Burrow’s End

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.