Free Tales from Watership Down by Richard Adams

I don’t know what a hare looks like?… Couldn’t get him to move until I kicked him,” he added to Bigwig in an undertone. “Talk about tharn—”
    “It
was
a ghost,” said Scabious, but with less conviction. “Perhaps it was a ghost hare—”
    “I don’t know about ghost hares,” said Bluebell, “but I tell you, the other night I nearly met a ghost flea. It must have been a ghost, because I woke up bitten like a burnet, and I searched and searched and couldn’t find it anywhere. Just think, all white and shining, this fearful phantom flea—”
    Hazel had gone over to Scabious and was gently nuzzling his shoulder.
    “Look,” he said, “that wasn’t a ghost—understand? I’ve never in my life known a rabbit that’s seen a ghost.”
    “You have,” said a voice from the other side of the Honeycomb. Everyone looked round in surprise. It was Coltsfoot who had spoken. He was sitting by himself in a recess between two beech roots: together with his customary silence, the position seemed to set him apart and, as it were, to confer upon him a kind of remoteness and authority, so that even Hazel, bent as he was upon reassuring young Scabious, said no more, waiting to hear what would follow.
    “You mean
you’ve
seen a ghost?” asked Dandelion, quick to smell a story. But Coltsfoot, so it seemed, needed no further stimulation, now that he had found his tongue. Like the Ancient Mariner, he knew those who must hear him; and he had a less reluctant audience, for under his dark compulsion the whole Honeycomb fell silent and listened as he went on.
    “I don’t know whether you all know that I’m not an Efrafan born. I was born at Nutley Copse, the warren the General destroyed. I was in the Owsla there, and I would have fought as hard as the rest, but I happened to be a long way out on silflay when the attack came, and the Efrafans took me prisoner at once. I was put in the Neck Mark, as you can see, and then last summer I was one of those picked for the attack on Watership Down.
    “But none of that has to do with what I said to your Chief Rabbit just now.” He fell silent.
    “Well, what has?” asked Dandelion.
    “There was a place across the fields, not very far from Nutley Copse,” went on Coltsfoot. “A kind of little, shallow dingle all overgrown with brambles and thorn trees—so we were told—and full of old scrapes and rabbit holes. They were all empty and cold; and no Nutley Copse rabbit would go near that place, not if there were hrair weasels after him.
    “All we knew—and the story had been handed down for Frith knows how long—was that something very bad had happened to rabbits there, long ago—something to do with men, or boys—and that the place was haunted and evil. The Owsla believed it, every one of them, so of course the rest of the warren believed it too. As far as we knew, no rabbit had flashed his tail there in living memory, and long before that. Only some said that squealing had been heard late in the evening dusk and on foggy mornings. I can’t say, though, that I ever thought about it much. I just did what everyone else did—kept away.
    “Now, during my first year, when I was an outskirter at Nutley Copse, I had a very thin time, and so did two or three of my friends. And the long and short of it was that one day we decided we were going to move out and find a better home. There were two other young bucks with me, my friend Stitchwort and a rather timid rabbit named Fescue. And there was a doe too—Mian, I think she was called. We set out about ni-Frith one cold day in April.”
    Coltsfoot paused, chewed his pellets for a time, as though considering his words, and then continued.
    “Everything went wrong with that expedition. Before evening it turned bitterly cold and the rain came down in sheets. We ran into a foraging cat and were lucky to get away. We were completely inexperienced. We had no idea where we meant to go, and before long we lost all sense of direction. We