An undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is.
Company Prospectus of the South Sea BubbleWith the exception of Buckthorn and the addition of Bluebell, the rabbits whoset off from the southern end of the beech hanger early the next morning werethose who had left Sandleford with Hazel five weeks before. Hazel had saidnothing more to persuade them, feeling that it would be better simply to leavethings to set in his favor. He knew that they were afraid, for he was afraid himself.
Indeed, he guessed that they, like himself, could not be free from the thought ofEfrafa and its grim Owsla. But working against this fear was their longing andneed to find more does and the knowledge that there were plenty of does inEfrafa. Then there was their sense of mischief. All rabbits love to trespass andsteal and when it comes to the point very few will admit that they are afraid to doso; unless (like Buckthorn or Strawberry on this occasion) they know that theyare not fit and that their bodies may let them down in the pinch. Again, inspeaking about his secret plan, Hazel had aroused their curiosity. He had hopedthat, with Fiver behind him, he could lure them with hints and promises: and hehad been right. The rabbits trusted him and Fiver, who had gotten them out ofSandleford before it was too late, crossed the Enborne and the common, takenBigwig out of the wire, founded the warren on the downs, made an ally of Kehaarand produced two does against all odds. There was no telling what they would donext. But they were evidently up to something; and since Bigwig and Blackberryseemed to be confidently in on it, no one was ready to say that he would ratherstay out; especially since Hazel had made it clear that anyone who wished couldremain at home and welcome -- implying that if he was so poor-spirited as tochoose to miss the exploit, they could do without him. Holly, in whom loyalty wassecond nature, had said no more to queer the pitch. He accompanied them as faras the end of the wood with all the cheerfulness he could muster; only beggingHazel, out of hearing of the rest, not to underrate the danger. "Send news byKehaar when he reaches you," he said, "and come back soon."Nevertheless, as Silver guided them southward along higher ground to thewest of the farm, almost all, now that they were actually committed to theadventure, felt dread and apprehension. They had heard enough about Efrafa todaunt the stoutest heart. But before reaching it -- or wherever they were going --they had to expect two days on the open down. Foxes, stoats, weasels -- any ofthese might be encountered, and the only recourse would be flight above ground.
Their progress was straggling and broken, slower than that which Holly had madewith his picked band of three. Rabbits strayed, took alarm, stopped to rest. After atime Hazel divided them into groups, led by Silver, Bigwig and himself. Yet stillthey moved slowly, like climbers on a rock face, first some and then others takingtheir turn to cross the same piece of ground.
But at least the cover was good. June was moving toward July and highsummer. Hedgerows and verges were at their rankest and thickest. The rabbitssheltered in dim green sun-flecked caves of grass, flowering marjoram and cowparsley; peered round spotted hairy-stemmed clumps of viper's bugloss,blooming red and blue above their heads; pushed between towering stalks ofyellow mullein. Sometimes they scuttled along open turf, colored like a tapestrymeadow with self-heal, centaury and tormentil. Because of their anxiety about eliland because they were nose to ground and unable to see far ahead, the wayseemed long.
Had their journey been made in years gone by, they would have found thedowns far more open, without standing crops, grazed close by sheep; and theycould hardly have hoped to go far unobserved by enemies. But the sheep werelong gone and the tractors had plowed great expanses for wheat and barley. Thesmell of the green, standing corn was round them all day. The mice werenumerous and so were the kestrels. The kestrels were disturbing, but Hazel hadbeen right when he guessed that a healthy, full-grown rabbit was too large aquarry for them. At all events, no one was attacked from above.
Some time before ni-Frith, in the heat of the day, Silver paused in a little patchof thorn. There was no breeze and the air was full of the sweet, chrysanthemum-like smell of the flowering compositae of dry uplands -- corn chamomile, yarrowand tansy. As Hazel and Fiver came up and squatted beside him, he looked outacross the open ground ahead.
"There, Hazel-rah," he said, "that's the wood that Holly didn't like."Two or three hundred yards away and directly across their line, a belt of treesran straight across the down, stretching in each direction as far as they could see.
They had come to the line of the Portway -- only intermittently a road -- whichruns from north of Andover, through St. Mary Bourne with its bells and streamsand watercress beds, through Bradley Wood, on across the downs and so toTadley and at last to Silchester -- the Romans' Calleva Atrebatum. Where itcrosses the downs, the line is marked by Caesar's Belt, a strip of woodland asstraight as the road, narrow indeed but more than three miles long. In this hotnoonday the trees of the Belt were looped and netted with darkest shadow. Thesun lay outside, the shadows inside the trees. All was still, save for thegrasshoppers and the falling finch song of the yellowhammer on the thorn. Hazellooked steadily for a long time, listening with raised ears and wrinkling his nosein the unmoving air.
"I can't see anything wrong with it," he said at last. "Can you, Fiver?""No," replied Fiver. "Holly thought it was a strange kind of wood and so it is,but there don't seem to be any men there. All the same, someone ought to go andmake sure, I suppose. Shall I?"The third group had come up while Hazel had been gazing at the Belt, and nowall the rabbits were either nibbling quietly or resting, with ears laid flat, in thelight green sun-and-shade of the thorn thicket"Is Bigwig there?" asked Hazel.
Throughout the morning Bigwig had seemed unlike himself -- silent andpreoccupied, with little attention for what was going on around him. If hiscourage had not been beyond question, it might have been thought that he wasfeeling nervous. During one long halt Bluebell had overheard him talking withHazel, Fiver and Blackberry, and later had told Pipkin that it sounded for all theworld as though Bigwig were being reassured. "Figh............