"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 couldn't see the sun, you understand, and when night fell there were no stars either. And then next morning a stoat found us--a big dog stoat.
"I don't know what they do to you--I've never met one since, El-ahrairah be praised--but we all three just sat there helplessly while it killed Mian; she never made a sound. We got away somehow, but Fescue was in an awful state, crying and carrying on, poor little chap. And in the end, some time after ni-Frith on the second day, we decided to go back to the home warren.
"It was easier said than done. I believe now that we wandered in circles for a long time. But anyway, by evening we were as lost as ever and just plodding on in a kind of hopeless way, when all of a sudden I came down a slope and through a bramble bush, and there was a rabbit--a stranger--quite close by. He was at silflay, browsing over the grass, and I could see his hole--several holes, in fact--beyond him, on the other side of the little dell we were in.
"I felt terribly relieved and glad, and I was just going over to speak to him, when all of a sudden something made me stop. And it was as I stopped and looked at him that it came over me where it was that we must have stumbled into.
"The wind--what wind there was-was blowing from him toward us, and as he browsed he stopped and passed hraka. I wasn't very far away, and he gave off no smell whatever--nothing--not the faintest trace. We'd come blundering through the brambles straight in front of him, and he hadn't even looked up or given any sign of having noticed us. And then I saw something which frightens me even now--I can never get it out of my mind. A fly--a big bluebottle--flew down right on his eye. He didn't blink or even shake his head. He went on feeding, and the fly ... it ... it disappeared; it vanished. A moment later he'd hopped his own length forward, and I saw it on the grass where his head had been.
"Fescue was beside me, and I heard him give a little, quick moan. And it was when I heard that that I realized there was no other sound in that dell where we were. It was a fine evening with a light breeze, but there wasn't a blackbird singing, not a leaf rustling--nothing. The earth round all the rabbit holes was cold and hard--not a scratch or mark anywhere. I knew then what I was seeing, and all my senses clouded over--sight, smell ... I felt a sort of surge of faintness pour up through my body. The whole world seemed to topple away and leave me alone in that dreadful place of silence, where there were no smells. We were Nowhere. I caught a glimpse of Stitchwort beside me, and he looked like a rabbit choking in a snare.
"It was then that we saw the boy. He was crawling on his stomach through the bushes a little to one side of us--downwind of the rabbit on the grass. He was a big boy, and all I can say is that men may have looked like that once, but from what little I've seen of them, they don't anymore. There was a kind of dirty, faraway wildness about him, like the place itself. His clothes were foul and torn. He had old boots too big for him and a stupid, cruel face with bad teeth and great warts on one cheek. And he, too, made no sound and had no smell.
"In one hand he was holding a forked stick with a sort of loop hanging from it, and as I watched he put a stone into it and pulled it back nearly to his eye. Then he let go, and the stone flew out and hit the rabbit on the right hind leg. I heard the bone break, and the rabbit leaped up and screamed. Yes, I heard that, all right--I still hear it, and dream about it too. Can you imagine what a breathless, a lungless scream might be like? It seemed to be in the air rather than to come from the rabbit kicking on the grass. It was as though the whole place had screamed.
"The boy stood up, cackling, and now the hollow seemed to be
full of rabbits we couldn't see, all running for those cold, empty holes.
"You could see he was enjoying 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. Thank Frith 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.