  Four little rabbits had seen the light in a hutch snugly stuffed with straw, where they lived cosy and warm by their mother’s side. They were pretty, plump little things, all four as fat as butter, and just as well-liking one as the other; but while three of them had white bellies and dappled backs, one was white all over from head to foot, and his mother was mighty proud of his beauty, you may be sure. You could not have found so exquisite a rabbit, no, not for three leagues round, and every day he grew handsomer and handsomer, like a king’s son. Two great rubies glittered in his fine eyes, and his teeth were just like the edge of a saw; yes, and he had a moustache—three hairs, which made him, oh! so conceited. Mother Rabbit loved them all tenderly; but she loved Jannot, her firstborn, best of all. To begin with, he was the eldest; then she had had more trouble to rear him, and ill-health always draws a closer bond between mother and child; besides, she was inordinately proud of his white coat, and dreamt he was destined for greatness. What form would it take? This she could not tell. Perhaps he would take first prize at a show—perhaps he would found a breed of white rabbits like himself. She lavished every delicacy upon her darling, and his prospective honours consoled her for the triviality of everyday existence. They would soon be two months old, and that is the age when young bunnies are taken from their mothers. She dreaded the moment of parting; Jannot would have to go with the rest. In fact, all four were weaned by this time; they were beginning to gnaw at carrots now, and would often try to get out through any gaps they could find, for they longed to see the great world. The hutch had open bars, and they could look out into a kitchen-garden with lettuce-beds, and beyond that see a flock of ducks paddling about beside a brook. There was an apple-tree to the right, with a cloud of sparrows always squabbling round it. To the left an outhouse door gave a glimpse of cows and horses, dimly outlined in the gloom of the interior. There were cats, too, stretching themselves in the sun or stalking sedately up and down. At peep of day the whole farmyard woke up; noon brought a momentary silence; then, as the sun grew hotter, sparrows chirped, ducks quacked, cows lowed, and the din went on uninterruptedly till dusk. The little bunnies would fain have joined the other animals; they would gaze wistfully at the birds flying high in the air, and the sight of the cattle marching off cheerfully for the pastures gave them a craving for the green fields. How big the farmyard seemed, to be sure! and how amazed they were when Mother Rabbit told them there were other places bigger still which they could not see. She described the woods and ravines and burrows, for she knew these well enough from hearsay; why, they could not have travelled round the world in a whole day, so enormous it was! Squatted round their mother, the youngsters listened to all this, and their hearts almost failed them. But not so Jannot; his imagination was stimulated by what he heard. “Ah!” he would cry, “will they never let me out, that I may have my chance of seeing all these wonderful things?” Then his mother was alarmed; but he would kiss her and promise he would come back again directly, once he had seen the world. But she only shook her head, and could not make up her mind to let him go. “The world is full of cruel beasts; you will never, never escape its dangers.” “I have teeth and claws.” “So have they, child; but their teeth are longer and their claws sharper than yours. Restrain your eagerness; time enough yet to go forth into the wide, wide world.” He would shake his head impatiently and fall to gnawing at the woodwork of the hutch; in fact his mind was full of guilty thoughts of escape. At last, one fine morning, when his mother was tidying the litter, he made a bolt for it. Scarcely had he gone a hundred steps when he was arrested by a startling sight. He beheld half-a-dozen hairy brown skins nailed up in a row. They still retained the shape of the bodies they had once clothed, and little trickles of blood ran down the wall where they hung. There was no mistaking; they had belonged to rabbits like himself. “Oh, dear!” he thought, “so they kill rabbits, do they?” But this sinister sight was quickly forgotten in the variety of new wonders he encountered. A pig was grunting on a dunghill, with a young foal kicking at him and destroying his peace of mind, and a goat gambolling near by; one after the other he saw a rat, a dog, a calf, and a flock of pigeons that suddenly took wing. They rose in the warm morning air, glittering in the sun, flying so high he soon lost sight of them altogether. Looking down again, he noticed a cat watching him, and remembered he had seen her in the garden, prowling among the lettuces. The width of the yard was between them, and he had a barn behind him. The cat lay crouched on the kitchen steps; she never moved, but her eyes were wide open and glittered cruelly. Then she got up slowly. Jannot believed his last hour was come; he thought of his mother, and