All four rabbits had climbed up through the hedgerow and onto the top of the car which, being upside down, was actually the bottom. Peter was standing right on the edge beside one of the wheels, looking down. Behind him Mark and Tom shook speckles of oil out of their fur coats and wiped grease off their paws. Travis perched on top of the battered and scorched exhaust pipe, which was bent upwards. He was keeping watch for any more opportunistic birds of prey.

"It was only an accident," he muttered.

The other three didn't hear him, but he continued mumbling to himself.

"But what if it could be done?" went Peter. "Do you think you could find more of this barbed wire? I mean short lengths of it. I know there are whole fences of it, but I want manageable pieces like this."

Mark shrugged. "I've never seen any buried before. Travis found it over on that long island that divides the road in two. There might be more over there, I suppose. Have you ever seen any before, Travis?"

"No," he snapped. "I didn't mean for this to happen, you know."

"We know you didn't, little brother."

"I had my eyes closed at the time," he continued.

"It's quite an achievement, then."

"It was only an accident!"

Peter leant over the side of the car again. He could see the barbed wire Travis had dragged across the road caught around the axle. It looked tightly wound. "Have you tried getting this bit free?" he asked.

"Not a chance." Mark snorted.

"No, I suppose not."

Tom sidled up close beside Peter and as they were both looking down, whispered into his ear, "Do you really think Alexander will let us back in again if we tell him how to defend the warren against humans, Pete?"

"If you bring some barbed wire back with you, then yes," Peter replied. "Or he'll listen to you at least. And I'll argue on your behalf."

"Thanks," said Tom.

"Though I think if anyone's going to convince him, it will be Angus."

"Ha!" Mark grunted.

"No, seriously," Peter went on. "I think it'll hit him pretty soon that he doesn't have any family left anymore. Not if he keeps on denying he has three sons living in exile just up the road."

Tom nodded sagely.

"Well, if that old man's so desperate to see us again," Mark began to rant. "He can come and live with us in our warren. You wouldn't get me living under Alexander's tyranny again for all the carrots in rabbit heaven!"

With that, he turned sharply on his hind legs - and slipped right over in the grease. After picking himself up he hopped along the bottom of the car, trying to look as dignified as he could, then disappeared into the hedgerow. Travis and Tom heard the snapping of small branches as their fat sibling climbed down.

Peter turned to face south and looked up at the sun. It was dipping to his right side now, which meant it was late afternoon. "I should be going soon," he told the others. "I don't know this area very well and I want to get back before dark."

"Do you think Alexander will let you come and see us again?" asked Travis.

"I don't think so, Travis," Peter told him.

"But he let you come today, didn't he?"

"Only because of what's happened. And he almost didn't."

"Oh," said Travis dejectedly.

After he'd jumped down off the crooked exhaust pipe the three of them crossed the car after Mark and climbed back down through the hedgerow. They returned to the burrow, but Mark wasn't inside and Peter declined to go back in. Mark may have been proud of this new colony he had established, but at the end of the day, it amounted to no more than a single muddy hole in the ground. Shreds of damp pornography had blown out of the burrow and stuck in the mud all around.

"Where's he got to now?" wondered Tom.

"Perhaps saying goodbye's too hard," Travis grumbled.

Peter nodded. He tried to smile at the little one, but once again, it's hard to tell if a rabbit's smiling unless you already know that it is. "Well, tell him I said goodbye when you do see him," he said.

They took him along the roadside and back into the cornfield where they'd first rescued him from the hawk. As they stood there saying their uncomfortable farewells, Mark suddenly appeared again. Most bizarrely, he appeared from the other side of the grass verge - and he had acquired a limp. He came over, and Travis noticed how Mark was doing his best to stifle them seeing this new injury.

"I guess we'll never see you again," Mark said bitterly.

"I don't know," said Peter, though it was probably true.

"Well, goodbye, then. Say hello to daddy from me."

He'd meant it flippantly, but Peter said, "I'll do that."

"Goodbye, Pete," said Tom.

"Tom." Peter nodded. "And Travis."

