BBC：100部英国人最喜欢的文学作品].WatershipDown.pdf

WATERSHIP DOWN
by RICHARD ADAMS (1972)
[VERSION (Apr 29 03). If you find and correct errors in the text, please
update the version number by and redistribute.]
To Juliet and Rosamond,
remembering the road to Stratford-on-Avon
Note
Nuthanger Farm is a real place, like all the other places in the book. But Mr.
and Mrs. Cane, their little girl Lucy and their farmhands are fictitious and bear no
intentional resemblance to any persons known to me, living or dead.
Acknowledgements
I acknowledge with gratitude the help I have received not only from my family
but also from my friends Reg Sones and Hal Summers, who read the book before
publication and made valuable suggestions.
I also wish to thank warmly Mrs. Margaret Apps and Miss Miriam Hobbs, who
took pains with the typing and helped me very much.
I am indebted, for a knowledge of rabbits and their ways, to Mr. R. M.
Lockley's remarkable book, The Private Life of the Rabbit . Anyone who wishes to
know more about the migrations of yearlings, about pressing chin glands,
chewing pellets, the effects of over-crowding in warrens, the phenomenon of re-
absorption of fertilized embryos, the capacity of buck rabbits to fight stoats, or
any other features of Lapine life, should refer to that definitive work.
PART I
The Journey
1. The Notice Board
CHORUS: Why do you cry out thus, unless at some vision of horror?
CASSANDRA: The house reeks of death and dripping blood.
CHORUS: How so? 'Tis but the odor of the altar sacrifice.
CASSANDRA: The stench is like a breath from the tomb.
Aeschylus, Agamemnon
The primroses were over. Toward the edge of the wood, where the ground
became open and sloped down to an old fence and a brambly ditch beyond, only a
few fading patches of pale yellow still showed among the dog's mercury and oak-
tree roots. On the other side of the fence, the upper part of the field was full of
rabbit holes. In places the grass was gone altogeth