Acorn was making a great business of licking Hawkbit's throat, while Speedwell watched.
'Keep still if you can, poor old chap,' said Acorn, who obviously wanted to be overheard. 'Just let me clean the blood out. Steady, now!' Hawkbit winced in an exaggerated manner and backed away. As Hazel came up, all the rabbits turned and stared at him expectantly.
'Look,' said Hazel, 'I know there's been some trouble, but the best thing will be to try to forget it. This is a bad place, but we'll soon get out of it.'
'Do you really think we will?' asked Dandelion.
'If you'll follow me now,' replied Hazel desperately, 'I'll have you out of it by sunrise.'
'If I don't,' he thought, 'they'll very likely tear me to bits: and much good may it do them.'
For the second time he made his way out of the pit, and the others followed. The weary, frightening journey began again, broken only by alarms. Once a white owl swept silently overhead, so low that Hazel saw its dark, searching eyes looking into his own. But either it was not hunting or he was too big to tackle, for it disappeared over the heather; and although he waited motionless for some time, it did not return. Once Dandelion struck the smell of a stoat and they all joined him, whispering and sniffing over the ground. But the scent was old and after a time they went on again. In this low undergrowth their disorganized progress and uneven, differing rhythms of movement delayed them still more than in the wood. There were continual stampings of alarm, pausing, freezing to the spot at the sound of movement real or imagined. It was so dark that Hazel seldom knew for certain whether he was leading or whether Bigwig or Silver might not be ahead. Once, hearing an unaccountable noise in front of him, which ceased on the instant, he kept still for a long time; and when at last he moved cautiously forward, found Silver crouching behind a tussock of cocksfoot for fear of the sound of his own approach. All was confusion, ignorance, clambering and exhaustion. Throughout the bad dream of the night's journey, Pipkin seemed to be always close beside him. Though each of the others vanished and reappeared like fragments floating round a pool, Pipkin never left him; and his need for encouragement became at last Hazel's only support against his own weariness.
'Not far now, Hlao-roo, not far now,' he kept muttering, until he realized that what he said had become meaningless, a mere refrain. He was not speaking to Pipkin or even to himself. He was talking in his sleep, or something very near it.
At last he saw the first of the dawn, like light faintly perceived round a corner at the far end of an unknown burrow; and in the same moment a yellowhammer sang. Hazel's feelings were like those which might pass through the mind of a defeated general. Where were his followers exactly? He hoped, not far away. But were they? All of them? Where had he led them? What was he going to do now? What if an enemy appeared at this moment? He had answers to none of these questions and no spirit left to force himself to think about them. Behind him, Pipkin shivered in the damp, and he turned and nuzzled him-much as the general, with nothing left to do, might fall to considering the welfare of his servant, simply because the servant happened to be there.
The light grew stronger and soon he could see that a little way ahead there was an open track of bare gravel. He limped out of the heather, sat on the stones and shook the wet from his fur. He could see Fiver's hills plainly now, greenish-gray and seeming close in the rain-laden air. He could even pick out the dots of furze bushes and stunted yew trees on the steep slopes. As he gazed at them, he heard an excited voice further down the track.
'He's done it! Didn't I tell you he'd do it?'
Hazel turned his head and saw Blackberry on the path. He was bedraggled and exhausted, but it was he who was speaking. Out of the heather behind him came Acorn, Speedwell and Buckthorn. All four rabbits were now staring straight at him. He wondered why. Then, as they approached, he realized that they were looking not at him, but past him at something further off. He turned round. The gravel track led downhill into a narrow belt of silver birch and rowan. Beyond was a thin hedge; and beyond that, a green field between two copses. They had reached the other side of the common.
'Oh, Hazel,' said Blackberry, coming up to him round a puddle in the gravel. 'I was so tired and confused, I actually began to wonder whether you knew where you were going. I could hear you in the heather, saying 'Not far now' and it was annoying me. I thought you were making it up. I should have known better. Frithrah, you're what I call a Chief Rabbit!'
'Well done, Hazel!' said Buckthorn. 'Well done!'
Hazel did not know what to reply. He looked at them in silence and it was Acorn who spoke next.
'Come on!' he said. 'Who's going to be first into that field? I can still run.' He was off, slowly enough, down the slope, but when Hazel stamped for him to stop he did so at once.
'Where are the others?' said Hazel. 'Dandelion? Bigwig?'
At that moment Dandelion appeared out of the heather and sat on the path, looking at the field. He was followed first by Hawkbit and then by Fiver. Hazel was watching Fiver as he took in the sight of the field, when Buckthorn drew his attention back to the foot of the slope.
'Look, Hazel,' he said, 'Silver and Bigwig are down there. They're waiting for us.'
Silver's light-gray fur showed up plainly against a low spray of gorse, but Hazel could not see Bigwig until he sat up and ran toward them.
'Splendid, Hazel,' he said. 'Everybody's here. Let's get them into that field.'
A few moments later they were under the silver birches and as the sun rose, striking flashes of red and green from the drops on ferns and twigs, they scrambled through the hedge, across a shallow ditch and into the thick grass of the meadow.
12. The Stranger in the Field
Nevertheless, even in a crowded warren, visitors in the form of young rabbits seeking desirable dry quarters may be tolerated… and if powerful enough they may obtain and hold a place.
To come to the end of a time of anxiety and fear! To feel the cloud that hung over us lift and disperse-the cloud that dulled the heart and made happiness no more than a memory! This at least is one joy that must have been known by almost every living creature.
Here is a boy who was waiting to be punished. But then, unexpectedly, he finds that his fault has been overlooked or forgiven and at once the world reappears in brilliant colors, full of delightful prospects. Here is a soldier who was waiting, with a heavy heart, to suffer and die in battle. But suddenly the luck has changed. There is news! The war is over and everyone bursts out singing! He will go home after all! The sparrows in the plowland were crouching in terror of the kestrel. But she has gone; and they fly pell-mell up the hedgerow, frisking, chattering and perching where they will. The bitter winter had all the country in its grip. The hares on the down, stupid and torpid with cold, were resigned to sinking further and further into the freezing heart of snow and silence. But now-who would have dreamed it? — the thaw is trickling, the great tit is ringing his bell from the top of a bare lime tree, the earth is scented; and the hares bound and skip in the warm wind. Hopelessness and reluctance are blown away like a fog and the dumb solitude where they crept, a place desolate as a crack in the ground, opens like a rose and stretches to the hills and the sky.
The tired rabbits fed and basked in the sunny meadow as though they had come no further than from the bank at the edge of the nearby copse. The heather and the stumbling darkness were forgotten as though the sunrise had melted them. Bigwig and Hawkbit chased each other through the long grass. Speedwell jumped over the little brook that ran down the middle of the field and when Acorn tried to follow him and fell short, Silver joked with him as he scrambled out and rolled him in a patch of dead oak leaves until he was dry. As the sun rose higher, shortening the shadows and drawing the dew from the grass, most of the rabbits came wandering back to the sun-flecked shade among the cow parsley along the edge of the ditch. Here, Hazel and Fiver were sitting with Dandelion under a flowering wild cherry. The white petals spun down around them, covering the grass and speckling their fur, while thirty feet above a thrush sang, 'Cherry dew, cherry dew. Knee deep, knee deep, knee deep.'