Travis came up close and whispered into his ear, "Mark doesn't mean it, you know. But ask Alexander if you can come and visit us again anyway. We don't steal anymore. Maybe you can convince him we're not that bad."

"Goodbye, Travis." Peter winked at him.

There was nothing left to say. Peter looked along the hedgerow. In the far distance he could just about see the old oak tree towering above the corn that towered above him. Somewhere beneath there was the warren, and the treetop would be his guide to it. But the stillness of a late springtime afternoon had settled over the cornfield and dusk was fast approaching over the eastern horizon. It wouldn't wait for him to get back. It was time to leave.

The journey back was going to be easier. Peter quickly found a few stalks of broken corn that he himself had snapped making his path through the cornfield on his way here. Inadvertently he had left a trail for him to follow back. He headed into the corn, pushing his way through the damaged crop, his mind always several inches ahead of him, his eyes searching for the path to take. When he had got so far, he stopped and looked back. Mark was gone now, but Tom and Travis waited until they couldn't see him anymore. He waved a forepaw. They didn't wave back. Peter already felt a million miles away from them, but he didn't feel any closer to home.

Back by the hedgerow, Travis saw Peter stop, but didn't see him wave, and after that, the corn was too thick between them and Peter was gone. Travis looked up at Tom sadly, and Tom said, "Come on, let's get back. It's about dinner time for that hawk again." So they returned to the burrow.

Mark was there before them. He was sitting at the back, where he usually sat, funnily enough in the only dry spot in the entire rabbit hole. He had been licking his paw when they arrived but when they came in he stopped and hid it beneath him. Tom and Travis went to their own little nesting spots and sat down amidst the mud. None of them said a thing.

Travis was preoccupied with what had happened today. Though it had been Beatrice and Flopsy and Mopsy and Cottontail who had died, it felt like Peter had died with them. Travis had never really thought before that he'd never see any of them again. He always assumed that one day Alexander would let them back into the warren. Though exiled, he still felt like a part of the colony.

"What's wrong with your paw?" Tom asked Mark.

"Nothing," said Mark. "I tripped, that's all."

"Let's have a look, then."

"It's fine," Mark protested.

"Well, where did you trip?"

"Round the back of the verge."

"What were you doing round there?"

"It doesn't matter, does it? I'm okay."

Travis frowned. "Are you bleeding?" he asked.

"Just a bit," Mark said. "It doesn't hurt, though."

"What? Did you land on a thorn or something?" said Tom.

"Yes, a thorn," Mark quickly agreed. "A thorn, that's it."

Travis looked at his own paw. With everything that had happened last night he hadn't told either of his brothers how he'd actually found the barbed wire. His gash didn't hurt anymore either. But as he looked from the healing wound over to Mark, he saw his brother glaring back at him angrily, as if his injury was all Travis' fault.

"I'm going to go and watch Peter go," Travis said slowly.

"Huh?" said Tom, glancing over suspiciously.

"From the top of the car," Travis quickly added.

"No, you stay here," Mark told him.

"Why? It'll be safe. I'll see any hawks from up there."

"You stay here because I tell you to, Travis."

"To hell with that," Travis said, and he hopped right out of the burrow. Mark leapt to his feet to stop him, but his wound was fresh and he collapsed back to the floor wincing. Tom looked over at him and frowned.

Travis didn't go back to the car. He went down beneath the hedgerow and over the grass verge. It didn't surprise him in the slightest when he couldn't find any thorn bushes there. What he did find, however, was some unsettled earth. It was brown and moist. Not like earth when it's been raining, but like it is when the soil's been turned over. On a leaf nearby there was a smear of rabbit blood. Travis already had a pretty good idea what was buried, so dug carefully with a single forepaw.

Suddenly one of his claws caught on something tough just beneath the surface. He cleared the earth around that spot. Sticking up out of the hollow he had just created were the protruding barbs of some more barbed wire. And Mark had just buried it here. He cleared the earth around it. This piece wasn't a straight length but a much longer piece wound into a coil wider than a rabbit. Travis couldn't tell just how much longer it was, but it seemed heavier when he got it in his mouth and tugged it backwards out of the hole he'd dug.

"What are you doing?" said a voice.

