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.”