Watership Down

“All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, and whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you, digger, listener, runner, prince with the swift warning. Be cunning and full of tricks and your people shall never be destroyed.”

Frith the sun god promises El-ahrairah that, though his people must be punished for his arrogance, they still are Frith’s friends and always will have the means to survive. The passage foreshadows the adventures of Hazel’s group, which will call upon every ounce of strength and wit it has to survive.

“‘[…] we need to cross the river, Hazel, so that we can get into those fields—and on beyond them too. I know what we ought to be looking for—a high, lonely place with dry soil, where rabbits can see and hear all round and men hardly ever come. Wouldn’t that be worth a journey?’ ‘Yes, of course it would. But is there such a place?’”

Fiver lays out for Hazel the basic description of what they’re searching for—a place with a good lookout, safe from flood and humans, and easy to live on. Fiver knows that, beyond a river, there are uplands, and these may lead them to their destination. Still, they’re searching for a rabbit’s version of heaven, and Hazel knows enough to doubt if it’s real.

“Now Bigwig’s put their backs up, and they’ll think they’ve got to go on because he makes them. I want them to go on because they can see it’s the only thing to do. There are too few of us for giving orders and biting people. Frith in a fog! Isn’t there enough trouble and danger already?”

Hazel answers Blackberry’s question about who’s in charge by expressing a desire to inspire rather than scare the rabbits. His idea of leadership would draw the others toward the goal rather than push them from behind. Bigwig is an important member of the group, but his efforts may backfire if they cause the rabbits to become sullen and fearful.

“To come to the end of a time of anxiety and fear! To feel the cloud that hung over us lift and disperse—the cloud that dulled the heart and made happiness no more than a memory! This at least is one joy that must have been known by almost every living creature.”

The rabbits find a beautiful meadow next to a wood with a brook and plenty of grass. As harsh as their journey was, this place makes the trip worthwhile. Nearby is a small warren of well-fed rabbits who welcome the newcomers. It all seems too good to be true, but the tired and hungry rabbits choose to delight in what appears to be good fortune.

“There is nothing like bad weather to reveal the shortcomings of a dwelling, particularly if it is too small. You are, as they say, stuck with it and have leisure to feel all its peculiar irritations and discomforts.”

Hazel’s band of young rabbits learn the hard way that there’s more to building a good warren than sitting back and enjoying the fruits of the labors of the does. These young bucks, struggling to build sheltering burrows, discover their own lack of ability. It’s an early sign that there’s more to a good warren than a bunch of bucks.

“It was cold, it was cold and the roof was made of bones.”

Hazel’s dreams are inflected by Fiver’s fears. Fiver believes the roof of the great hall at Cowslip’s warren isn’t covered in tree roots but in the bones of dead rabbits. His instincts are correct: The warren is a breeding ground for rabbits meant to be slaughtered and fed to humans. Hazel is wise enough to let that terrible thought intrude on his fantasy of a wonderful home where predators are removed, and food is plentiful. It is too good to be true: A place that lulls them into passive happiness also will kill them.

“Who wants to hear about brave deeds when he’s ashamed of his own, and who likes an open, honest tale from someone he’s deceiving?”

Fiver explains why Cowslip’s warren doesn’t care for stories about El-ahrairah, whose daring fails to fit into their submissive culture of good living followed by execution. They can’t admit their cowardly desire to have Hazel’s group die instead of them; the visitors’ stories thus make them feel awkward. Fiver clarifies that the warren’s residents aren’t their friends but part of the trap they’ve fallen into.

“Since leaving the warren of the snares they had become warier, shrewder, a tenacious band who understood each other and worked together. There was no more quarreling. The truth about the warren had been a grim shock. They had come closer together, relying on and valuing each other’s capacities. They knew now that it was on these and on nothing else that their lives depended, and they were not going to waste anything they possessed between them.”

Adversity tempers Hazel’s group, and they learn to depend on each other’s abilities. Hazel is the acknowledged leader; Fiver’s predictions are taken seriously; Bigwig’s authority is unquestioned. This newfound ability to operate as a team makes them wiser, stronger, and better able to meet the challenges that face them.

“Nowadays, among fields and woods, the noise level by day is high—too high for some kinds of animal to tolerate. Few places are far from human noise—cars, buses, motorcycles, tractors, lorries. The sound of a housing estate in the morning is audible a long way off. People who record birdsong generally do it very early—before six o’clock—if they can. Soon after that, the invasion of distant noise in most woodland becomes too constant and too loud. During the last fifty years the silence of much of the country has been destroyed. But here, on Watership Down, there floated up only faint traces of the daylight noise below.”

