You spend the majority of your day underground and hide your newborn young deep in the earth. When you do surface, you lick the pads of your forepaws, coating them with saliva, then smooth them along the fur of your face. Listen, in the tall grass. Your ears are tall, funnels, and all sound is of course a movement; when the movement stops, it is only a kind of memory. What was that sound? A distant hrududu, out on the roadway? Approaching elil? It is wise to be cautious, ready to thump your long hind paws, to sound a warning. If you stand on your haunches to see over the tall grass, everything that sees you — the Thousand, the elil — will try to kill you. The only reassurance, one you hold close: My people are the strongest in the world, for they breed faster and eat more than any of the other people.

I stretched out in my twin bed, next to my younger brother’s twin bed. I felt the warmth of my father, sitting down by my feet. The movement, the sound of his voice filled that basement room as he read to us about the rabbits of “Watership Down”:

Soon they reached a place where the river curved around in a bend from the east, and here they came upon the broad, shallow fall. It was no more than a foot high — one of those artificial falls, common on the chalk streams, made to attract trout. Several were already rising to the evening hatch of fly. Just above the fall a plank footbridge crossed the river. Kehaar flew up, circled the pool and perched on the handrail.

Ten years old, I reached behind my head on the pillow and felt the rough black wooden walls of my bedroom, the cool smooth copper in the spaces between the boards. The square window, up by the ceiling, slowly filled with soft, white snow, but we were warm, underground. Upstairs, from the kitchen, the sounds of my mother loading the dishwasher. Closer, my father’s voice flew up and circled and perched; back then it was capable of whispers, fluid modulation. Now, 40 years later, he no longer reads to me; also, his voice has changed — it falters and breaks and catches, escalates beyond his control.

I stand on the long, golden grass of Watership Down, wind rushing around me, tears in my eyes. When I was told I could visit any place I had read about but never physically visited, I first thought of Earthsea, of Narnia — landscapes that cannot be reached by car or boat or airplane. Watership Down can be reached more easily. It is in Hampshire, 60 miles from London, near the village of Kingsclere. Standing on the Down, I squint at that distant village of 3,000 humans. Closer, the buildings of a stable: An array of paths, horse gallops, stretch toward me. I turn a slow circle, then stumble all tharn with a huge paper map blown around my head, across my face, as every animal mocks and flees from me.