Ch. 2: Rabbit-Day

For a time, the arrangement worked as well as such arrangements ever do, which is to say that everyone was unhappy, but in an orderly way.

Each day at noon, one animal walked slowly up the stony path to Numskull's den. The animals chose with great care whom to send. Usually it was someone very old, who said that they had seen enough of the world in any case, or someone very sad, who had lost a mate and had no wish to go on, or someone so devout that they believed they were going to a better forest altogether. Each kind took its turn: the deer, then the boars, then the buffaloes, then the oxen, round and round like the spokes of a cart wheel.

And because of this, the rest of the forest began to breathe again. The peacocks danced once more, though a little stiffly. The jackals laughed at night, though not as loudly as before. The young ones were let out of the thickets to play. It is a strange thing, but true, that creatures can grow used to almost anything, so long as it comes at the same hour every day.

Only the rabbits did not grow used to it. Rabbits are good at counting, being so numerous themselves, and they had counted the kinds of animals and the turns, and they knew to the very morning when rabbit-day would come.

The rabbit warren lay beneath a bank of red earth near a stream, where the roots of a tamarind tree made a roof over a hundred little doorways. On the evening before rabbit-day, all the rabbits gathered there to decide who should go.

Nobody was old enough. That was the first difficulty. Rabbits do not, as a rule, live to be very old, and the grandmother of the warren, who might otherwise have gone, had been carried off by a hawk the spring before. Nobody was especially sad, either; it had been a good season for clover. And though several rabbits were devout, none of them was devout enough to say so out loud that evening.

So they drew lots, with blades of grass, the short blade losing. And when the blades were all drawn and compared, the short one was found in the mouth of Shashaka, the rabbit with the crooked ear.

There was a long silence. His mother began to weep. His little sisters pressed their noses into his fur. The other rabbits looked at their feet, ashamed of how glad they were that it was not them.

“I will go,” said Shashaka. His voice was steady, but his heart was jumping about inside him like a frog in a jar.

That night he could not sleep. He lay in his burrow staring at the earthen ceiling, listening to the stream outside, and he was more afraid than he had ever been in his life. He was afraid of the lion‘s teeth. He was afraid of the lion’s breath, which was said to smell of old bones. He was afraid, oddly, of the walk up the stony path, more even than of what lay at the end of it, because he would have to walk it alone, knowing.

But underneath the fear, like a cool stone at the bottom of a muddy pool, there was a thought, and the thought would not go away.

“Why,” it said, “must it be me who is eaten? Why not the lion who is beaten?”

It was a ridiculous thought. He was a rabbit. He could not fight a lion. A lion could knock him into the next valley with a single careless paw. And yet the thought lay there, cool and smooth, and the more he turned it over, the less ridiculous it seemed.

“In what can wisdom not prevail?” he whispered to himself in the dark, remembering a verse the old grandmother used to say. “In what can resolution fail? What cannot flattery subdue? What cannot enterprise put through?”

He said it three times, and by the third time, though he was still frightened, he was frightened in a different way. It was the fear of a creature who has a plan, and not of one who has none.

In the morning the whole forest came to see him off.

This was the custom by now. The animals gathered at the foot of the stony path to say farewell to whoever was going, and to give advice, because there is nothing that animals, or people, enjoy giving so much as advice to someone who cannot use it.

“Walk with dignity,” said the stag Chitra. “Hold your head high. Show the tyrant that we are not afraid.”

“Do not walk with dignity,” said the boar Danta. “Run. Run as fast as you can and get it over with.”

“Say your prayers,” said a devout old tortoise.

“Do not look him in the eye,” said a mongoose. “Lions hate that.”

“Do look him in the eye,” said another mongoose. “Lions respect that.”

“Whatever you do,” said the old elephant Vriddhi, laying her trunk very gently on his small head, “do not be late. You know what he promised. If you are late, he will come down this path for the rest of us.”

Shashaka listened to all of it and thanked everyone politely. Then he set off up the path, and the animals watched him go until his white tail was out of sight among the rocks.

As soon as he was out of sight, he stopped.

He sat down on a warm flat stone. He scratched his crooked ear with his hind foot. He watched a line of ants carrying a dead beetle along the edge of the path, and he thought how much easier it would be to be an ant, who only had to carry things and never had to think.

Then he got up, and walked a little way, and stopped again, and nibbled a patch of wild sorrel at the side of the path, though he was not in the least hungry.

He was being late on purpose.

It was the first part of his plan, and it was the part that frightened him most, because it could not be undone. Every moment that the sun climbed higher, the lion would grow hungrier, and the hungrier he grew, the angrier he would be. But a hungry, angry lion, Shashaka reasoned, is a lion who does not think. And a lion who does not think may be led, as a bullock is led, by a rope through the nose, if only one can find the rope.

“I can kill even a lion,” he said aloud, to the ants.

The ants did not answer. But the sun climbed, and noon came, and noon went, and the shadows began to lean towards the east, and still the rabbit dawdled on the stony path, meditating with a troubled spirit upon a means of putting an end to Numskull.