Lives of the Fur Folk

by Maud D. Haviland

Were I to relate all the vicissitudes which befell the White Rabbit during the following days, I should be accused of recounting miracles; for perhaps under the circumstances not one rabbit in ten would have survived. The ditch was full of enemies, for hedges are the Fur Folk's highways from field to field, and foxes, cats, and stoats patrolled it from hour to hour. The next evening the White Rabbit worked along to the demesne wall, under which a little drain ran, and crept into the wood. If there was vastness and mystery in the fields, how much more under the trees? The sanicle spread a silvery pall above the dying bluebells; the thick scent of the hawthorn was borne to and fro on the night wind; and the woodcock, playing in the dusk, 'chissicked' as they wheeled overhead. That night, for the first time, the White Rabbit ate grass and relished it. She was very hungry, and once her little teeth learned the knack of nibbling criss-cross up a blade, she found that it was pleasanter than her previous attempts had led her to believe. In fact, she was so intent upon her newly learned accomplishment that she never heard the owl swoop down with a thrum of soft wings, and then slant up just as the hawk had done on the hill. But she heard the click as he alighted on a branch overhead, and seeing his eyes, catlike and luminous in the gloom, she hid under a bush.

A day or two later, the White Rabbit had one of the narrowest escapes of her life. Perhaps she had got over her first fright and grown reckless; at any rate, she came out into the grass in broad daylight. The field was purple with ripening grasses, and the warm wind bore the scent of young birch leaves—the sweetest of all summer scents. It was good to be alive. The White Rabbit lay down on her side, and stretched herself luxuriously in the hot sun. Bees hummed comfortably in the vetches, and the grasshoppers assiduously polished their shanks. Suddenly, in the sunshine-chequered hedge, she caught sight of a curious creature moving gently to and fro. She had never seen anything quite like it before. Its deliberate, rhythmical movements fascinated her, and she watched it dance behind a dock plant and out again, with an intentness which rejoiced the heart of a certain wary hunter who crouched behind the said dock. The White Rabbit hopped a step or two nearer, and stood up in order to see this wonderful thing better. At that moment the cat ceased to lash its tail and sprang. The rabbit caught a glimpse of unsheathed claws, bared gums, and dilated eyes, and dived into a forest of cockfoot grass. The cat, at fault, made short excited rushes hither and thither as he heard the rustle of the fugitive's steps, but the White Rabbit flung herself into a stunted blackthorn bush and lay gasping. By and by, when she had recovered sufficiently from her fright to sit up and polish the 'cuckoo froth' from her whiskers, she peeped out; and lo and behold in a runway, with his paws tucked away cosily before him, the cat sat and waited.... The White Rabbit very silently withdrew, and escaped by the further side of the bush. That was the fourth lesson she learned: Beware of the cat—the patient hunter.

It was not until she was three parts grown that the White Doe realised that she was not in all respects like other rabbits. By then she had learned many things. She knew that the badger and the hedgehog and the squirrel and the shrew are quite harmless, but that the fox and the stoat and the cat must be avoided. She knew that the meadow-grass tastes better than either the cockfoot or the couch; and that the surest way to come to grief is to bolt into a hole without first finding out whether it has a back door or no. By degrees, however, she began to find out something more important still, namely, that the rest of the Fur Folk turned aside from her path. Did she hop into the clearing where the other rabbits came of nights to feed, or visited the Dark Pool among the sallies, then the circle was immediately broken up, and vanishing feet fired a whole volley of signals from the bushes. If she fed in the daytime, the squirrels overhead chattered and speculated until the jays took up the matter, and half the woodside was in a fluster. This knowledge did not come in a day. The pignut flowers died, and the enchanter's nightshade had sent up its faint spires in dark places before the White Rabbit realised her powers. It was the fox who opened her eyes to the fact that a certain magic was hers in her perilous ways. One evening after sunset she squatted upon a 'rabbit's table.' There is a rabbit 'table' in almost every glade. It is generally a moss-grown tree stump, or more seldom an ant-hill, upon which the rabbits love to sit for the sake of the expansive view (comparatively speaking) which the extra twelve inches affords them. It is also very often a trysting-place. The White Rabbit was washing herself. It was the penalty which she paid for her uniqueness, that she was obliged to spend no mean portion of the day combing her pink ears and cleansing her silky stockings. Hence she neither heard nor winded the fox's approach until he snapped a twig in the clearing itself. Then, looking up, she saw in the shadows what appeared to be a pair of red stars. The blood of the White Rabbit seemed turned to water; she was paralysed with fear; even her nose ceased its eternal tremolo. She could only stare back, bemused with terror. It must be said that the fox had not entered the glade with any fixed idea of hunting there, he was merely passing through it; hence the increased awfulness of the apparition of the ghost-rabbit on the moss cushion. It was nearly dark, but a shaft of light came down aslant between two tree-tops. In the gloom she appeared larger than her natural size—misty, luminous. The hair along the fox's spine bristled, a growl rose in his throat. It was so quiet, so light; as if fascinated he began to tiptoe forward. Remember that there is hardly anything white known in the woods, except here and there a flower. There is neither white bird nor beast; even the white eggs of the pigeon are laid where none of the Fur Folk can see them, except it be Koutchee the squirrel. Men—wiseacres—who would judge Nature by their printed books, talk grandly of the benefit of Protective Resemblance, and the Survival of the Fittest. They have left out of count the germ planted in the being of the higher Fur Folk—a germ which is often carried from birth to death undreamed of, undeveloped—but which in man, another step up the ladder, becomes a power which is accountable for untold cruelty and strife—superstition. Had all rabbits been white since the first of the race, then indeed the fox's hunting would be easy enough; but when once in ten generations a white rabbit appears, its chances of life are many times greater than those of its fellows, for in the eyes of the hunters it is compassed round with magic, a thing set apart.

