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Burrow’s End
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Wildflower meadow with the old hawthorn and a distant thatched stone cottage at golden hour.

The earth held its breath.

She went.

Burrow’s End a novel by Elsa Bergström

The grey was burning off, replaced by the first golden rays cresting the eastern ridge.

Press and hold, or hold Space or Enter.

Scout the morning

Before anyone else is up

Scout the morning

Where the sun touched the dew, the meadow caught fire

Every morning, someone has to go first. This morning, it’s you.

  1. Listen

    Turn each ear and hear what it finds.

    Left ear: the hedgerow. Blackbird alarm calls, or the absence of them.

    Right ear: the stone wall, the lane.

    Drag an ear, or use the arrow keys: ← → for the left, ↑ ↓ for the right.

    The birds were singing, which meant nothing was hunting.

  2. Read the night

    Put your nose to the entrance soil.

    • Your own passage, last evening.
    • Bracken, your brother: hours cold, back from wandering he thinks you don’t know about.
    • Fox. Very old, passing east to west along the far side of the hedge.

    Not interested. Not this time.

  3. Scan the sky

    Drag across the sky, or press Scan.

    No shapes moved against it. No wings.

    All clear.

Bramble Warren’s meadow at sunrise: mist over the grass and a single hawthorn in blossom on a low mound, the sun rising over the far ridge.

Check the morning first, if you like. A scout thumps the all-clear when nothing is hunting. One measured strike means safe; three fast ones mean danger.

Below her, bodies stirred. The warren was waking. 30

The distinction was subtle ⁠— a danger-thump was harder, faster, a staccato burst.

The cover of Burrow’s End: four rabbits sheltering in a burrow under brambles, with a bulldozer and a motorway bridge on the skyline, in a painted, cream-paper style. Title in capitals; author Elsa Bergström.

Fourteen rabbits. One bedtime story. No map.

A novel by Elsa Bergström 37 chapters about 160 pages

Every dawn, Fern is the first rabbit above ground. She reads the night in the soil, checks the hedge gap and thumps the all-clear. She believes in what she can scout. Everything else is a story.

Then orange flags appear across the meadow, and the bulldozers come.

Fourteen of thirty rabbits escape the collapsing warren with nothing but old Thistle’s bedtime legend: far to the west stands Briar Hill, a white chalk hill whose tunnels glow green, where clover grows all winter and no rabbit ever has to run.

So Fern leads them west, past foxes and farm dogs, through a housing estate where a forest used to be, and across six lanes of roaring motorway, towards a place she isn’t sure exists.

Briar Hill is real. Its tunnels glow, its stores are full, and its ruler, the vast and courteous General Thorn, has been expecting them.

Fern starts counting the exits.

For readers 10 and up, and for reading aloud from 9. Content notes and reading it together

Read Part One free The book

Hear Chapter One

Chapter 1: The Morning Scout 8 min 30 s

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Ninety-two seconds

The trailer

Four ways in

Where the story goes

The meadow at golden hour: a sentinel rabbit, the old hawthorn and a thatched stone cottage.

Out in the open

The freeze

do not move. Do not breathe. Do not exist.

A shadow overhead means one thing. Every rabbit knows what to do.

When it comes, keep still until it passes.

Ten seconds. Fifteen. The shadow circled back.

When the kite had gone, Bracken shook himself.

  1. “See?” he said. “That’s what I mean. We spend our whole lives freezing.”
  2. “We spend our whole lives alive,” she said.
  3. “Same thing, Fern.”
  4. “It really isn’t.”

Also in development as

An animated feature

The film in development

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Every morning, someone has to go first.