Tales from Watership Down (21 page)

Bigwig then said that he and Holly would go with her, but this she declined. She did not want any other rabbits to risk themselves.

At this, Bigwig lost his temper. “You call yourself a Chief Rabbit and then say you’re going out traipsing about by yourself for the sake of a few miserable Efrafan does. Is that what you call weighing one thing with another? If Hazel were here, he’d certainly forbid you, and well you know it. A stupid, fatheaded doe calling herself Chief Rabbit! Chief Field Mouse more like.”

Hyzenthlay went up to him and looked him squarely in the eye. “Bigwig, I’ve said what I’m going to do, and that’s all there is to it. If you reject my authority over this, there’ll be no authority left in the warren by tomorrow, as you must know perfectly well. Now please let me get on; and have some clean burrows ready for the Efrafan does when they arrive.”

Bigwig, fuming, stormed out of the Honeycomb and began cursing the first rabbit he met, who happened to be Hawkbit. Meanwhile, Hyzenthlay, leaving Thethuthinnang to tell Hazel, as soon as he returned, what had happened, set off toward the Belt.

She was surprised not to meet the Efrafan rabbits on the way and wondered what could possibly have happened
to them. It was now early evening. What breeze there had been had dropped. The air was still. The shadows of the tall cow parsley were growing longer, and the sun was dropping toward a cloud bank in the west. With a certain misgiving she pressed on. After quite some time, she found herself approaching the Belt, with no sign of rabbits anywhere. She began searching to right and left, but found no trace in the twilight. As she was wondering what to do, she came upon a female hare feeding its leverets in the form. The hare spoke first.

“Are you looking for some stray rabbits? Does? There’s a small crowd over there, by that beech tree.”

A few moments later Hyzenthlay was among them.

“I’m a Watership rabbit come to look for you. Rithla told us you were going to make your own way to us. What’s happened?”

“It’s Nyreem here,” answered one of the does. “She’s hurt one of her back legs and can’t use it at all. We’ve stayed with her. We weren’t going to leave her out alone all night for the elil.”

Hyzenthlay examined the injured rabbit. She was in a lot of pain and could barely stand, let alone walk. The upper part of the leg was swollen and very tender. However, there was no wound, and Hyzenthlay thought that all she needed was rest. She said so.

“Rest? Here?” said another doe. “How long for?”

“Until she’s better,” answered Hyzenthlay shortly.

“But it’s nightfall now. If an enemy comes, she can’t run, can’t defend herself—”

“
I
am going to stay with her,” said Hyzenthlay. “The rest of you are all to get on as fast as you can, up that track—that one over there. That will take you straight to Watership, where they’re expecting you. No arguments now! Get on with it!”

The does, none of whom had ever been a hundred yards beyond Efrafa in their lives, obeyed her with no more than a show of reluctance, and Hyzenthlay settled down beside Nyreem in the long grass. Pathetically young and totally inexperienced, the poor little creature was almost beside herself with fear, and it was all that Hyzenthlay could do to calm her and give her the reassurance that she by no means felt in herself. She told her all the stories she could remember and finally settled her to sleep, pressed up against her own warm flank. Soon she felt drowsy herself, but struggled against every inclination to drop off. Owls began calling, the moon rose, and from the grass came all the tiny noises of night—rustlings, susurrations, minute tappings and quick little here-and-gone sounds that might never have been at all, might have existed only in a pair of long ears strained to the limit with listening. She prayed with all her might to El-ahrairah for his protection and shelter, and tried to feel his presence with her among the moon shadows.

Now began one of the most frightening nights of her life. Cramped, and trying not to move for fear of disturbing Nyreem, despite herself she began to think of all that she had ever heard of the elil, of the silence with which they moved upwind, stalking their rabbit prey so noiselessly
that the victim knew nothing until the pounce and the grip of teeth in the flesh. She had seen worms and beetles writhing in the beaks of the blackbirds, had seen thrushes cracking the shells of live snails on stones. Would it be like this for her? She had seen, too, the scavenger beetles that dug cavities and laid their eggs inside, together with bodies of small dead creatures for the hatched young to live on. Bats and owls, too, she thought of, hunting moths and mice, their living prey. Moles, she knew, would fight each other to the death when they met in their underground passages. Were rabbits the only creatures that did not hunt and kill? So it seemed in her dismal thoughts. Woundwort had done all he could to confer ferocity on rabbits, and little good it had done him in the end. She thought of all the Efrafans whom he had sent to their deaths. She wished with all her heart that Woundwort were lying beside her now. And if that was not desperation, what was?

