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.