The author makes a direct comment about environmental degradation in the downlands where the rabbits live. Animals behave differently under the stress of human noises; since the book’s publication in 1972, a half-century of development has only increased the problem. Watership Down, though, is somewhat isolated; the rabbits suffer less from the noise that stresses their nervous systems and drowns out the stealthy approach of predators.

“‘We’re going to need some new ideas ourselves.’ ‘Well, you’re the fellow for ideas,’ said Hazel. ‘I never know anything until you tell me.’ ‘But you go in front and take the risks first,’ answered Blackberry. ‘We’ve all seen that.’”

Blackberry, among the smartest of the rabbits, acknowledges Hazel as the leader. Hazel, ever the diplomat, returns the compliment. It’s part of Hazel’s leadership ability to encourage each rabbit to understand and use his strengths and to know that he’s valued for his contributions.

“‘There’s terrible evil in the world.’ ‘It comes from men,’ said Holly. ‘All other elil do what they have to do and Frith moves them as he moves us. They live on the earth and they need food. Men will never rest till they’ve spoiled the earth and destroyed the animals.’”

Holly says that most predators—the stoat, the fox, the hawk—are part of Frith’s plan, but humans are different. Their ways upset the natural balance and threaten all living things. Human activity is relentless, and it grows larger all the time. The destruction of the Sandleford warren is but one of a continuing list of attacks on the lives of the woodland’s creatures.

“Bluebell had been saying that he knew the men hated us for raiding their crops and gardens, and Toadflax answered, ‘That wasn’t why they destroyed the warren. It was just because we were in their way. They killed us to suit themselves.’”

Holly describes the horror of watching his warren mates die and his home plowed under. Toadflax lives long enough to sum up the disaster. It’s a terrible and disorienting thing to know that they were attacked, not for food or vengeance, but simply at a predator’s convenience. That the rabbits died for no reason they can fathom is hard for them to comprehend. The world somehow ceases to be orderly, and the chaos has a cruel edge to it.

“You know how you let yourself think that everything will be all right if you can only get to a certain place or do a certain thing. But when you get there you find it’s not that simple.”

Holly describes his own journey to reach Bigwig and apologize to him, a trek that he believes somehow will set things right. His notion echoes the all-too-common human dream of overcoming problems with a single, big solution. Life, though, has its complexities, and human or animal plans can get drowned in the details.

“Water is necessary to us, but a waterfall is not. Where it is to be found it is something extra, a beautiful ornament. We need daylight and to that extent it is utilitarian, but moonlight we do not need. When it comes, it serves no necessity. It transforms.”

The downs at night sometimes glow beneath a full moon. Its light offers, not utility, but awe. The author suggests that even the animals might sense a difference in the presence of such eerie beauty.

“Like the pain of a bad wound, the effect of a deep shock takes some while to be felt. When a child is told, for the first time in his life, that a person he has known is dead, although he does not disbelieve it, he may well fail to comprehend it and later ask—perhaps more than once—where the dead person is and when he is coming back.”

The rabbits must deal with the unthinkable, that Hazel has been killed. Such an event can’t be believed, much less understood. The rabbits have an especially hard time with the idea of losing their chief, though perhaps all creatures, including humans, struggle to comprehend the loss of a great leader.

“‘Animals don’t behave like men,’ he said. ‘If they have to fight, they fight; and if they have to kill, they kill. But they don’t sit down and set their wits to work to devise ways of spoiling other creatures’ lives and hurting them. They have dignity and animality.’”

Strawberry describes the typical viewpoint of an animal, which wants only to survive and not to cause pain. General Woundwort, though, thinks only of dominating his warren—his is an exaggerated version of the casual cruelty of Owslas—and won’t listen. Woundwort might argue that his rules help his warren survive, but his extreme measures warp into brutality, and they verge on the barbarism of humans toward other animals. 

“Well, there’s another place—another country, isn’t there? We go there when we sleep; at other times, too; and when we die. El-ahrairah comes and goes between the two as he wants, I suppose, but I could never quite make that out, from the tales. Some rabbits will tell you it’s all easy there, compared with the waking dangers that they understand. But I think that only shows they don’t know much about it. It’s a wild place, and very unsafe. And where are we really—there or here?”

