“Just alive.”
Eustace leaned back, munching a strig of grass reflectively and looking at the sky: “Don’t seem no sign of rain, however?”
“No.”
The old man who said “No” hung his melancholy head, and pondered; he surveyed his boots, which were of harsh hard leather with deep soles. He then said: “We ought to thank God we had such mild weather at the back end of the year. If you remember, it came a beautiful autumn and a softish winter. Things are growing now; I’ve seen oats as high as my knee; the clover’s lodged in places. It will be all good if we escape the east winds—hot days and frosty nights.”
The downs, huge and bare, stretched in every direction, green and grey, gentle and steep, their vast confusion enlightened by a small hanger of beech or pine, a pond, or more often a derelict barn; for among the downs there are barns and garners ever empty, gone into disuse and abandoned. They are built of flint and red brick, with a roof of tiles. The rafters often bear an eighteenth-century date. Elsewhere in this emptiness even a bush will have a name, and an old stone becomes a track mark. Upon the soft tufts and among the triumphant furze live a few despised birds, chats and finches and that blithe screamer the lark, but above all, like veins upon the down’s broad breast, you may perceive the run-way of the hare.
“Why can’t a man live like a hare?” broke out the younger man. “I’d not mind being shot at a time and again. It lives a free life, anyway, not like a working man with a devil on two legs always cracking him on.”
“Because,” said Mordecai, “a hare is a vegetarian creature, what’s called a rubinant, chewing the cud and dividing not the hoof. And,” he added significantly, “there be dogs.”
“It takes a mazin’ good dog to catch ever a hare on its own ground. Most hares could chase any dog ever born, believe you me, if they liked to try at that.”
“There be traps and wires!”
“Well, we’ve no call to rejoice, with the traps set for a man, and the wires a choking him.”