The Hunt for the White Stag

Years after their coronation, the four Kings and Queens of Narnia—Peter the Magnificent, Susan the Gentle, Edmund the Just, and Lucy the Valiant—ruled in great joy, governing wisely and stamping out the remnants of the White Witch's evil. One year, the Faun Tumnus, now middle-aged and beginning to grow stout, came down the river with news that the White Stag—a legendary beast that grants wishes to anyone who catches it—had once more appeared in his parts. The four monarchs, with the principal members of their court, rode a-hunting with horns and hounds in the Western Woods to follow the White Stag.

The Chase and the Discovery of the Lamp-post

They had not hunted long before they sighted the stag, and it led them a great pace over rough and smooth, through thick and thin, until the horses of all the courtiers were tired out and only the four sovereigns remained in pursuit. The stag entered a thicket where their horses could not follow. King Peter declared, "Fair Consorts, let us now alight from our horses and follow this beast into the thicket; for in all my days I never hunted a nobler quarry." The others agreed, and they alighted, tied their horses to trees, and went on foot into the thick wood. As soon as they entered, Queen Susan saw what she took to be a tree of iron, but King Edmund corrected her: it was a pillar of iron with a lantern set on top. King Peter remarked on the strangeness of placing a lantern where the trees clustered so thick and high that it could give light to no man. Queen Lucy observed that when the post and lamp were set there, the trees must have been smaller or fewer, for this was a young wood and the iron post was old. King Edmund felt a strange recognition, saying, "It runs in my mind that I have seen the like before; as it were in a dream, or in the dream of a dream." All the others confessed the same feeling. Queen Lucy added a foreboding: "if we pass this post and lantern, either we shall find strange adventures or else some great change of our fortunes." King Edmund and King Peter shared the premonition. Queen Susan proposed they return to their horses and follow the White Stag no further, but King Peter refused, citing their unbroken record of achieving every high matter they had undertaken. Queen Lucy supported him, saying they would be shamed if they turned back from so noble a beast out of fear. King Edmund declared he would not turn back for the richest jewel in all Narnia and the islands. Queen Susan yielded: "Then in the name of Aslan, if ye will all have it so, let us go on and take the adventure that shall fall to us."

The Return Through the Wardrobe

They entered the thicket, and before they had gone twenty paces they all remembered that the thing they had seen was called a lamp-post. Before they had gone twenty more, they noticed they were making their way not through branches but through coats. The next moment they all tumbled out of a wardrobe door into the empty room, no longer Kings and Queens in their hunting array but just Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy in their old clothes. It was the same day and the same hour on which they had all gone into the wardrobe to hide from Mrs. Macready and her party of sightseers, who were still talking in the passage. The children were not caught.

The Aftermath and the Professor's Wisdom

Feeling they must explain the missing coats, the children told the Professor the whole story. He, being a very remarkable man, believed them entirely. He told them it would be no good trying to go back through the wardrobe door to retrieve the coats, for they would not get into Narnia again by that route. He assured them they would return to Narnia some day—"Once a King in Narnia, always a King in Narnia"—but warned them not to try to use the same route twice, nor to try to get there at all. "It'll happen when you're not looking for it," he said. He advised them not to talk too much about it even among themselves, and not to mention it to anyone else unless they found others who had had adventures of the same sort. "Odd things, they say—even their looks—will let the secret out," he added. And that was the very end of the adventures of the wardrobe, but if the Professor was right, it was only the beginning of the adventures of Narnia.