from going?"
Kehaar had a short-way-with-landlubbers manner which he sometimes used to those of the rabbits that he did not particularly like. Blackberry was not one of his favorites: he preferred straightforward characters such as Bigwig, Buckthorn and Silver.
"Ees rope. You like bite heem, den you go damn queek, all de vay."
"Yes, I see," said Fiver. "The rope goes round that metal thing where Hazel's sitting: and the other end's fixed on the bank here. It's like the stalk of a big leaf. You could gnaw it through and the leaf--the boat--would drop off the bank."
"Well, anyway, let's go back now," said Hazel, rather dejectedly. "I'm afraid we don't seem to be any nearer to finding what we're looking for, Kehaar. Can you possibly wait until tomorrow? I had the idea that we might all move to somewhere a bit drier before tonight--higher up in the wood, away from the river."
"Oh, what a pity!" said Bluebell. "Do you know, I'd quite decided to become a water rabbit."
"A what?" asked Bigwig.
"A water rabbit," repeated Bluebell. "Well, there are water rats and water beetles and Pipkin says that last night he saw a water hawk. So why not a water rabbit? I shall float merrily along--"
"Great golden Frith on a hill!" cried Blackberry suddenly. "Great jumping Rabscuttle! That's it! That's it! Bluebell, you
shall
be a water rabbit!" He began leaping and skipping about on the bank and cuffing Fiver with his front paws. "Don't you see, Fiver? Don't you see? We bite the rope and off we go: and General Woundwort doesn't know!"
Fiver paused. "Yes, I
do
see," he replied at length. "You mean on the boat. I must say, Blackberry, you're a clever fellow. I remember now that after we'd crossed that other river you said that that floating trick might come in handy again sometime."
"Here, wait a moment," said Hazel. "We're just simple rabbits, Bigwig and I. Do you mind explaining?"
Then and there, while the black gnats settled on their ears, by the plank bridge and the pouring waterfall, Blackberry and Fiver explained.
"Could you just go and try the rope, Hazel-rah?" added Blackberry, when he had finished. "It may be too thick."
They went back to the punt.
"No, it's not," said Hazel, "and it's stretched tight, of course, which makes it much easier to gnaw. I can gnaw that, all right."
"Ya, ees goot," said Kehaar. "You go fine. But you do heem queek, ya? Maybe somet'ing change. Man come, take poat--you know?"
"There's nothing more to wait for," said Hazel. "Go on, Bigwig, straightaway, and may El-ahrairah go with you. And remember, you're the leader now. Send word by Kehaar what you want us to do; we shall all be here, ready to back you up."
Afterward, they all remembered how Bigwig had taken his orders. No one could say that he did not practice what he preached. He hesitated a few moments and then looked squarely at Hazel.
"It's sudden," he said. "I wasn't expecting it tonight. But that's all to the good--I hated waiting. See you later."
He touched his nose to Hazel's, turned and hopped away into the undergrowth. A few minutes later, guided by Kehaar, he was running up the open pasture north of the river, straight for the brick arch in the overgrown railway embankment and the fields that lay beyond.
34.
General Woundwort
Like an obelisk towards which the principal streets of a town converge, the strong will of a proud spirit stands prominent and commanding in the middle of the art of war.
Clausewitz,
On War
Dusk was falling on Efrafa. In the failing light, General Woundwort was watching the Near Hind Mark at silflay along the edge of the great pasture field that lay between the warren and the iron road. Most of the rabbits were feeding near the Mark holes, which were close beside the field, concealed among the trees and undergrowth bordering a lonely bridle path. A few, however, had ventured out into the field, to browse and play in the last of the sun. Further out still were the sentries of the Owsla, on the alert for the approach of men or elil and also for any rabbit who might stray too far to be able to get underground quickly if there should be an alarm.
Captain Chervil, one of the two officers of the Mark, had just returned from a round of his sentries and was talking to some of the does near the center of the Mark ground when he saw the General approaching. He looked quickly about to see whether anything was at fault. Since all seemed to be well, he began nibbling at a patch of sweet vernal with the best air of indifference that he could manage.
General Woundwort was a singular rabbit. Some three years before, he had been born--the strongest of a litter of five--in a burrow outside a cottage garden near Cole Henley. His father, a happy-go-lucky and reckless buck, had thought nothing of living close to human beings except that he would be able to forage in their garden in the early morning. He had paid dearly for his rashness. After two or three weeks of spoiled lettuces and nibbled cabbage plants, the cottager had lain in wait and shot him as he came through the potato patch at dawn. The same morning the man set to work to dig out the doe and her growing litter. Woundwort's mother escaped, racing across the kale field toward the downs, her kittens doing their best to follow her. None but Woundwort succeeded. His mother, bleeding from a shotgun pellet, made her way along the hedges in broad daylight, with Woundwort limping beside her.