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The rabbits flee at the sound of approaching footsteps moments before George and Lennie emerge into the clearing.

The adverb 'noiselessly' performs a small literary trick: the narrator describes silence by naming it, drawing readerly attention to the absence of sound that the rabbits' caution produces. Because rabbits will later become Lennie's obsessional emblem of the imagined homestead, this opening glimpse of them fleeing human approach plants a structural irony—the creature Lennie longs to tend and stroke instinctively recognizes humans as threat.

Argue that Steinbeck establishes the rabbit motif's tragic logic in its very first appearance—the animals' flight from human presence in line one of the action prefigures how Lennie's loving touch becomes destructive contact throughout the novel.