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The change came to Bigwig while he was at silflay, all at once, a strange heaviness to his back and a kind of itching behind his shoulders. He turned his head to nibble at the discomfort, and got a faceful of feathers.
*
The rabbits scattered about the down were very soon coming together, like thickening fog, into a crowd near to Bigwig. A curious, leaning-forward look to most of them, ears forward, but that could shift quickly to nervous or worse. Bigwig resisted his first impulse to raise his body into a bigger, aggressive stance, but as his shoulders twitch he felt a corresponding ruffling on and above his back, like the hairs lifting when he was angry: his new wings.
He stared the others down, daring them to make an issue of the change. He did not understand it himself; he was not a rabbit in a story, except these days his own warren's stories. But he was not about to admit to the shock, or any fear at the strangeness.
Fiver was among the nearest of the rabbits, but he had a reassuringly natural look of worry to him, not the otherworldliness that came upon him when he was in one of his fits of being a seer. It was Hyzenthlay who hopped forward, thankfully also alert rather than seeing-elsewhere glazed, but she was not the rabbit who spoke first.
"Are you going to keep on at silflay, then, or would you rather insects?" Acorn was probably making a joke—he had been one of the best of them at foraging for what Kehaar liked, and grumbled about the task less than some rabbits did—but he was using a plausibly polite tone.
Bigwig worked his jaw, actually considering the question. It would be awkward if he was suddenly part bird, worse somehow than the sole, sudden addition of having birdlike wings. But his appetite felt the same as ever, no yearning for strange food that was tiny prey instead of forage.
So he went back to eating, looked away from the crowd, his ears tipping to catch the thud of paws as they dispersed.
*
They were not Kehaar's wings. Obviously, what with being attached to Bigwig, but they were not, Bigwig thought, really at all similar to Kehaar's except for being feathered. None of the gull's bold white and grey colouration, but a subtly ticked grey-brown that matched Bigwig's fur. There were even two or three ruffled places, like the scruff of fur that gave Bigwig his name.
The wings changed Bigwig's balance less than he would have imagined, if he had ever put thought to what it would be like to have additional limbs. He dropped back to all four paws, having tried rearing up and cuffing at the air, experimentally.
But Bigwig was most definitely not going to make his first attempts at flight within sight of the warren. He imagined crashing to the ground while the whole population, from veterans down to the newest wide-eyed kittens, was looking on, and held in a shudder.
He did not say so much to Hazel, but his Chief Rabbit's ready agreement to a one-rabbit patrol suggested he knew quite well, and was not going to insist on speaking of, Bigwig's motives.
*
This was not a long patrol; they had not sunk to borrowing the Efrafan term. But Bigwig was far from the warren, and glad to be. He could run, and flap his wings, and look foolish, with no one but himself to know it or remember.
When the weather shifted, Bigwig had no established tunnels to retreat to from the cold rain. He had been going to make himself a scrape for the night, once he had finished scouting the area. But the rain lashed down so quickly that his immediate area, with its thin, unappetising grass, was mud before he had begun so much as one scratch of his front paws.
Bigwig crouched, dispirited by the cold wet. His back felt strangely heavy, his wings unfamiliar. He would become used to them, presumably, unless they disappeared as suddenly as they had appeared. But they were not yet solidly part of how he felt himself. They were an addition, like a fresh tunnel one didn't yet move along as confidently as established routes underground in one's own warren.
He shook himself, nose to tail, and found the automatic motion extended to his wings, the rain shivering off them.
*
Feathers for some reason felt much less bothersome when rained on than did fur.
Eating rain-freshened grass under the shelter of his arched wings had something to recommend it. Bigwig listened to the drops falling from the rain-heavy scrub, the grinding noise as he chewed, and the nearly as quiet soft noise of his feathers, and was content.