Tales from Watership Down Read Online Free PDF Page A

and what was the task that demanded his boldness? Finally he set off to find out.
    He asked birds and beetles, frogs and even the yellow-and-brown caterpillars on the ragwort, but none could tell him where he could seek the business of not growing old. At last, after wandering for many days, he met an old, gnarled hare squatting in its form in a patch of long grass. The old hare stared at him in silence, and it tookEl-ahrairah some little time to pluck up the courage to ask his question.
    “Try the moon,” said the old hare, hardly looking at El-ahrairah as he spoke.
    Then El-ahrairah felt sure that that old hare knew more than he would say unless he pressed him hard; and he went close up to him and said, “I know you are bigger than I am and can run faster, but I am here to learn what you know, and I will press you with all the means in my power until you tell me. I am no foolish, inquisitive rabbit come to waste your time, but one engaged on this search up to the depths of my heart.”
    “Then I pity you,” replied the old hare, “for you seem to have pledged yourself to seek for what cannot be found and to throw your life away in the search.”
    “Tell me,” said El-ahrairah, “and I will undertake whatever you instruct.”
    “There is only one way you can attempt,” replied the old hare. “The secret you are looking for lies with the Three Cows and with no one else. Have you heard of the Three Cows?”
    “No, I haven’t,” said El-ahrairah. “What have rabbits to do with cows? I have seen cows but never had dealings with them.”
    “Nor can I tell you where to find them,” answered the old hare. “But the Three Cows’ secret—or rather, the secret they guard—is the only one which can reward your search.”
    And with this the old hare went to sleep.
    El-ahrairah went asking everywhere for the Three Cows, but received no replies, except bantering and mocking ones, until he began to feel that he was doing nothing but make a fool of himself. Sometimes he was maliciously misdirected and went on journeys only to find at the end that he had been tricked. Yet he would not give up.
    One evening of early May, when he was lying under a bush of flowering blackthorn and the sun was setting in a silver sky, he once again heard, close by, his friend the yellowhammer singing among the low-growing branches.
    “Come here, friend,” he called. “Come and help me!”
    Then the yellowhammer sang:
    “El-ahrairah, behind and before
    The bluebell wood and the wide downs o’er,
    El-ahrairah need search no more.”
    “Oh, where? Where, little bird?” cried El-ahrairah, springing up. “Only tell me!”
    “Now by my wings, my tail and beak,
    The First Cow isn’t far to seek.
    Just under the Down, in the neighborhood,
    Lies the brindled cow’s enchanted wood.”
    The yellowhammer flew away and left El-ahrairah sniffing among the first burnets and early purple orchids. He was puzzled, for he knew that there was no woodanywhere in the neighborhood of the Down. At last, however, he went to the very foot, and there, to his astonishment, he saw a deep wood on the far side of the meadow. In front of the outskirts sat the biggest brown-and-white cow he had ever seen.
    This could only be the cow he had been looking for; and El-ahrairah knew that the wood must in some way or other be enchanted, for how else could it have come to be standing where to his knowledge no wood had been before? If he hoped to find what he was looking for, into that wood he would have to go.
    He approached the cow cautiously, for he had no idea whether she would attack him, although he thought that if the worst came to the worst he could always run away. The cow simply stared at him out of her great brown eyes and said nothing.
    “Frith bless you, mother!” said El-ahrairah. “I am looking for a way through the wood.”
    The cow said nothing for so long that El-ahrairah wondered whether she had heard him. At last she replied, “There is no way