The Story of a Hare

by J. C. Tregarthen

CHAPTER VIII

THE GREAT WINTER

After leaving the form the hare kept loping to and fro on the strip of waste by the cliffs. No tempting bit of herbage detained him; he nibbled neither leaf nor spray; his movements were as aimless as they could be. He was in a quandary; he did not know where to turn because he did not know where he was going to sit, though it had occupied his thoughts since the withdrawal of the marten.

Of the many spots that occurred to him not one offered especial attractions like the hill, which kept presenting itself to his notice, without however winning him to it. And this is not to be wondered at, in view of the fear he had of being waylaid and gobbled up by Grey Fox if he ventured there. Nor was his fear groundless. Grey Fox had haunted the hill in the hope of securing what he esteemed the titbit of the wild. Day after day in the half light of the morning and in the dusk of the evening he crouched in one spot after another beside the path by which he thought the hare might leave or return, persisting in the quest until he had completely ringed the form with his ambuscades and satisfied himself that the hare was no longer using it.

At last he went to examine the seat: it was cold and scentless, and he realised what a fool’s business he had given his best energies to. Standing there he chided himself for throwing away so many precious hours, above all for being outwitted by a hare. Scathing was his self-reproach, yet brief, for Grey Fox wasted little time in vain regrets. He wanted to come to a settlement, and was concerned to know where the sly hussy of a grass-feeder had betaken herself. For a moment he stood with his bluish-green eyes fixed on vacancy, lost in thought, as if wondering where she could be, then stole down the slope, trailing his great brush as he went. He was abandoning the hill.

This was on the night that the hare narrowly escaped falling into the gully, so that after all puss might have safely returned instead of racking his poor brain over a new seat. In the end he found one on the moor, atop of a grassy mound which had once taken his fancy as he passed. From the slightly raised station he commanded a wide outlook across the waste, whose monotony the pool with its yellow reeds served in some measure to relieve. The moor, drear and barren though it was, furnished hospitality to a few migrant birds; a jack snipe fed within a dozen yards of the hare, a flock of golden plover was on the ground out of his ken beyond the pool. Later, eleven in all, they flew with musical whistlings over the reeds and across his front. Nor were these the only feathered visitors. Soon, as the weather grew colder, duck, widgeon, and teal visited the pool to feed, arriving at nightfall and leaving at dawn for the sea, where they rested through the day. Their line of flight was only a little wide of the mound, and the hare was always back in time to see the skeins go past. More than once too he caught sight of the dusky forms of otters stealing back to the cliffs; they were returning from a raid on the waterfowl.

But nothing is of long continuance in the wild. The visits of the duck were abruptly terminated by the freezing of the pool, and a phalarope, whom the lone water had attracted, was driven away at the same time.

The plover remained, the snipe foraged along a runnel fed by a warm spring, but the heath was rendered uninhabitable for the hare by the piercing wind, against which the withered grasses of the mound afforded no protection. He endured the discomfort for some days, then as it became unbearable he forsook the spot and returned, not without misgivings, to the hill. But Grey Fox was still present to his mind; he approached with the utmost caution, carefully shunned the old form, and sat at a spot midway between it and the chantry.

In this higher station, however, he found effectual shelter from the wind, though its whistling sounded menacingly close, especially when it rose, as towards night it often did, to a shriek.

In its shrillest notes the north-easter was almost articulate; it seemed to sound a warning of the bitter weather to come. For the cold was no mere snap like the previous visitation; it was, as the old tenant of Brea Farm foresaw in the red sunsets and dead set of the wind, the beginning of a season of unusual severity. The flocks of redwings and fieldfares which had sought the westernmost angle of the land found the exposed fields as hard frozen and inhospitable as those they had fled from. In the sheltered valleys alone, when the abundant crop of haws along the hedgerows had been consumed, were they able to pick up a living and find what was almost as necessary as food, a roosting-place out of the eye of the wind. The blackthorn brakes, every branch of the holly and the furze, any bush screened by ivy, were all occupied at night by thrushes, mistle-thrushes, blackbirds, linnets, and finches, whilst bevies of larks slept on the ground below.