The fox crept to within eight feet of the mystery and cowered down, for there was little or no scent to enlighten him as to its nature. The White Rabbit's red eyes were wide with horror, but under the nightmare spell of the fox's proximity she could not move. Fear clogged her limbs, and she watched him, fascinated. She was, of course, entirely unaware that it was she herself who thus checked him. She believed herself almost invisible, and feared to move lest she should betray her presence, thus obeying the arbitrary law of her race: Lie still and he may pass you by. So they gazed eye to eye while one might pant half a score of times, and then a heron, sweeping by with a shriek which ripped the silence of the night, broke the spell. With a snarl the fox leaped sideways into the bushes; and the rabbit, ears flattened, paws twitching, crouched where she was until the rush of his footsteps died away. After this adventure the White Rabbit gradually grew bolder. She lived in some ready-made burrows in the corner of the wood, and fed in the field below Garry's Hill. But if a prowling cat or fox came by, and the rest of the community dived underground, the White One merely sat at the hole's mouth and waited; and in two cases out of three the hunter, after a stealthy glance, passed on. The third case was generally a cat who, more accustomed to the mysterious ways of men, their dependents and belongings, was not afraid to stalk the White Doe of Garry's Hill.

By this time it was August, and the birds went to moult in the deepest thickets of Knockdane. Only an occasional robin sang a bar or two of his roundelay, or a chiff-chaff, who had forgotten the rhythm of his call, cried 'chaff-chaff' in the beech trees. Big spikes of purple loosestrife crowned the damper clearings, and missel thrushes went out to the fields in straggling bands. The mornings grew cooler and later, damp mists steamed up from the river, and the beeches began to turn orange and brown. One fine night the cuckoos disappeared, and the corn-crakes prepared to follow them, for the corn was ripe, and all through the hazy days the whirr of machinery was heard from the hills, like some gigantic grasshopper. The squirrels and oxeyes squabbled in the hazels, and the badgers went harvesting when the moon rose. To the Fur Folk the autumn was a faint echo of the spring. There was something in the mild, still weather, and equal hours of day and night, which stirred them to vague repetition of their doings early in the year. The rabbits wandered away from their burrows, and made desultory scrapings by the pathsides, and the birds, the throstle and pigeon, sang again half heartedly. The White Rabbit, with no idea why she did so, also dutifully scratched little holes in the moss, and followed faint trails which led nowhere in particular. However, the first frost put an end to all this; and after the frosts came the November gales, which slashed the sleet across the woods. Once or twice the men came to shoot in Knockdane, but the White Rabbit was safe enough, for she never made a 'form,' but always lay underground. In fact, there was little enough covert in that part of Knockdane in the winter, and in January, when the foxes were ravenous, the woods were quite bare. However, the White Rabbit passed unscathed through that time of peril; even the traps, which doubly decimated her companions, spared her. Nature, who had put a mark upon her which set her apart from her fellows, had in compensation gifted her with keener wits and judgment. As everybody knows, a rabbit track runs hop-dot down the hedgerow like a rosary of beads, and Paddy Magragh set his snares cunningly in the beads, which are the little patches from which the rabbits hop over the tussocks; but the White Doe went safely to and fro, merely skipping aside if the wicked loop struck her nose. Perhaps, again, it was her colour which saved her here, for many a bunny blundered into the noose when his fellows chased him in sport or anger; but the brown rabbits ignored the White Doe, and she hopped leisurely between her hole and the meadow unharmed. Nevertheless, towards the end of the winter, she, with the rest of the rabbit kind, suffered grievously from famine, for the weather had spoiled all the greenery in the woods. Here again it was the White Rabbit who first set the example of climbing into the boughs of a fallen thorn tree to gnaw a meagre sustenance from the bark of the ivy entwined in it. The idea became fashionable in her burrow; and, clambering clumsily among the branches three or four feet from the ground, the rabbits chiselled away at the ivy until its twigs were as white as bone.

With February—the famine month—the love season began in earnest. All the other rabbits who lived in the outlying collection of burrows with the White Doe, forsook them and wandered down into the woods; while up on Garry's Hill the ground was dotted with the little tufts of grey wool, ripped from one rival by another. The White Rabbit paid no attention to these changes at first, but led her own contented spinster life. The Wild Folk concern themselves very little about the doings of their neighbours; and had every rabbit in Knockdane been suddenly wiped out of existence, the White One would not have altered her habits in a single particular.

