Ahab's Adventure's In Wonderland; or The Rabbit

Chapter Twenty-Four

I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest; my oath had been welded with theirs; and stronger I shouted, and more did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul. A wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab's quenchless feud seemed mine. With greedy ears I learned the history of that murderous monster against whom I and all the others had taken our oaths of violence and revenge.

For some time past, though at intervals only, the unaccompanied, secluded White Rabbit had haunted those uncivilized fields. But not all of them knew of his existence; only a few of them, comparatively, had knowingly seen him; while the number who as yet had actually and knowingly given battle to him, was small indeed. For, owing to the large number of farms; the disorderly way they were sprinkled over the entirety of Massachusetts, many of them adventurously pushing their quest along solitary latitudes, so as seldom or never for a whole twelvemonth or more on a stretch, to encounter a single news-telling man of any sort; all these, with other circumstances, direct and indirect, long obstructed the spread through the whole countryside of the special individualizing tidings concerning Moby Dick. It was hardly to be doubted, that several individuals reported to have encountered, at such or such a time, or on such or such a road, a Rabbit of uncommon cuteness and malignity, which, after doing great mischief to his assailants' vegetable gardens, has completely escaped them; to some minds it was not an unfair presumption, I say, that the rabbit in question must have been no other than Moby Dick. Yet as of late the farming industry had been marked by various and not unfrequent instances of great ferocity, cunning, and precociousness in the monster attacked; therefore it was, that those who by accident ignorantly gave battle to Moby Dick; such hunters, perhaps, for the most part, were content to ascribe the peculiar terror he bred, more, as it were, to the perils of the farming industry at large, than to the individual cause. In that way, mostly, the disastrous encounter between Ahab and the rabbit had hitherto been popularly regarded.

And as for those who, previously hearing of the White Rabbit, by chance caught sight of him; in the beginning of the thing they had every one of them, almost, as boldly and fearlessly aimed for him, as for any other rabbit of that species. But at length, such calamities did ensue in these assaults-- not restricted to sprained wrists and ankles, broken limbs, or devouring amputations--but fatal to the last degree of fatality; those repeated disastrous repulses, all accumulating and piling their terrors upon Moby Dick; those things had gone far to shake the fortitude of many brave hunters, to whom the story of the White Rabbit had eventually come.

Nor did wild rumors of all sorts fail to exaggerate, and still the more horrify the true histories of these twee encounters. For not only do fabulous rumors naturally grow out of the very body of all surprising terrible events,--as the smitten tree gives birth to its fungi; but, in rural life, far more than in that of the urban realm, wild rumors abound, wherever there is any adequate reality for them to cling to. And as the countryside surpasses the city in this matter, so the rabbit surpasses every other sort of animal, in the wonderfulness and fearfulness of the rumors which sometimes circulate there. For not only are coneymen as a body unexempt from that ignorance and superstitiousness hereditary to all hunters; but of all hunters, they are by all odds the most directly brought into contact with whatever is appallingly astonishing in the forest; face to face they not only eye its greatest marvels, but, hand to jaw, give battle to them. Alone, in such remotest forests, that though you walked a thousand miles, and passed a thousand hovels, you would not come to any chiselled hearth-stone, or aught hospitable beneath that part of the sun; in such latitudes and longitudes, pursuing too such a calling as he does, the coneyman is wrapped by influences all tending to make his fancy pregnant with many a mighty birth. No wonder, then, that ever gathering volume from the mere transit over the wildest spaces, the outblown rumors of the White Rabbit did in the end incorporate with themselves all manner of morbid hints, and half-formed foetal suggestions of supernatural agencies, which eventually invested Moby Dick with new terrors unborrowed from anything that visibly appears. So that in many cases such a panic did he finally strike, that few who by those rumors, at least, had heard of the White Rabbit, few of those hunters were willing to encounter the perils of his jaw.