"Shall we leave now, master?" asked Rabscuttle. "You surely don't want us to be mixed up with this place any longer, do you? We might be shot or ... or ... well, whatever the men are going to do."
"Yes, we'll leave, all right," replied El-ahrairah. "But I'm not ready yet. Just keep a lookout and tell me at once if you see the men doing anything unusual."
However, nothing happened on the following day and nothing the day after that. It was unusually early on the morning of the third day after the cat had been killed that Rabscuttle woke El-ahrairah and told him that a whole lot of men were coming into the long-grass field, most of them carrying sticks and one of them with a gun. El-ahrairah crept under a hawthorn bush to a place where both of them could watch the men, who at that moment were doing nothing except standing about, burning white sticks in their mouths and talking.
After some time, two of them went away and came back riding on the hrududu, pulling the grass cutter behind it. They drove it to a place at the outer edge of the long grass and began cutting the whole field in a circle, always going a little further inward as they came round. Meanwhile, the other men spread out and stood all round the edge, moving slowly inward as the grass was cut. Although El-ahrairah knew that the whole field was full of rabbits, he saw none come out. He realized that they wanted to stay hidden in the long grass and were creeping toward the center as it was cut.
At last the hrududu stopped and became silent. It had left a patch of long grass uncut, and this the men surrounded.
"Right, we'll go now," said El-ahrairah, and began to run as fast as he could away from the field, away from the farm and out into the open country beyond, with Rabscuttle hard on his heels. He did not want to hear the men shouting as they went forward, beating at the grass with their sticks. He did not want to see Burdock and his rabbits come scuttling out in all directions, to be clubbed and battered to death as they tried to get through the encircling men. One or two did get through, but the man with the gun did not miss them.
"Don't look back," said El-ahrairah to the trembling Rabscuttle, "and don't ever talk about it. We're going home--remember?--and something's telling me it's not very far now."
11
El-ahrairah and the Lendri
Tommy Brock ... was not nice in his habits.
He ate wasp nests and frogs and worms: and he
waddled about by moonlight, digging things up.
BEATRIX POTTER, "The Tale of Mr. Tod"
>
Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier
to act than to think.
HANNAH ARENDT, quoted in W. H. Auden, A Certain World
For a few days (said Dandelion) after they had left poor Burdock and his rabbits, El-ahrairah and Rabscuttle traveled on uneventfully through the long-grass meadows and the summer weather.
One evening, as they were making themselves comfortable in the straw on the floor of an old barn, Rabscuttle said, "We're not far from home now, master. I can feel it all through my body, can't you?"
"Well, I can't feel it all through your body," replied El-ahrairah, who was often unable to resist gently testing Rabscuttle, "but I can feel it, all right. All the same, I've got the notion that we may have to get past some big obstacle or other before we get there. We'd better keep a good lookout and go carefully. It would be a pity, wouldn't it, to stop running so close to home?"
It was getting late in the afternoon of the next day when they came in sight of a thick forest. It was no ordinary forest, as they could see. To right and left it stretched way into the distance, and there seemed to be no gaps or openings which might have been the beginnings of paths through the tangle of trees and undergrowth.
"I'm afraid there's no help for it," said El-ahrairah, when he had gazed at the forest and pondered for some time. "Through that nasty-looking place we'll have to go. I can tell that, can't you?"
"All too clearly, master, I'm afraid," answered Rabscuttle, sitting down in the grass and cleaning his face with his front paws. "But we can't do it on our own. We're going to need some kind of help. It would never do just to go plunging into a place like that by ourselves. We'd be lost in half an hour and dead in half a day."
"What sort of help, though?" asked El-ahrairah. "We'd better start by trying to find someone who knows a bit more about it than we do."
They had not gone far toward the forest before they came upon a huge rat, almost as big as El-ahrairah himself. It was sitting in the sun and no doubt, thought the rabbits, meditating on the details of some vile and murderous scheme. Neither of them liked the look of it at all, but all the same, thought El-ahrairah, as the rat eyed him silently with an evil and cunning expression, we've got to start somewhere. He greeted the rat politely and sat down beside it on the edge of a ditch.
"I wonder if you can give us some advice," he began. "We've got to get through that forest."
"What for?" asked the rat, its whiskers twitching unpleasantly.
"To get home," said El-ahrairah.
"Then how in bones and blazes do you come to be here?" asked the rat.
"It was on the orders of Lord Frith," answered El-ahrairah. "We had to undertake a long journey at his bidding. We're lucky to be alive. But now we're going home."