shut his eyes. A furious barking made him open them again. The cat was gone; with one bound Jannot sprang into a cart round which a bull-dog was racing with his mouth wide open, and leapt from there into the barn. Inside the straw was piled up mountains high, so close to the wall he had some difficulty in forcing a passage; still, it was only betwixt the wall and the straw he could hope to find a safe refuge. He durst not come out again, and stayed there in hiding till nightfall. Then he plucked up spirit, took a step or two in the dark, and came upon a hole close down to the floor through which he could slip. What a sight met him outside! The country lay white in the moonlight, house-roofs, pools, watercourses glittering in the beams. The leaves quivered restlessly in the night wind, and the distant clumps of brushwood stood out in clear-cut outline. It was very beautiful; but look! suddenly, close to him, two long, black, moving shadows scared him out of his seven senses. The cat! Jannot never stopped till he reached the woods, after darting across the garden, leaping a brook, scurrying over the fields, breathless and exhausted. Vague shadows loomed around him; flying footsteps sounded about his path; suddenly, by the startled cry that escaped a little creature which halted right before his nose, he knew he was in presence of another rabbit. “I am Jannot,” he said, in a low voice; “perhaps we are relations.” From the first moment the rabbit saw him, he loaded him with polite attentions, declared he loved him already, and offered him the hospitality of his house; so the two of them jogged off in company. But after a moment or two Goodman Rabbit stopped dead, saying— “You’d best go by the clearing, and I through the scrub; it will never do to let the polecat see us. We will meet at the foot of a great oak you can’t help seeing.” Jannot followed his companion’s advice; but no sooner were they together again than the rabbit, after fifty yards or so, cried out once more— “The place we’re in now is just as dangerous as the other. A wild-cat lurks hereabouts, and slaughters whatever comes under his claws. You go that way; I’ll go this. A rock you will see will serve as rendezvous.” They reached the rock at the same moment, and then trotted off again. They were just coming to a coppice of young trees with narrow winding paths through it when his experienced friend called a halt for the third time, crying— “Well, we did well not to travel side by side. My advice is that we go each his own way again, without bothering about one another, till we come to the crossroads you’ll find down yonder. Ah! d’ye see those snares? Mind you don’t get into them, for if the polecat and the wild-cat are lords of the lands we have just been through, the poacher rules here as monarch paramount.” The advice was good, but its giver had no time to finish it; he was caught by the foot in one of the gins, and the more he struggled to get free, the tighter the dreadful noose was drawn. “Help! help!” he clamoured. But already Jannot was off and away, panic-stricken; he ran on and on, never once stopping till he won back as quick as ever he could to the edge of the woodland where he and Master Rabbit had first met. “If the world is so strewn with dangers,” he thought to himself, “better to live in peace and quietness in a hutch. What use in roaming the woods, when death is at the journey’s end?” Then in his mind’s eye he saw his mother again and his brothers; and the safe shelter where they awaited his return seemed a far-off, happy refuge he could hardly hope to reach. Field-mice and weasels and martens were stirring in the dark underwood and shaking the leaves. Suddenly a new terror, more appalling than all the rest, gripped him; he thought he was being pursued. Then he dashed out into the plain that lay clear in the moonlight, and, with ears pricked, thinking all the while he could hear at his heels the unwearying, unflagging trot, trot of the fell creatures that were on his track, he pushed through hedges, leapt ditches, climbed banks. He had his back to the moon, and two black shadows, the same he had seen at the outset of his escapade, stretched out before him; this time they went in front, never leaving him, and sometimes lengthening out to portentous proportions. No doubt about it, a whole host of enemies was after him! At last his breath failed him and he sank down in despair, waiting for death; but as it was a long time coming, he began to recover a little courage, and, turning round, stared hard into the night. Not a thing was visible amid the loneliness of the fields, and the moon seemed to be grinning down at him from the sky. Then he discovered that the two shadows that had terrified him so were only the shadows of his own two ears. This was mortifying! Day dawned by slow degrees; and presently he found himself back by the brook, the ducks, the cow-shed and the kitchen-garden. “Mind this,” his mother told him, “there’s no adventures so fine as to match the pleasure of being safe at home, among the folks who love you.” |
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