A RABBIT'S WORLD

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 936, 19 July 1957, Page 12

A RABBIT'S WORLD

THOSE OF THE FOREST, by Wallace Byron Grange; Faber and Faber, English price 21/-. HIS is an exasperating book to read, but as full of information as a dictionary. It is, in fact, a dictionary whose words are pages and pages of cyclopaedias. You have to be tough to get to the end, but if you are tough, and patient, and confiding, and credulous, you will never again see a tree as a tree or a rabbit as a rabbit. The author is a_ biologist, trained and tried. But just as Goethe was not satisfied to be a poet, and a poet only, Dr Grange is not satisfied to be a naturalist and a naturalist only. He insists on being a philosopher, a poet, and a man of science simultaneously, and that puts a severe strain on the reader’s nerves. In addition he finds it necessary to be a rabbit; or two rabbits.

"Those of the forest" are owls, hawks, coyotes, wolves, beavers, wild cats, foxes, weasels, deer, mice; shrews, with half a dozen others of whose exits and entrances it is difficult not to lose trace. But you have to watch them all through the eyes of a Snowshoe Rabbit and follow them in and out of the author’s scientific but humourless brain, Long before the story is half told you have lost the wood in a tangle of trees, partly, of course, because you have forgotten that you are supposed to be a rabbit. Rabbits don’t see forests, or landscapes, or rivers, or skies. They see what is in front of their noses and within a foot or two of the ground; but it is maddening to men to see the world like that. I know that quotations are like statistics. Twist them about and they will prove anything. But take this. A coyote chases a rabbit. Does the rabbit run? No. He sits quietly. He hears some sound of danger. He is off-jumping rapidly down the runway, burning the pine-needle and aspen-bark fuel which has become sugar and protein, and enzymes and blood within him. The brain has given some signal to which his total organism responds. He has willed it, thought it, reacted to it (it is not important which) and has acted upon the sensation of sound, in response to sonic physical waves, having judged them to imply danger; or, more often, knowing them to mean danger. Yet precisely how the intelligence borne upon the waves of inanimate sound, received by his ears, and judged by his brain, has been transformed into his hysical, living act of jumping is not clear. erhaps Snowshoe does not wonder about it. Perhaps he is not interested in it. The essential thing is that as a superb living organism his endowments include everything necessary for the reception and appraisal of sounds, plus the physical means to act upon them in his own self-interest. And this he does not will, for it is the gift of life itself, conferred in the act of Creation. There may be readers who can take that kind of thing-must be, or the publishers would not have "sold 10,000 copies almost overnight," and had to

cope with the demand for a new edition. Nor would a panel of judges have awarded the author the John Burroughs Medal. But if the way to reveal "the day-things and night-things of the wilderness" is to drag them in one by one and solemnly philosophise over each, Thoreau was a pretender and Hudson

just a loafer.

O.

D.