Fiver, attuned somehow to the great mysteries, describes the dream world as a kind of afterlife. He points out that no one ever can know for sure that they’re in the waking world and not the dream world, a realm that might not be as safe as sleepers believe. Fiver has access to more of reality than most rabbits—or most humans—and his mind seems to dwell in an in-between region where he can gather information from both realms. Though he can see both worlds, he doesn’t understand them, nor does he feel comfortable in the alternate universe.

“The kind of ideas that have become natural to many male human beings in thinking of females—ideas of protection, fidelity, romantic love and so on—are, of course, unknown to rabbits, although rabbits certainly do form exclusive attachments much more frequently than most people realize. However, they are not romantic and it came naturally to Hazel and Holly to consider the two Nuthanger does simply as breeding stock for the warren. This was what they had risked their lives for.”

The author steps briefly into the story to explain the rabbit mindset regarding mating. He makes no apologies for the creature’s inherent chauvinism but simply states it as a fact. The passage anticipates criticisms that erupted when the book was published. The author may share a distaste for chauvinism, but he respects the natural world and the directions its animals take, whether or not they meet with the approval of humans.

“[…] I have learned that with creatures one loves, suffering is not the only thing for which one may pity them. A rabbit who does not know when a gift has made him safe is poorer than a slug, even though he may think otherwise himself.”

The mythical El-ahrairah makes painful sacrifices to save his people, but they forget, offer no respect, and grow weak with complacency. They don’t realize the efforts of their old leaders and hold them in contempt. It’s a hard lesson, and it reminds Hazel and Bigwig that their finest efforts soon will be lost to time.

“There is nothing that cuts you down to size like coming to some strange and marvelous place where no one even stops to notice that you stare about you.”

Hazel’s group arrives at a large river that dwarfs them and mocks their feeble ability to cross it. They’re deep inside an alien land dominated by a large warren that has nothing to fear from them physically. The rabbits are fully aware of their smallness in the midst of the vast territory into which they intrude.

“A wild animal that feels that it no longer has any reason to live reaches in the end a point when its remaining energies may actually be directed toward dying.”

Pretending to be a loyal Efrafa Owsla, Bigwig meets some of the does punished for wanting to leave. Their spirits seem nearly crushed; they sing only songs of desolation. It’s yet another example of rabbits that Hazel’s group has encountered who have lost hope in a warren that imprisons them. A theme of the book is the search for freedom—if not from the dangers of life, at least from the oppressions that rabbits sometimes visit on one another.

“They walked a short distance eastward from the road and Lucy set the rabbit down. It sat stupefied for nearly half a minute and then suddenly dashed away over the grass. ‘Yes, he has got something the matter with that leg, you see,’ said Doctor Adams. ‘But he could perfectly well live for years, as far as that goes. Born and bred in a briar patch, Brer Fox.’”

Dr. Adams and Lucy Cane release Hazel back to the wilderness, unaware of the astounding adventures the rabbit has had. These two are the only humans who are kind to Hazel. Lucy possesses a good heart, and the doctor is kindly—he represents author Richard Adams, who, in a quietly humorous way, makes a brief appearance in his own novel. For a moment there’s a peaceful encounter between humans and the wild animals that must otherwise guard their lives from many enemies, human and otherwise. The quote’s final sentence refers to the Brer Rabbit stories, which somewhat resemble the myths about El-ahrairah. The doctor intuits that Hazel is a similar character.

“The fields below the hill were all cleared. One had already been plowed and the polished edges of the furrows caught the light with a dull glint, conspicuous from the ridge above. The sky, too, was void, with a thin clarity like that of water. In July the still blue, thick as cream, had seemed close above the green trees, but now the blue was high and rare, the sun slipped sooner to the west and, once there, foretold a touch of frost, sinking slow and big and drowsy, crimson as the rose hips that covered the briar. As the wind freshened from the south, the red and yellow beech leaves rasped together with a brittle sound, harsher than the fluid rustle of earlier days. It was a time of quiet departures, of the sifting away of all that was not staunch against winter.”

One of dozens of admiring descriptions of the countryside around Watership Down, the passage reminds readers of similar passages in another great English animal story, The Wind in the Willows. Both authors notice the small beauties among the great ones in the great outdoors, and each tries to express the feelings that the countryside evokes. Beyond any other possible meanings to be drawn from these books’ plots, the glory of nature stands supreme. The story emerges from these settings, runs its course, then fades back into the ever-present realm of the natural world, as if all the to-do were merely a wisp of air among the trees.