Thankfully, it wasn't Mark. Travis flinched and dropped the barbed wire. When he turned he found Tom standing at the top of the grass verge. "Did Mark tell you to come and fetch me?" he asked.

"Yes," said Tom. "What are you doing?"

"Thought so. He just buried this."

Tom came over and looked at the coil of barbed wire covered in dirt. He frowned. "So he knew about it before, then," he deduced. "And he didn't tell Peter. But why didn't he want us to know, either?"

"Because he doesn't want us to go back there," Travis hissed. "Can't you see? If we get let back into the colony then he's going to be the only rabbit in his own warren. And it's not a warren if there's only him."

Tom nodded. It all made sense. "What are we going to do?"

"I don't know about you, but I'm going after Peter," Travis said. "I might be a little slow if I have to carry this thing on my own, but I can still catch him up. Look, if you're not coming, at least keep Mark distracted. Please."

"Who says I'm not coming?" Tom said.

Travis squeaked with excitement. "Okay, this is going to difficult to do," he said, moving around the coil and sizing it up. "But if I get this side in my mouth and go backwards, and you get that side and go forwards, we should be able to carry it between us." Then he took his side up in his teeth.

Tom nodded, then went round to the other side of the coil and picked it up with his mouth. It was heavy, and their both necks ached from the strain. Not all of the barbed wire was wound into the coil. There was a long trailing piece that kept nipping Tom as it bounced along beside and behind him.

The hardest part was getting the barbed wire through the hedgerow. The gap through the weeds and roots they usually used to get into the cornfield was only as wide as themselves, and the coil was wider. The barbs around the edge caught on a creeper growing up the stem of a wildflower bush and stuck fast. Travis pulled harder and Tom pushed from behind, but the coil just got even more firmly stuck.

"No, no, stop," said Travis. "This isn't working."

"How about if come and pull from that side?"

So Tom climbed through the gap on top of the barbed wire and then both him and Travis took the wire in their mouths side by side. The coil squeezed out of shape to fit through the gap, tearing past the weaker weeds, and then sprang back into shape as soon as it was out the other side. The rabbits fell backwards into the corn.

Travis was immediately back on his feet, listening for a sign that Mark had heard and was coming to investigate. There was none, so he went back to his side of the barbed wire coil and Tom went back to his and then they started into the corn with it. The corn was even weaker than the weeds. Its brittle stems broke rather than bent when caught on the barbs - but they each broke with a loud snap.

They finally caught up with Peter at dusk. He had had to rest often and judging himself as having plenty of time before sunset, even stopped to pick some berries growing amidst the hedgerow. He hadn't eaten since leaving the warren on the eastern side of the road and for that reason they tasted like the nicest berries he'd eaten in a long time. When he heard the snapping of the corn behind him, he immediately dropped his berries and put his nose to the ground. It sounded like a fox was creeping through the cornfield, but he couldn't smell it. There was another smell, a familiar smell, but he didn't place it until the moment just before Tom and Travis broke through the corn with this colossal coil of barbed wire in their mouths.

They dropped it when they saw him. They hadn't expected to catch up with him so quickly. Travis ran over.

"Where'd you find that?" Peter asked.

"Mark found it," Travis said.

"And hid it," Tom added.

"Where is Mark?" Peter wondered.

"We left him to it."

"Alexander has to let us in now," Travis concluded.

"I hope so," Peter murmured. "Come on, let's go."

The three rabbits returned to the barbed wire. With both Travis and Tom pulling from the front and Peter's superior strength behind, they should have been able to go even quicker. But when they picked it up and tried to move, they couldn't go anywhere. At first Peter looked around for something the wire had caught on. But it wasn't caught on anything. When they then tried picking it up again, and it still didn't move, Peter noticed the end of the wire trailing behind pull taut. The end of the wire trailed away into the corn and must have been caught on something in there. Tom and Travis exchanged nervous glances. Peter went back to free it.

He found Mark standing there, his full weight on the end of the wire.

NOTES:
Not really a shock ending, but there are several signposts to future plot developments in this chapter. Some obvious, some completely unintentional (in that I wrote one bit, then realised I could later turn that into a subplot or something).