WatershipDown

days when silflay is still enjoyable. For the adventurous, garden-raiding has its charms. And underground there are stories to be told and games to be played -bob-stones and the like. For rabbits, winter remains what it was for men in the middle ages -- hard, but bearable by the resourceful and not altogether without compensations.

On the west side of the beech hanger, in the evening sun, Hazel and Fiver were sitting with Holly, Silver and Groundsel. The Efrafan survivors had been allowed to join the warren and after a shaky start, when they were regarded with dislike and suspicion, were settling down pretty well, largely because Hazel was determined that they should.

Since the night of the siege, Fiver had spent much time alone and even in the Honeycomb, or at morning and evening silflay, was often silent and preoccupied.

No one resented this -- "He looks right through you in such a nice, friendly way," as Bluebell put it -- for each in his own manner recognized that Fiver was now more than ever governed, whether he would or no, by the pulse of that mysterious world of which he had once spoken to Hazel during the late June days they had spent together at the foot of the down. It was Bigwig who said -- one evening when Fiver was absent from the Honeycomb at story time -- that Fiver was one who had paid more dearly than even himself for the night's victory over the Efrafans. Yet to his doe, Vilthuril, Fiver was devotedly attached, while she had come to understand him almost as deeply as ever Hazel had.

Just outside the beech hanger, Hyzenthlay's litter of four young rabbits were playing in the grass. They had first been brought up to graze about seven days before. If Hyzenthlay had had a second litter she would by this time have left them to look after themselves. As it was, however, she was grazing close by, watching their play and every now and then moving in to cuff the strongest and stop him bullying the others.

"They're a good bunch, you know," said Holly. "I hope we get some more like those."

"We can't expect many more until toward the end of the winter," said Hazel, "though I dare say there'll be a few."

"We can expect anything, it seems to me," said Holly.

"Three litters born in autumn -- have you ever heard of such a thing before?

Frith didn't mean rabbits to mate in the high summer."

"I don't know about Clover," said Hazel. "She's a hutch rabbit: it may be natural to her to breed at any time, for all I know. But I'm sure that Hyzenthlay and Vilthuril started their litters in the high summer because they'd had no natural life in Efrafa. For all that, they're the only two who have had litters, as yet."

"Frith never meant us to go out fighting in the high summer, either, if that comes to that," said Silver. "Everything that's happened is unnatural -- the fighting, the breeding -- and all on account of Woundwort. If he wasn't unnatural, who was?"

"Bigwig was right when he said he wasn't like a rabbit at all," said Holly. "He was a fighting animal -- fierce as a rat or a dog. He fought because he actually felt safer fighting than running. He was brave, all right. But it wasn't natural; and that's why it was bound to finish him in the end. He was trying to do something