The Story of a Hare

by J. C. Tregarthen

Higher and higher rose the sun, flooding the hill with light, warming the resinous trees and filling the wood with their fragrance. But for the cold nip in the air it might almost have been a summer’s day. One less suggestive of evil happening could not be; yet the first act of a tragedy of which the wood was to be the theatre was being enacted less than a furlong away, where two weasels were pressing a rabbit from gallery to gallery of its burrow. No hope for the defenceless thing lay there, still less in the wood across which it presently came loping with fateful laboured movement. A look of entreaty appeared in the rabbit’s starting eyes when it saw the hare, but the doomed creature did not stop. On, on it struggled, followed still by the murderers, the two puny, lithe, fiendish-looking weasels.

The sight of these bloodthirsty miscreants stirred the hare to fury; scarcely had they passed when he rose and stamped with his hind feet: surely not to warn his own kind, it could not be that; it was his protest, his poor, ineffectual protest, against the outrage.

Intent on their quarry, the weasels gave no heed, but the owl looked out of its hole to learn what ailed its exemplary neighbour, and the marten peered over the edge of the nest to ascertain, if possible, the cause of the disturbance. She saw nothing of rabbit or weasels, for the trees hid them from sight, but she had an uninterrupted view of the hare, and at once was all excitement at the prospect of an unexpected feast. Though she had tasted hare once and only once, the memory of the delicious flavour remained, and she had often longed to taste it again. So eager was she that she could not take her eyes from off this unlooked-for prize; even the death-squeal of the rabbit which presently rent the air did not distract her gaze. After a while she lay down again, but not to sleep. She spent the rest of the day planning the capture of the hare, interrupting her deliberations only to rise every now and then to assure herself that the quarry was still below.

Far different had been the effect of that despairing cry on the hare. It left him disquieted and unnerved, with but one desire, to get away at the earliest possible moment from the wood and the murderer up above whom he had surprised in the act of looking down at him. Short as the day was, he thought that it would never end; and the moment the sun dipped below the plain he stole away noiselessly as a ghost, ascended the opposite hill, made along the high ridge, passed the earthworks, crossed the old camp on Bartinney and came to the chantry, where he stood awhile with his face towards the sunset. He seemed to be watching the expiring effort of day, but he was really considering where he should forage, above all where he should sit, on the morrow. He had no wish to sit on the hill; he wanted to get farther away from the wood than that; farther from its horrid association with blood. He thought of the island; he thought of a place that had once taken his fancy on the cliffs; he thought of Sennen Dunes, and in the end decided to seek a form there. The moment he had made up his mind he glanced along his trail, and, descending the hill, set out across the lowland.

That back look told that he had the pine-marten in mind; and well he might, for she was no mean enemy. She had watched the hare leave the wood, but so great was her dread of man that she feared to follow till the dusk deepened. As soon as she dared, however, she came down from the tree and took to the trail, following it up the long slope and along the heights past the Liddens to the chantry, where, with her breath coming quickly, she stood eagerly scrutinising the hillside and the flooded lowland all agleam in the moonlight. Her coat was wet from the heavy dew, but she was too preoccupied to shake it; all her senses were in her eyes searching in vain for the quarry now far away in the midst of that water-logged moor. When she saw no sign, her heart sank; she was at a loss to know what to do. She was very loath to abandon the quest, but the dread of a blank night if she persisted weighed with her, so she presently forsook the trail on which she had stood and disappeared into the night.

Meanwhile the hare, who had reached the moorland farmstead he had made for, passed from one small enclosure to another, picking what little herbage he could find. With the help of the furze-shoots he managed to get his fill before leaving to roam for hours over the snipe-haunted waste. Hither and thither he journeyed, seemingly without any other object than to pass the hours away, going farther and farther from his goal, to which, however, he turned at the first crow of the crofter’s cock, so that the somewhat stormy dawn found him ensconced in a shallow pit on the brink of the dunes. He had chosen wisely; the sand was dry, and the thick marram-grass screened him from the keen wind which tore the spindrift from the rollers that tripped and foundered on the strand.

Yet, comfortable though he was, his mind was ill at ease; he was haunted by the tragedy of the pinewood. He did all he could to deaden memory of the scream, but the cries of the gulls kept it alive till a peregrine shot into view and drove them to the cliffs: then it faded and left him at peace. Even now he dreaded falling asleep, for fear of being visited by nightmare; he fought against his drowsiness, but in vain; he had dropped off before the gulls returned. Neither marten nor weasel harassed his peaceful slumbers, rendered delectable by a vision of the strand up and down which he was speeding like the wind, not alone, but in company with mother and sister. It was a very vivid dream; he felt the breeze in his face, the shells under his feet; his happiness was complete. He was sorry to awake, but the presence of the beach cheered his disappointment as he looked forward to a good gallop on the smooth sand left exposed by the ebb. At earliest nightfall he left the form and in part realised his dream, tearing up and down the level foreshore and spurning the sand as he went. It looked as though he would never tire, his sinews seemed to be of steel; but at length he withdrew and betook himself to the feeding-ground.

Dawn after dawn he returned to the dunes. Dusk after dusk he enjoyed his gallop, till one night he discovered the cat and two kittens crouching beside the path he always left by. Then, rather than run the risk of capture, he decided to forsake the delightful spot and return to the hill. True to his resolve, he was at Carn Brea on the morrow, and to his joy found the seat much drier than he expected. Better, however, had he gone anywhere else, for as things chanced he was to be the harassed spectator of a terrible affray between his two most dreaded enemies, the final scene in the drama that began to unfold itself soon after he was ensconced.

The dawn was clear despite the grey sky, with only a belt of mist here and there on the lowland to interrupt his watch for the night-prowlers returning to their lair. The scanning of the moor was his constant practice, because of the haunting dread he had of being stumbled on by homing fox or fitchet; in fact, he never settled down with a feeling of real security until day had fully declared itself and driven all his persecutors to their retreats. Not a living thing showed at first; presently however his gaze was arrested by some animal that issued wraith-like from a patch of mist, and after crossing a wide strip of moor entered the croft bordering the “linhay” field. There he could see it as it threaded the stunted furze, though not plainly enough to make quite sure that it was a fox as he suspected. All doubt was removed when the creature, after being hidden by intervening bank and overgrown ditch, crossed the boundary wall and began stealing up the hill straight for the form. It was Grey Fox himself. It looked now as if the hare’s forebodings were at last to be verified, but it was not so, for the brute entered the clump of tall furze midway up the slope and remained there.

The hare concluded that the fox had kennelled; he even judged him to be already asleep, so weary and exhausted did he look. But Grey Fox never thought of curling himself up; he was far too anxious for that; he was eagerly surveying the plain for sight of the enemy who had been pursuing him from farm to farm and moor to moor since midnight. He looked long without seeing aught, but he dared not compose himself to sleep. Instead he withdrew to the little grassy space behind the furze, where he kept walking up and down under the eyes of the hare, like a wild beast in a cage. “Strange behaviour this,” thought the hare. “There’s something very wrong with Grey Fox this morning. See how his flanks heave! what a mist his breath makes!” Presently the gaunt creature ceased pacing and lay down at full length, but after a few seconds he got up again and went back to the furze.