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just by looking that he’s one of the smaller boys in his year. If you go right through the middle of the standing corn you can’t see anything but the corn and the blue sky above so you could be anywhere. Keep straight on walking over the crumbled stony earth between the lines and you come to the end of the field. Here there’s a bank covered with brambles, with small trees growing up out of the brambles. In the bank are the rabbit holes.
    You have to come up to them very slowly and make no noise, which is actually impossible, but you do everything in slow motion as if you’re in a film. Then just where the corn ends you sit down on the last raised furrow and you wait. The rabbits are all in their holes where they’ve run while you’re stamping and crashing toward them, because however careful you are, to them you’re a huge heavy frightening giant. Rabbits are gentle, timid creatures, they don’t hurt anyone. They don’t eat other animals, not even worms. Other animals eat them. Butthey can hear everything. They can hear when your tummy rumbles. And they’re so fast. If you startle them they vanish and you don’t even see them go. They’ve got special eyes, they can see in all directions at once. But there’s something they can’t see, which Cas has learned all by himself. If you stop moving and just stay still, after a while they can’t see you any more.
    So he sits and waits, breathing softly, his hands clasped round his knees. He likes to try to guess which hole the first rabbit will come out of. From where he sits he can see two holes clearly, and another three through a fringe of grass and bramble. He thinks a lot about what it must be like underground, where the rabbit holes go. He imagines each hole is like a door, and each door leads to a passage, and each passage leads to the same big burrow with a round curving ceiling, which is like the living room. Running off the main burrow he imagines lots of smaller burrows, which are the bedrooms. The most rabbits he’s counted outside this warren at once is nine, but there’s probably lots more.
    A flicker of movement. A whiskery rabbit nose peeps out of a hole, sniffing for danger. Cas sits motionless. Watching the first rabbit come out is the best bit. You can tell how timid they are, how ready to run at the slightest sign of danger. That makes the slow creeping out all the more exciting.
    The rabbit is fully out now, crouched on the edge of the hole, on the little slope of bare earth that’s always littered with droppings. Strange that they should do their poos on their doorstep. You’d think they’d want to go off into the nettles and make their mess in private. The rabbit crouches there, trembling, nose twitching, ears scanning from side to side. The soft sleek gray fur on its flanks moves in and out as it breathes. Then up it rises onto its haunches, front paws folded before its chest. Now it’s a sentry rabbit, doing guard duty. The bulbous allseeing eyes take in Cas, hunkered down on the edge of the field of corn, but because he doesn’t move, he’s invisible.
    A few moments go by, then the rabbit drops down again, and starts to graze. Two more rabbits come out of the holes, moving more confidently than the first. How do they know it’s safe to come out? The sentry rabbit sent no signal that Cas heard or saw. But now there are four rabbits, all with their heads down, nibbling away at the grass. The evening sunshine falls on them as they graze, making their coats gleam.
    One of them hears a sound, and starts up into the alert position. The other three freeze. A soft whirr of wings high above: a sparrow-hawk circling overhead. The sentry rabbit doesn’t look up, but his sticky-out eyes can see the hawk even so. A flash of white scut, and he’s disappeared down the rabbit hole. The other three go within the same instant. The hawk flies on, no more than a speck