And how pretty they are, those harmless little malefactors! How they frolic across the sward with tiny irregular jumps, like a sportive kitten, only ten times more guileless no tinge of bloodthirstiness in their liquid eye, no stealthy cruelty in their honest grey faces! Your rabbit is a decent and inoffensive vegetarian. Besides, its mode of life sorts well with the uplands; it never disfigures nature, but accommodates itself to the environment like a good working evolutionist. When we first thought of building here, a clever Girton girl, whom we met at the little inn, held up her hands in horror. Why build on Hartmoor at all? Why not simply burrow? And the rabbits burrow. The hilltop is just honey-combed with their underground palaces. There they lurk for the most part during the heat of the day, and come out at night to feed on the furze-bushes that protect and conceal the mouths of their burrows. Indeed, the very shape of the furze-bush, as we ordinarily know it, depends on the constant activity of the hungry and greedy bunnies. Naturally, gorse, if left to itself, would grow feathery from the soil upward, without any gaunt stretch of naked stem at its base; but the rabbits eat off the growing shoots just as high as they can reach by standing tip-toe on their hind feet; so that the resulting shape is a product, so to speak, of rabbit into gorse-bush. Where the soil is light and sandy, as here, burrowing is universal; but on cold wet moors, the rabbits avoid the chance of rheumatism by constructing long tunnels above ground instead, through matted galleries of heather and herbage.
Cowardice is the principal defence of the rabbit, as of all other unarmed rodents. At the first alarm, he flies headlong to his burrow. What swiftness of foot does for the open-nesting hare, that swiftness of retreat does for his underground cousin. Natural selection in such a case favours the most cowardly; for to be brave is to court immediate extinction. That is why rabbits have the noticeable patch of white under their tails their scuts, as sportsmen very aptly call them. At first sight you would suppose such a conspicuous white mark must be a source of danger. In reality it has been evolved as a patent safety-signal. For while the rabbits crouch and feed, unseen in the grey grass, they are very little conspicuous; but the moment one of them spies any cause of alarm, off it scampers to its hole; and, raising the danger-signal as it goes, it warns the whole warren, all whose members scuttle after it apace without waiting to inquire into the nature of the panic. The mouth of the burrow runs quite straight just at first, so that the retreating bunny can dash into it at full speed without checking his pace; but at a convenient point, a few feet in, it begins to bend and divaricate, besides branching and subdividing as a precaution against weasels and other vermin enemies. It has also at least two entrances and exits, like a room at the theatre, in case of pursuit; and it is cunningly engineered against the chance of intrusion. But the nursing-chamber, where the timid wee mother hides her naked and shapeless young, is quite differently contrived with but a single mouth, and is fitted up with every internal luxury. The good parent lines it with soft fur pulled from her own warm coat, and goes stealthily by night to suckle her little ones. When she comes away, she plasters up the entrance with earth to conceal it as well as she can from prying enemies; and there the baby rabbits remain alone in the dark till her next visit. Three or four such broods are produced each year, for your rabbit is indeed an uxorious creature.
VI.
THE ADDERS SIESTA
Two hedgers and tiners, demolishing a bank of earth at Turners Corner as I walked along the Headley Road this morning, came, to their great surprise and no little horror, on a coiled and twisted colony of hibernating adders. I paused in my stroll for ten minutes to watch the unearthing. It was a curious sight; the lithe and sinuous creatures, recognizable at once as genuine vipers by the zigzag pattern of dark diamond-shaped spots down their glossy green backs, lay curled and entwined with one another in snaky amity, fast asleep past waking, and completely filling up, as with a living mass of inextricable knots, the curves and crannies of the underground hole where they had taken refuge. They were there, of course, for their little winter siesta, which occupies them for a trifle of six months at a sitting. I pleaded hard for their lives with the men, explaining most earnestly that they would do much more good than harm, from the point of view of those whose talk is of beeves, and who regard standing corn as the one really sacred object in this beautiful universe. But I need hardly say my special pleading proved of no avail; the hedgers chopped them up fine before my eyes with their murderous spades, on the familiar antique principle of larning them to be adders. Poor helpless creatures, expiating thus unaware the delicta majorum! They would have killed more mice in a week than the men could catch in a summer; but they were snakes for all that, and your rustic hates and shrinks from snakes, et dona ferentes.
The adders siesta is just as much a part of his fixed yearly cycle as the fall of the leaf is to the tree, or migration towards warmer lands is to the swallow or house-martin. Snakes cant migrate; because, of course, theyve got no wings to migrate with; and being chilly creatures, evolving little animal heat of their own from their sluggish circulation, and warmed by the sun alone into spasmodic activity, they are compelled to bury themselves in holes in the ground, where they lie close to all others of their species that they can find, so as to utilize in common, by mutual aid, whatever trifle of bodily warmth they possess between them. Indeed, a snake, like a tree, can only be said really to live for half its lifetime; the other half these Persephones of the north spend underground in the torpid condition. The heart almost entirely ceases to beat; the lungs cease to act; sensation is suspended; and the animal dozes away his time unconsciously till the summer warmth of the surface soil begins once more to revive him. Then he ventures forth timorously from his hole on some bright May morning, to see how things are progressing in the upper world; and meeting, peradventure, some belated shrew-mouse or some early spring chicken, makes a dash at it at once with what life he has left in him, strikes it with his poison-fang, and, swallowing it whole, straightway regains fresh fuel for the battle of existence.
Adders were always friends of mine. They are numerous hereabouts, on our heathy uplands; and for my own part, I do my best to protect and preserve them. For we have not so many wild creatures left in England that we can afford to despise any lingering element of our native fauna. Besides, they do next to no practical harm; occasionally, indeed, they may spring at a dog who provokes their otherwise placid and meditative tempers by treading on them in the heather; and they will still more rarely make a dash at a man who incautiously handles them; but as a rule they are timid and rather sluggish creatures, much more likely to take fright and flee when discovered than to turn and rend one. I come across them frequently on basking paths among the heath in summer; they lie sunning themselves on the warm sand; but when I endeavour to rouse them to resistance by poking at them with my stick, they refuse, as a rule, to show fight, and after a few minutes of hesitation and lazy reluctance to move, they retire in high displeasure to their home among the bracken. Never once have I known them try actively to resent my intentional intrusion on their post-prandial reflections.