CHAPTER XI
L’HOMME S’AMUSE
As if to compensate the persecuted animal for his recent trials, the hare now enjoyed what was to him a long immunity from molestation, for during January and part of February no enemy waylaid or pursued him.
At the end of that time the weather, which had again become bleak and inclement, suddenly softened with the return of the westerly wind, becoming so mild as to savour of spring. The change was felt and responded to by every creature. On St Valentine’s Day when Golden Valley resounded with the love songs of birds, the hare had already set out in search of a mate. Whether influenced by reason or by instinct, he did not seek her along his usual beats, on which he had not once crossed the trail of his kind, but set his face to the north, to the unexplored land he had often looked down on from Bartinney and Chapel Carn Brea; there he was in high hope of meeting her.
So intent was he on his quest that he never stopped to browse, leaving untouched patch after patch of tender herbage in the moorland farms he crossed. Yet he never saw a living thing. He came to the wild which is crowned by the weird rocks of Carn Kenidzhek, and here, standing near the summit, he scrutinised the moonlit waste, apparently a desolate land, a land without life. Just before daybreak, however, there came into view, ghostly as the stoats but very much larger, a creature threading its way in and out among the furze bushes as it made for the Carn. The hare was puzzled as to its identity until it began to ascend the slope, when to his surprise he saw that it was that uncommon thing, a white badger.
It presently winded the hare, stood, gazed at him, then after a glance at the faint glow in the depressions between the hills, hurried to its earth. As soon as it had disappeared the hare sought a couch in the heather, and sat with his face to the far-off Carns, whose crests were soon bright in the rays of the rising sun.
“In that golden land,” he thought, “I shall surely find her. To-night I will go there.”
The day proved as glorious as the night had been serene, but for the hare it was all too long. He could hardly sit in his form, so eager was he to be afoot, and the moment the stars peeped he quitted the seat.
What miles on miles he traversed: he visited the hills, he penetrated to the cliffs of Morvah, he turned inland again and roamed wide stretches of moor and down, he skirted Chun[[8]] cromlech, and passed within sight of the Men Scryfa as he headed for the Galver, with its upthrust peak conspicuous against the stars. From the Galver he went to Hannibal’s Carn, and presently stood on its highest rock gazing at the plain beneath. His ears were pricked as they had been a score times since sundown to catch the whispers of the waste and perhaps hear the bleat of a doe. He listened as he had never listened before; but there came no call, no sound indeed save the murmur of the dawn wind about the crags; so at last the love-sick fellow forsook his station and returned to the Galver, where after weaving a maze of trails he sought a form high up the slope.
In his lone retreat he felt as safe as on Chapel Carn Brea; he was even more remote from the haunts of man. Yet harriers were already on their way to the meet, and it was that very ground where he sat that was to be hunted.