Watership Down them a safe place in which to settle, and the group eventually finds Watership Down, which matches Fiver's description of the perfect home exactly. There they are soon reunited with Holly and Bluebell, who were with Bigwig in the Owsla. The two are nursing severe injuries which, they reveal, were inflicted as they escaped the violent human destruction of Sandleford and then later at Cowslip's warren. Holly also confesses that it was he who had tried to stop them leaving that first night, but Fiver's vision coming true has left him a changed rabbit and he is there to join
Watership Down Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, a similar award that authors may not win twice. In 1977 California schoolchildren selected it for the inaugural California Young Reader Medal in the Young Adult category, which annually honours one book from the last four years. In The Big Read, a 2003 survey of the British public, it was voted the forty-second greatest book of all time. The 1993 Puffin Modern Classics edition of the novel contains an afterword by Nicholas Tucker, who wrote that stories such as "Watership Down" "now fit rather uneasily into the modern world of consideration of both sexes". He contrasted