The young doe beside her slept on soundly. If only, she thought, she could get her alive and well to the warren, she would have justified her own insistence on coming here alone. But in order to do that, she must herself survive, and there was nothing more she could do to bring that about.

She saw with surprise that the moon had almost set. She must have slept without knowing it; and nothing bad had happened. This was encouraging, and spontaneously she began to feel herself in a more cheerful frame of mind. El-ahrairah, she thought, would not leave a loyal rabbit helpless.

After a while, she had the notion that they were being watched. Even as she realized this, the long grass parted and there, before her eyes, was a rat.

For long moments in the fading moonlight they sized each other up. It was not a very large rat, though quite big enough. Also, it was plainly foraging. She could see on its bared teeth fragments of some sort of flesh. It blinked once or twice, twitched its whiskers and moved nearer. It was still undecided.

Hyzenthlay spoke in hedgerow vernacular. “This young doe mine. I mother. You come to kill, I fight till you dead.” Instinctively she stood up, to bring home to the rat her superior size and height. At this, Nyreem woke and began to whimper.

Hyzenthlay placed herself between Nyreem and the rat. As she did so, a feathered mass, clawed and smelling of blood, fell upon them from above, without a sound. Instantly, before she even had time to be afraid, it was gone and the rat with it, horribly pierced in its talons.

“What’s happened? Oh, what was it?” cried Nyreem, pressing close against her.

“An owl,” replied Hyzenthlay. “It’s gone away now. There’s nothing to be afraid of, dear. I’m here. You go back to sleep.”

She herself fell asleep again, this time thinking with a kind of sullen indifference that everything had happened which could happen and anyway she was past caring.

When she woke it was a little after sunrise, and a
blackbird was singing in the beech tree as though there were no such thing as fear in the world. Nyreem, too, woke, and she asked her whether the leg felt any better. The swelling had certainly gone down a good deal, and she was able to limp a few steps. Hyzenthlay told her to lie down again and go on resting. She herself went and had a look round, then bit off a burnet and some sorrel leaves, which they ate together, lying in the sunshine as it grew gradually warmer.

Hyzenthlay asked Nyreem why she had joined the rabbits leaving Efrafa. The little doe replied that she had wanted to be like Quiens, an older rabbit whom she greatly admired. “That’s how I hurt my leg,” she said. “Quiens jumped right down a steep bank and I followed her, but it was too much for me. I thought at first I’d broken my leg. I know it was a silly thing to do, but they were very kind about it. I do hope they all got safely to your warren last night.”

As the sun climbed slowly toward ni-Frith, Hyzenthlay wondered whether to press Nyreem to do her best to go on. She certainly did not want them to spend another night in the open. It was a difficult decision, but it was one that would have to be made. Finally she thought that the thing to do would be to wait until the evening and then encourage Nyreem to do the best she could. Head in the grass, she settled down patiently to watch the insect world amid the sun and dew. She could perceive no purpose whatever in their clamberings among the grass blades. She herself lay so still that the blackbird, looking for something to eat, alighted
beside her and pecked here and there for a while before fluttering on.

It was a very long day. The only movement was that of the thin grass shadows and of the clouds passing above. Both were so smooth and regular that they did nothing to break the monotony. During the late afternoon the heat slowly lessened, and she dozed once more, becoming alert only when a pair of goldfinches alighted close by, stripped the seeds from the taller grasses and bobbed restlessly away.

A few moments later she started up in alarm, raising her ears to listen tensely and looking one way and another with staring eyes. Some animal was coming through the grass, an animal fully as big as herself, if not bigger. It was downwind of her, and she could smell nothing; but she could see the disturbed grass moving in a steady progression toward her. Instinctively she crouched down, her back legs drawn up under her, ready to leap.

