Free Tales from Watership Down by Richard Adams Page B

what he’d done—not just that he’d shot himself a rabbit but that it was hurt and screaming. He went over to it, but he didn’t kill it. He stood looking down at it and watching it kick. The grass was bloody, but his boots left no mark, either on the grass or on the mud.
    “What was going to happen next I don’t know. ThankFrith I’ll never know. I believe my heart would have stopped—I should have died. But suddenly, like a noise coming from a long way outside when you’re underground, I heard men’s voices approaching and smelled a white stick burning. And I was glad—yes, I was
glad
as a goldfinch on the tall grass—to hear those voices and smell that white stick. A moment later they came pushing through the flowering blackthorn, scattering the white petals all over the ground. There were two of them, big, flesh-smelling men, and they saw the boy—yes, they saw him and called out to him.
    “How can I explain to you the difference between those men and the rest of that place? It was only when they came shoving in, rasping on the thorns, that I understood that the rabbit and the boy and—everything there—they were like acorns falling from an oak tree. I saw a hrududu once roll down a slope by itself. Its man had left it on a slope, and I suppose he’d done something wrong—it just went slowly rolling down into the brook below, and there it stopped.
    “That’s what they were like. They were doing what they had to do—they had no choice—they’d done it all before—they’d done it again and again—there was no light in their eyes—they weren’t creatures that could see or feel—”
    Coltsfoot stopped, choking. In dead silence Fiver left his place and lay down beside him, between the tree roots, speaking in a very low voice which no one else could hear.After a long pause, Coltsfoot sat up, shook his ears and went on.
    “Those … those … sights … those things … the rabbit and the boy—they melted, even as the men spoke. They vanished, like frost on the grass when you breathe on it. And the men—they noticed nothing strange. I believe now that they saw the boy and spoke to him as part of a kind of dream, and that as he and his poor victim vanished, they remembered nothing of it. Well, be that as it may, they’d evidently come there because they’d heard the rabbit squeal, and you could see why at once.
    “One of them was carrying the body of a rabbit dead of the White Blindness. I saw its poor eyes and I could see, too, that the body was still warm. I don’t know whether you know how men go about this dirty work, but what they do is to put the still-warm body of a dead rabbit down a hole in a warren before the fleas have left the ears. Then, as the body turns cold, the fleas go to other rabbits, who catch the White Blindness from them. There’s nothing you can do but run away—and that only if you realize in time what the danger is.
    “The men stood looking round them and pointing at the deserted holes. Neither of them was the farmer—we all knew what he looked like. He must have asked them to come and bring the body of the rabbit and then been too lazy to go out with them; just told them where to go, and they weren’t too sure about the exact place. You could see that from the way they looked about.“After a little, one of them trod out his white stick and started burning another, and then they went over to a hole and pushed the body right down it with a long pole. After that, they went away.
    “We went away too—I can’t remember how. Fescue was as good as mad: when we got back to Nutley Copse he just lay tharn in the first burrow he found and wouldn’t come out next day or the day after. I don’t know what happened to him in the end—I never saw him after that. Stitchwort and I managed to get hold of a burrow of our own later that summer, and we shared it for a long time. We never spoke of what we’d seen, even when we were alone together. Stitchwort was killed