CHAPTER IV
THE FEAR THAT WAS IN THE WAY
Brownie was one of the first family of Fluff-Button and Cuni. It has already been related how she fought the rats in the Garry's Hill burrow, and enough has been said to show that she was a very devoted mother, as indeed most rabbits are. But she had been so terrified by that experience that she resolved to make her next nest right away from the warren; so she dug a hole into the hillside at about a hundred yards' distance.
In the darkness her four babies were only known to her as a squeaking, naked mass, helpless and wholly beloved. She was ignorant of their very number, they had no individuality, nevertheless she lavished all her care upon them, and lay with them all day, feeding and licking them. Only at nightfall she crept out to feed herself, with both ears on the alert. But very few enemies crossed Garry's Hill at night. Now and then an owl hooted in Knockdane; the nightjars purred among the pine trees at the bottom of the hill; and from the warren came the distant bustle of the rabbit community—the munching of many teeth, the splashing of many feet in the dew, and the stamping of scores of signals.
The fern croziers had fully uncoiled, and the lowest bells on the wild hyacinth carillons were fading, before the babies acquired their fur jackets. Under ordinary circumstances they would have remained below ground a few days longer, but an unfortunate accident hurried them out into the world.
Theoretically June is the month of sunshine and flowers; actually—in Knockdane, at all events—there are flowers enough, but June is too often ushered in by pitiless soaking rain. All the new greenery of the woods is saturated, and the hemlocks and nettles, stimulated to ardent growth, begin to send up their shoots waist-high. This is what happened in the season of which I write, for it rained for two nights and a day, and all the flowers seemed drowned. There was trouble enough in the Garry's Hill burrows, but it was very serious indeed for Brownie. A nesting-hole is dug for temporary use only, and has not the drainage of a permanent burrow. The water soon began to filter in from the sides, and a very respectable trickle ran from the entrance. By the second morning the bedding was soaked, and the sucklings lay in a pool of water. For the present they were homeless, and Brownie saw that the only thing was to take them into the fields. Three brown tots, blinking painfully in the daylight, crawled on to the grass; but when the fourth appeared, Brownie sat up, and her nose worked as fast as the 'quaking grass' round, for the last little rabbit was as white as the hawthorns in the hedgerows. There were legends in Knockdane that, in the days when the beeches round the Great White House were saplings, there had been a race of white rabbits in the woods; but for many many years none had been seen there. Perhaps some long-gone ancestor had transmitted his singular colouring to Brownie's nestling, or else some trifling detail in Nature's machinery had been out of gear, for she had not a brown hair upon her, and out on the open slope was as conspicuous as a crow on a snowdrift. However, the Fur Folk live and work only in the present. They are guided by mysterious laws—the accumulated wisdom of past generations—written in the blood of those who went before and neglected to obey the code—and Brownie knew that her babies must lie out on the hillside, for to take them to the warren was to court disaster. She hid the first one in a tussock six feet away in one direction, and the second a few paces from him, while the third was left in some clover. The fourth—the white one—had to put up with a meagre root of rushes. When each little rabbit lay stone-still, the mother went away herself, for she knew that her presence would only add to their danger. When she looked back to judge of the success of her stratagem, the three brown babies were invisible in the grass, but the white one could be seen all over the field. Nevertheless, because of the rulings of the law of the Fur Folk, Brownie went her way, and left her litter to shift for themselves during the day.
The rain had ceased at sunrise, and, although grey vapours curled before the clearing lift, the hillside was a very pleasant place. There were rosy clover clubs, and the yellow bird's foot trefoil beloved of blue butterflies, daisies, and the dainty milkweed, all growing so close together that the grass was almost crowded out. The fluting of the blackbirds in Knockdane only seemed the more mellow for the rain, and skylarks mounted up in rapturous jubilee.