Tales from Watership Down by Richard Adams

There was a time (said Dandelion), long ago, when rabbits had no sense of smell. They lived as they do now, but to have no sense of smell was a terrible disadvantage. Half the pleasure of a summer morning was lost to them, and they couldn't pick out their food in the grass until they actually bit into it. Worst of all, they couldn't smell their enemies coming, and this meant that many rabbits fell victim to stoats and foxes.

Watership Down was the third book I read for the Fifty Books Project, way back when Brent and I started this blog in 2007. It was a different world, and many of the books I've read since then have become blurry in my mind, this is a book I remember with real fondness. I loved the way that Adams turns the life of the rabbit into something both whimsical and adventurous, fraught with real dangers. It's not entirely true that the coziness and pastoralism of Watership Down is a facade, meant to lull you into a much darker and violent story, but it is true that it is several different types of book at once, and does them all well.

So I knew that no matter how good Adams' odds-and-ends sequel, Tales from Watership Down, would be, it would be nice to return to that world again. And it was. Tales from Watership Down begins with a series of stories (told in frame by the newly established rabbits in their hard-won warren) about the rabbit trickster figure El-ahraihrah, whose legends are a model and inspiration to the rabbits of the original novel. My favorite of these was the story in which El-ahraihrah goes on a quest to bring rabbitkind the sense of smell. This involves traveling far to meet the King of Yesterday, a shaggy bison or auroch who presides over a forest filled with all the animals that have gone extinct because of human activity. The King of Yesterday sends him to the King of Tomorrow, a deer who seems to inhabit a future world in which wildness has returned to the British Isles again, and the world. An appropriate framework, perhaps, for a story about the rabbits receiving those gifts that offer them protection against their enemies. (The vulnerability of rabbits is a big theme in their legend, it seems, "El-ahraihrah" means "The Prince With a Thousand Enemies.")

But the most satisfying parts of Tales from Watership Down are those stories that continue the tale of the rabbits of the original warren. Having secured their safety, the Chief Rabbit Hazel must adapt to being the leader of the rabbit exodus to a peacetime executive, and many of these stories are about the crises that threaten the stability of the warren: new, cocky generations of rabbits who do not remember the war with the rival warren Efrafra, the arrival of strangers, like a doe obsessed with the threat of "White Blindness" (myxomatosis) or a hutch-raised rabbit who would be killed because he "smells of man." These crises threaten Hazel's leadership, but of course, he always seems to navigate the right path, with the help of his lieutenant, Fiver, and enforcer, Bigwig. And in these stories, we see the warren in the next stages of its evolution: overcrowded, it must send out an envoy to establish a new satellite. For a rabbit, as for a college student with a Blogspot account, time moves on.