It was not until the woodcock began to mate that the White Rabbit found out that she was lonely. Then she left her burrow and went out into the woods, which was a dangerous thing to do in daylight. The robin was reciting his marriage vows to his mate under a holly bush; and the pigeons, recklessly bold, flapped lazily from tree to tree. The White Rabbit scraped enthusiastically for a few minutes, for she felt impelled to unaccountable energy that day, but when she had dug a few inches she broke off, for she could not remember what to do with the hole when she had finished it. Near at hand a buck rabbit stamped, and presently another, larger than he, came out of the bushes and fought him. The White Doe hopped towards them, but being stranger rabbits they broke off their tournament, and fled at the sight of her whiteness. She saw many rabbits that day, and half of them ran away, and the other half were indifferent. The White Rabbit had never felt so lonely before—not even when her mother had been taken from her. Presently she came upon a luckless rabbit which had been killed by a stoat an hour before. The White Rabbit did not know this, and went up to sniff at him. Here at last was something which would not run from her; but when she smelt the fresh blood and saw the wound behind his ear, she turned and galloped away. There was fear everywhere. She was feared by her own kind; and she again feared the blood-hunters. A wren caught sight of her and began to scold—it, too, was afraid. The White Rabbit was very sorrowful.

The Love Longing was not always so strong. Sometimes for weeks at a time she lived alone as happily as heretofore. Then it would break out again, and send her into the woods; but she never found a mate, although young rabbits played outside the burrows, and the birds were all nesting. So March turned to April, and April to May, and the lowest bracken fronds opened like green wings before the crimped tops were uncurled. Then again one day the Love Longing came upon the White Rabbit, and she went to the Dark Pool where the Fur Folk go to drink. There are willow saplings all round, and the chaffinches were collecting the down for nest-lining, for the seeds were ripening. On the further side the White Doe passed a rabbit's 'registry' tree. Most woods have their own registry where the buck rabbits repair in spring, and each tries to scrape away the bark and set the imprint of his teeth a little higher than his fellows. Most of the rabbit duels take place near these trees. Sometimes it is a young sycamore, or a laurel, or a beech, which is chosen out from among the rest; but in this part of Knockdane it was a willow sapling, peeled and scored for two feet above the ground, and with little paths, beaten hard by rabbity feet, converging to it from every direction. As the White Doe passed by, she saw a brown buck rabbit, on his hind legs, leisurely rubbing his whiskers against the trunk; and hopping up quietly behind him she touched him with her white nose. He darted away a few paces, and sat rigid. The White Doe approached him beseechingly and caressed him with a whisker kiss; but he only stared horror-stricken at her wonderful pink eyes, beat his fore paws once or twice in surprise and dismay, and scudded out of sight.

All that day the Love Longing would not be satisfied, and when the White Rabbit fed outside her burrow after dark, the restlessness in her grew so strong that she crept from the shadow of the trees to Garry's Hill. She had scarcely ever visited her native warren, and on the rare occasions on which she wandered thither, the whole burrow had been thrown into a panic. It was dark on the hill, for the moon was behind the clouds. The rabbit people were all munching busily, and the White Rabbit, happy in a sense of companionship, crouched near them. Now and then one bunny, in the sheer joy of living, skipped three feet into the air, and the older bucks chivied the younger ones in and out of the earthworks which many generations of excavators had thrown up. Two rabbits were playing 'tig' on the slope, dodging one another backwards and forwards. The White Doe watched their twinkling white scuts for a minute, and then, just as the moon broke from behind the clouds, with a hop, skip, and jump she launched herself playfully between the couple. They stood still for one paralysed instant, and then, stamping frantically, the whole community stampeded in every direction. The White Rabbit did not realise that she was responsible for this flight, but, believing it to mean cat or stoat, she bolted with the rest. She plunged down a burrow and scurried along never-ending corridors and side-ways. She could hear footsteps which fled before her, and all round the passages rang with muffled danger signals. At last she entered a hide-up, and hearing shuffling feet, explored it to its end. In the dark she collided with something which was furry and soft, and felt twitching whiskers brush her face. Another rabbit had taken refuge there; and surely it was—yes, it was—the noses of the Fur Folk are as trustworthy as our eyes—the same who had repulsed her in the wood that morning. But obviously he did not recognise her in the darkness, for he cowered to her at the end of the passage. There was comfort in companionship, and they huddled together, fearful lest something stealthy and terrible should sniff its way towards them. The White Rabbit thought of stoats, but the other dreaded nameless things—magic things, white things—which leaped out of the gloom. Every now and then the White Rabbit turned her head and nestled against the soft fur of the other's shoulder. Here was rabbit—normal rabbit, brown rabbit—and yet he did not shrink from her, for in her turn she felt a tremulous nose sniff at her ears....