‘Yes,’ I said, no longer in denial, ‘Peter Knox, ex-Spotter, RabCoT office, Hereford.’
They started to move towards me, but I didn’t budge. There would have been no point. I knew how fast foxes could move.
‘We are so going to enjoy this,’ said the first fox, grinning fit to burst, his fangs wet with saliva. ‘I’ve always wanted to know what killing a human felt like. But don’t feel bad. It’s not simply payback for Torquil – but for all those hunts.’
I didn’t think I’d mention that I’d never been on a fox hunt, and instead murmured ‘guilty on all counts’ and closed my eyes.
The circle hadn’t only been completed in Colony One. Every single anthropomorphised rabbit had gone home by the time the full moon had risen. Despite this, Nigel Smethwick ordered the attack to continue, just in case it was some sort of a rabbit trick. It wasn’t, and the press mocked him for his ‘war on rabbits’ before they moved on to other matters, such as the shock cancellation of Casualty, whether the new Dr Who was as good as the old one, or reporting on what someone on Twitter said about someone else who was also on Twitter. By the end of the month all the colonies were smoking ruins, the network of burrows mined by the Royal Engineers. In a year the land had been cleared and returned to farmland.
As a parting gesture and to refute detractors who said that rabbits had no sense of humour, the rabbits took the foxes with them. The timing was, for me at least, impeccable. My five foxy executioners reverted within one pace of me, and swiftly ran off into the hedgerows, confused and nervous. But unlike the rabbits, the foxes retained memory traces of their former life and made repeated attempts to sneak into exclusive London restaurants and hotels. The Savoy had to employ a gamekeeper who killed fifty-eight of them in a single six-week period, and foxes can often be seen at Glyndebourne, staring wistfully at the performers from the safety of a near by wood.
Not all animals reverted. Firyali Elephant was sworn in as Kenya’s president three years later, a job she has done spectacularly well over the past sixteen years – the model for elephantine governance that is currently transforming Africa. Back in the UK the Dalmatian and the badger were untouched by the deEventing, and last I heard were still doing their ‘Spots and Stripes’ comedy routine, which remains unfunny, but still unique, to this day. The surviving guinea pigs were released on licence after a decade, reoffended in under a week and are now back inside. Adrian Whizelle changed his name to Arthur Bulstrode, but it didn’t help: he, like all the other weasels, was found dead in suspicious circumstances by the time the year was out. The caterpillar is still in the Natural History Museum and s/he has yet to change into a butterfly. And the bees? No one has any idea what happened to the bees.
Aftermath
The Reversion created as many questions as the Event, and as the years went by, the possibility of another Event filled the imagination of all those who understood the quiet simplicity of the Rabbit Way. With each full moon, there is hope of another. We watch, and we wait.
– Event Rabbits by Peter Knox, 326 pages, Hodder & Stoughton, first published Oct. 2028
Without rabbits to be the focus of his hatred, Nigel Smethwick directed his ire at ‘anyone different’, and the followers of UKARP followed suit, using a simple word substitution to change their party constitution and mission statement quickly and efficiently. He was defeated at the next general election, his message of Hominid Supremacism diluted by the loss of the rabbits. He retired from politics but remains active as a talk-show pundit. The language of division can always be monetised.
The Rabbit Compliance Taskforce was disbanded, the employees made redundant with generous payouts. Owing to an oversight, the paperwork regarding my firing hadn’t gone through, and I was paid off like the rest. I never went back to Much Hemlock, but I understand it’s much the same. Wing Commander Slocombe took over my Speed Librarying duties and is the new Mr Major. He still uses my system of codes, for which I am grateful. To this day, Much Hemlock have still not won a Spick & Span award.
I took the insurance payout from my burned house, sold the plot and moved to Rhayader, where I purchased a large house with grounds that overlooked the old MegaWarren site. I took to chronicling the fifty-five years of the Event in some considerable detail, and seemed the person best positioned to do so. Of all the humans who were living in the five colonies at the time of the Reversion, seventy-six decided not to go. I interviewed sixty-eight of them for my book. The number of humans who had decided to go with the rabbits was around four thousand, but estimates vary. They were officially declared ‘missing, whereabouts unknown’.
Patrick Finkle and Pippa were amongst them.
When the MegaWarren site was sold I bought the entranceway, admin buildings and forty acres of warren, from which was developed the Event Museum, now in its ninth year, and currently Mid-Wales’ fifth-most popular tourist attraction. The reopened branch line, now a steam heritage railway, is the first.
It took Connie two years to find me and take up residence in my orchard. I could easily identify her by the mismatched eyes – one bluey-violet, the colour of harebells, one as brown as a fresh hazelnut – but if she retained any sense of what she had once been, I didn’t see it. She acted just like a wild field rabbit. Harvey joined her a week later. He was easily identified by the lack of any ears, and with him, always with him, always together, was a smaller rabbit, a female, who would have been indistinguishable from any other rabbit but for a single ear stud on her right ear, a present from me on her eighteenth birthday, and never removed. She moved uncertainly, but well enough to forage amongst the food I left out for them, the muscular strength of her forelegs making up for any shortfall. I missed her terribly, but it was her choice to stay with Harvey and fully embrace the Rabbit Way, and I respected that.
The rabbits were curious, but never really tame, and the colony remains there to this day. The one who I once knew as Constance lived the longest. She used to come on to the patio and stare at me quizzically as I made breakfast, but would run away if I opened the door.
It was to be expected. She was, after all, only a rabbit.
Acknowledgements:
I am indebted first of all to my agent Will Francis and my Editor Carolyn Mays, who interpreted a very troublesome first draft of The Constant Rabbit in a positive manner and were sufficiently bold to see that the core idea was sound, and that something good may come out of it.
The many references to The Court Jester are in deep homage to an iconic movie, but it should be noted that the duelling pistol ditties are an adaptation of Martha Raye and Bob Hope in ‘Never Say Die’, itself a precursor to the ‘Pellet with the poison’ routine. I also borrowed a line from a Spike Milligan short story and a Mel Brooks film – two titans of comedy whom I hope will forgive me.
Rabbit information was supplied via Wikipedia and Lockley’s excellent Private Life of the Rabbit. My apologies to anyone in Herefordshire who have battled tirelessly to attack inequality in this world and feel they might have been in some small measure maligned. I had to set the book somewhere.
My thanks to the team at Hodder for their endless support, especially Lily Cooper, and my thanks go also to the eagle-eyed Sharona Selby and Olivia Davies.
The frontispiece was drawn by Bill Mudron of Portland, Oregon. Other examples of his work can be found at https://www.billmudron.com/ and he will gladly discuss commissions.