The next thing she knew, the long grass parted and Bigwig appeared.

“Bigwig!” cried Hyzenthlay, overcome with relief and feeling sure on the instant that all her problems were as good as solved. “Bigwig! Why ever are you here?”

“Oh, well, I—er—I was just—er—having a bit of a stroll, you know,” replied Bigwig in some embarrassment. “I—er—thought you might be somewhere about, sort of. How are
you
?” he said, turning to Nyreem. “Leg better now? Your Efrafan friends are all waiting for you and
hoping you’ll be back with them this evening. Just see what you can do with it, because I think it’s time we were going.”

“Oh, I’m sure I’ll be quite all right now, sir,” answered Nyreem. “If we don’t go too fast, I’m sure I’ll manage very well, no danger.”

“Good!” said Bigwig. “Come on, then. I’ll keep on one side of you and—er”—he choked slightly—“Hyzenthlayrah will keep on the other. You’ll do fine.”

They set off slowly, Nyreem hobbling as best she could, determined not to complain. As near as she could guess, this must be none other than Thlayli, the renowned captain of the Watership Owsla, who had defeated the terrible General Woundwort in underground combat. She stole a sideways glance. Yes, it must be he. He was scarred all over, and on his head was the tuft of fur which had given him his name. Had he actually come out to look for her? Or, more likely, for Hyzenthlay, who was talking across her and telling Thlayli about the rat and the owl. Apparently they regarded looking after her as all in a day’s work and simply part of their duty as officers. They regarded themselves as responsible for any Watership rabbit, however insignificant. So this was what it meant to be a Watership rabbit? Then and there, she resolved never to do anything that might forfeit her place in the warren.

They arrived home a little before nightfall, to find Hazel and Silver pretending to be concluding a late silflay but in actuality watching out for them. Nyreem, almost
too overawed to thank them, rejoined her Efrafan companions and told them about her adventure. Even Quiens seemed favorably impressed, and Nyreem could not help feeling that she had made quite a good start in the new warren.

After two or three days, Nyreem’s injured leg had completely recovered and she had settled into the warren as smoothly as any of the new arrivals from Efrafa; that is, until the time when she became an admirer of Sandwort’s.

Sandwort, a strongly built and self-willed young buck, was no more than a few months old when he began to attract criticism from several of the older rabbits.

“You’d better keep an eye on that young Sandwort of yours,” remarked Silver one day to his mother, a quiet, gentle doe named Melsa, a descendant of Clover, one of the rabbits from Nuthanger Farm. “He was plain insolent to me this morning; I had to cuff him over the head.”

“I can’t do anything with him,” replied Melsa. “He’s got no respect for me, or for any other rabbit, come to that. The trouble is he’s very big and strong for his age, and he’s influenced quite a few of the younger rabbits to admire him and see him as a sort of leader.”

“Well, you’d better tell him to think a bit less of himself,” said Silver, “if he doesn’t want to get on the wrong side of Hazel-rah and Bigwig; or of me either, for that matter.” He liked Melsa and on that account was content to leave it there, for the moment, anyway.

It was Sandwort, however, who soon showed himself of no mind to leave it there. Before long, others among the veteran rabbits were complaining of his behavior. He had disregarded Holly, who had told him to get back out of sight in the long grass when men were coming up the Down. He had refused point-blank to obey Speedwell, a quiet and easygoing rabbit if ever there was one, when told one evening to take his scuffling companions out of the Honeycomb and find somewhere else to tussle and brawl. “We’ve got as much right to be here as you,” he said; and Speedwell, faced by a small crowd of Sandwort’s hangers-on, had felt it best to say no more and himself to leave the Honeycomb.

In short, it soon became plain that Sandwort did not regard himself as subordinate to any rabbit in the warren. In such a free-and-easy society this was not particularly obtrusive until he began persuading other young rabbits, both male and female, to accompany him on expeditions beyond the warren and refusing to say where they were going or where they had been.

“I don’t have to tell you or any other rabbit where I’ve been,” he replied one evening to Silver, who had met and questioned him returning with two or three others from
what had evidently been a long and exhausting excursion. “I can go where I please and it’s no one else’s business.”