"Watership Down" by Richard Adams, Chapters 35-38

During the afternoon he had been up and down the runs and crowded burrows with Chervil and Avens, the other Mark officer, and had thought to himself that never in his life had he seen such a cheerless, dispirited lot of rabbits.

As Bigwig found a place alongside, he noticed for the first time, in the opposite wall of the run, a kind of recess like an open cave.

In this, three rabbits were squatting. Those on either side had the tough, stolid look of members of the Owslafa.

One eyelid was misshapen and closed askew.

Despite the cool, exciting air of the July evening, he seemed apathetic and torpid. He kept his gaze fixed on the ground and blinked continually.

After a time he lowered his head and rubbed his nose on his forepaws in a listless manner.

No doubt, he thought, this was some hero of the warren, wounded in a great fight and now infirm, whose past services merited an honorable escort when he went out.

Every Mark should see how I have been punished as I deserve for my treachery in trying to leave the warren.

They’re no trouble themselves, but Nelthilta’s taken up with them and it seems to have made her cheeky and resentful: sort of thing you saw just now.

Bigwig’s spirit was as tough as his body and quite without sentimentality, but, like most creatures who have experienced hardship and danger, he could recognize and respect suffering when he saw it.

“I know you’re Nelthilta,” said Bigwig to the pretty young doe who had retorted to Chervil in the run.

Nelthilta’s rejoinder to Chervil in the run had been full of hatred, but this doe’s gaze spoke of wrongs beyond her power to express.

He ran like mad, but Campion had got the alarm, you see, and he simply moved round and intercepted him further down the fields.

Blackavar presumably spent the day under guard in some special burrow. Probably hardly anyone knew where—no one knew anything in Efrafa—and certainly no one would tell.

At last she spoke again, so low in his ear that the words seemed barely more than broken cadences of breathing.

“Oh, the marli tharn,” said Chervil. “Funny, I didn’t think she was ready.” Marli—a doe. Tharn—stupefied, distraught.

In this particular context, the nearest translation might be “the maiden all forlorn.”

Most of the Mark did not appear to be unduly affected by the thunder, which was still distant, as Chervil had said.

Bigwig’s first impulse was to fight Woundwort on the spot. He realized immediately that this would be futile and would only bring the whole place round his ears.

Despite the sunset, the evening seemed heavy with cloud and among the trees it was sultry and gray.

There was no sound close by, but behind and below them, from the water meadow on the nearer bank of the Test, came faintly the shrill, incessant fussing of a pair of sandpipers.

He sat secure at the junction of all paths, seeing clearly down each, while he, Bigwig, ludicrous in his efforts to measure up to him as an enemy, clambered clumsily and ignorantly through the undergrowth, betraying himself with every movement.

He could certainly succeed in getting out with a couple of resolute, sensible does.

The sky seemed as close as the tops of the trees, covered with still cloud and flushed on the morning side with a lurid, foxy glow.

Blackavar was squatting a little way off, under an overhanging plume of cow parsley.

As they set off up the left bank, the wind began to blow in fitful, warm gusts, with a multifoliate rustling through the sedges.

Bigwig gave the guard a tremendous cuff on the side of the head, which knocked him clear across the run and into the prisoner’s alcove.

Surely, when the thunder struck them again they would vibrate, tremble and shatter, till warm shards, sharp as icicles, fell flashing down from the ruins.

Immediately upon it came the thunder: a high, tearing noise, as though some huge thing were being ripped to pieces close above, which deepened and turned to enormous blows of dissolution.

Expecting to be attacked at any moment, they scuttered and floundered through the undergrowth, finding here a doe and there one of their own rabbits and forcing them on.