"Watership Down" by Richard Adams, Chapter 43-Epilogue

Until that very moment he had shown up strongly, a most formidable adversary.

Cunning and resourceful in adversity, he had nearly succeeded in hurting the gull when he leaped at him out of the close cover by the plank bridge.

Day and night they heard the muffled thud of the picks above and dreamt of the collapse of the grotto and of every ghastly eventuality.

They were cuffed and mauled and barely got out with their lives.

He had brought his Owsla to get at these rabbits, knock them down and beat them. A siege would be a miserable anticlimax.

One was at the north end of the Honeycomb, above the place where the tree roots formed a kind of cloister in the burrow.

Here the roof, latticed through and through with fine roots, was very strong.

The air in the dark burrow was stifling.

“I give you my word, sir,” said Thistle querulously, “there’s some animal down there that is not a rabbit. We both heard it.”

The great field at the foot of the escarpment had been reaped, but the straw had not yet been burned and lay in long pale rows upon the darker stubble, tenting over the bristling stalks and the weeds of harvest—knotgrass and pimpernel, fluellen and speedwell, heartsease and persicary—colorless and still in the old moonlight.

His head was a tumult of smells—phlox in bloom, ashes, cow dung, dog, cat, hens, stagnant water.

In a terrible miasma of dog smell, which gripped him with fear and called “Run! Run!” down every nerve, he crept forward to where the eye bolt was screwed into the roof.

The punt cord had been drenched through with rain, pliant, slippery and fibrous.

Its great green eyes, the pupils contracted to vertical black slits in the sunshine, were staring into his own.

A poor lot, I’d say—skulking underground, and some of them running away in the night.

More than once he had fought alone and imposed his will on crowds of other rabbits.

Ferocity and aggression are everything.

Blood had matted the great thatch of fur on his head, and one ear, half severed, hung down beside his face.

Even he could derive little satisfaction from the prospect of killing a tharn rabbit half his own size, in obedience to a contemptuous taunt.

Now, as he continued to meet the eyes of this unaccountable enemy—the only one he had faced in all the long night’s search for bloodshed—horror came upon him and he was filled with a sudden fear of his words, gentle and inexorable as the falling of bitter snow in a land without refuge.

The shadowy recesses of the strange burrow seemed full of whispering, malignant ghosts and he recognized the forgotten voices of rabbits done to death months since in the ditches of Efrafa.

But almost before they had begun to scatter, into their midst bounded a great black dog, snapping, biting and chasing hither and thither like a fox in a chicken run.

“Ah, that’s good girl. I reckon she’ll be right’s a trivet tomorrer.”

He took off his pince-nez and put them in his waistcoat pocket.

Although Woundwort had shown himself at the last to be a creature virtually mad, nevertheless what he did proved not altogether futile.

Although leaves remained on the beeches and the sunshine was warm, there was a sense of growing emptiness over the wide space of the down. The flowers were sparser.

They are more subject to disease in winter and the cold lowers their vitality.

“Please, sir, I’ve never seen a cat,” said the young rabbit.
“No, you haven’t yet,” admitted the gallant captain.

One chilly, blustery morning in March, I cannot tell exactly how many springs later, Hazel was dozing and waking in his burrow.

It seemed to Hazel that he would not be needing his body any more, so he left it lying on the edge of the ditch, but stopped for a moment to watch his rabbits and to try to get used to the extraordinary feeling that strength and speed were flowing inexhaustibly out of him into their sleek young bodies and healthy senses.