Hazel

A. N. Wilson has written over twenty stories for grown-ups, many of which have won prizes such as the Somerset Maugham Award (for
The Healing Art)
and the 1988
Whitbread Award (for the biography
Tolstoy
). He has also written the story of the exciting adventures of a hamster in a book called
Furball and the Mokes
and the tale of an old
cat looking back over his life, called
Stray
. He has had many pets in his life, including dogs and cats. His three daughters have, between them, had rabbits, guinea pigs, hamsters,
goldfish and dogs.

Also by A. N. Wilson

Furball and the Mokes

First published in Great Britain in 1989 by Walker Books Ltd.

Published in paperback in Great Britain in 2012 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Text © 1989 A. N. Wilson
Illustrations © 2012 Luisa Crosbie

The moral right of A. N. Wilson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him/by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of
1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual
persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN: 978 0 85789 078 8
E-book ISBN: 978 0 85789 079 5

Printed in Great Britain.

Corvus
An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd
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26–27 Boswell Street
London
WC1N 3JZ

www.corvus-books.co.uk

Hazel’s Search

The Visit of Fudge

Brown ’Un

Hazel was a brown, sleek, beautiful guinea pig with eyes as glossy and black as raisins. Like most guinea pigs, Hazel enjoyed her food. She was far from slender. To be honest,
Hazel was a very fat guinea pig indeed. In fact, she was so fat that she looked as though she had been blown up like a balloon. Her cheeks bulged. Her black-curranty eyes seemed to pop out of her
ample face. And her body was a sphere, a pudding of glossy brown fur.

But Hazel was an extremely handsome creature. It suited her to be fat, just as it suits some
people
to be fat. And fat is what she was.

Hazel liked to explore. When she was in her hutch, she sometimes ran from one room to the next, as though she were looking for something. Life in two rooms becomes more interesting if it can be
turned into an everlasting quest. She waddled into her living room and ate some food. Then she nuzzled about behind the food bowl, as if she were looking for something there. Then she ran back into
her bedroom and burrowed into the hay, as though she had lost something – something very precious.

When her young owner got her out of the hutch, Hazel liked to explore some more.

‘No,’ she seemed to say, turning this way and that on someone’s lap. ‘It’s not here. Let’s try up there.’ And she would scuttle up under someone’s
jersey.

‘Hazel loves going up your jumper,’ said one of the children, one afternoon when their mother was out at the shops.

‘Yes, she does,’ agreed the other child. ‘She likes to explore.’

‘I suppose I do,’ thought Hazel. ‘I like to explore. I wonder what there is down
this
dark passage. I’ll just have a look. You never know.’

When she went down that dark passage, Hazel felt wool pressing hard against her cheeks, and she heard the girl’s voice crying out, ‘Hazel! What are you doing?’

‘She is going up your jumper,’ said the boy’s voice.

Hazel tried to advance further into the sleeve-tunnel, but it was tight and dark and woolly. Before long, she could feel the girl pulling at her hind legs and dragging her back into the
daylight.

Hazel wriggled and struggled to be free. She had begun to feel a bit peckish, and she would not have refused if someone had offered her a piece of brown bread or a carrot. (These were her
favourite foods.)

She found that the girl had put her down on the kitchen floor, and she was able to run about freely. Here there was much to explore.

‘Worth a look,’ thought Hazel, as she scuttled to the other end of the kitchen and peered between the bars of a fender. A fire was glowing beyond the bars, and Hazel wondered whether
she might have a closer look at it. Very bright, fire is. Very interesting. On the other hand, it is also … Hazel wondered how she would describe it. Well, hot would be one word. The bars of
the fender almost hurt her nose before she had started to sniff them.

‘I remember now,’ she thought. ‘Fire’s hot. Ar well, now that I’ve had a look at that, it is time to search about for … for …’

What was it that Hazel was always searching for and seeking?

She ran along the skirting board and listened at a mousehole. All was quiet within, for this was a household with cats. There was no mouse merrymaking there.

Hazel peered at the bottom of a cupboard. But the door was shut.

And then, at the other end of the kitchen, she saw another door. This time, it was an open door.

No one was taking as much notice of her as they should have done when Hazel, very swift, though very fat on her short legs, made her rapid progress towards the open door. She ran! Oh, how Hazel
ran! She ran out of the kitchen and into the tiled hall, through the legs of a chair, and up to a most interesting selection of articles lying higgledy-piggledy by the back door.

‘Now,’ Hazel asked herself, ‘what have we here?’

She had stopped feeling slightly peckish. She had become extremely hungry. And she had decided that there was no point in waiting for someone to give her a stalk or a leaf, a carrot or a crust.
She should go and look for them. That’s what she would do.

Hazel’s mind had wandered a bit by the time she reached the heap of interesting articles. She had forgotten, exactly, what it was that she had decided. Explore, that would be it. But what
for?

Now then, what had she here? Hazel paused. In that moment, she looked as round and as brown and as sleek and as fat as she had ever looked in her life. Just ahead of her nose, she had seen a
Wellington boot resting on its side.

‘Well,’ said Hazel to herself, ‘if that isn’t a tunnel! What was it that I had decided to go and do?
Explore
! That was it. Well, where better to explore than up
a tunnel? And – me being hungry and all, who knows? Like as not, there’s a carrot or a bit of brown bread at the end of that … yes, that tunnel. Tunnel’s the word for
it.’

And with great eagerness, Hazel advanced into the Wellington boot. Inside it smelt rather rubbery, but she pressed on, fearless, towards the toe.

‘Now this,’ she thought, ‘is what I’d call dark. Very, very dark, this tunnel. Dark and – ’ she added to herself as she got further and further inside the
boot – ‘dark and, well, narrow would be one word for it. Yes, I would definitely say that this tunnel was narrow. Still, what was it? Carrots and crusts?’

By now Hazel was in complete darkness, and she realised two very disagreeable facts. One was that the sides of the tunnel were narrower than her own fat little body. Another sad fact was that,
though her feet were still scampering and scuttling, she had stopped moving.

In short, Hazel was stuck.

She had never walked backwards in her life. She had only walked forwards. And the more she scampered and scuttled with her sharp little claws, the more stuck Hazel became. The sides of the
Wellington boot pressed against her fur. She had become a prisoner.

In the kitchen, the children had noticed Hazel’s absence, but they were unable to explain it.