During the great frost before the blizzard he clung to the hilltop, and lay there under the snow, with just a breathing-hole in the side of his white hut. For three days he fed on the shoots of the furze, but at last, hunger dispelling his fears, he ventured down to a mowhay and had his fill of clover from a stack near a dog-kennel. Fortunately, snow fell that night and hid his tracks, so that he was not followed next morning by poachers, as he had been once before despite the long round he took and the various shifts he resorted to for the purpose of throwing them off his track.
“The many musets through the which he goes,
Are like a labyrinth to amaze his foes.”
In snow, storm, and sunshine, the hare clung to the summit of the upland, and but rarely used the form near the pool. Its solitude and the great silence that brooded over it were almost as sweet to him as life itself. Rarely did anything move across the broad slopes he overlooked save the fleeting shadows of the clouds. All the summer through but one man came up the hill—an aged botanist he was, of world-wide fame—who more than once toiled to the top, and the hare got accustomed to the gleam of his big spectacles and the flapping of his long coat-tails, and somehow knew that he was harmless, though his eyes, like those of the men who had sought him with dogs, were always on the ground.
On the dry bank, with the thick grasses to screen him from the hot rays and the sea breezes to fan him, he would sleep through the noontide heat when the lizard left the sparse brake to bask in the sun, and “king-crowner” butterflies flitted above the crest, or settled on the outcropping rocks to open and close their gorgeous wings though there was no eye to admire their beauty. In these neighbours the hare had nothing to fear, nor in the kestrel that hovered over the hill, nor now, in the raven that winged its way high overhead as it crossed from the northern to the southern cliffs.
This happy time lasted until the splendour of the dwarf furze faded, and chill October stripped the storm-bent thorns of foliage; with the advent of the black month (as the ancient Cornish styled November) it came to an end, and the hare was called upon to bear the greatest trial of his life.
CHAPTER XII
The Hare—Continued
DIGORY STROUT AND FARMER PENDRE
About this time there returned to St Just a native of the parish who had made his fortune in the Far West of America. He was brought up as a miner, but the discovery that enriched him was really due to his love of sport. For, tiring of work in a copper-mine, he took to trapping and big game shooting, and one day in following the trail of a grizzly in a remote gully, lit on a shallow creek containing gold. The claim is worked out now; but in some maps of the States you will see, near the Canadian frontier, a small river marked Digory’s Creek. Amongst the cottonwood and spruce trees near its source, in the heart of the Great Divide, the hunter built a log-cabin, hung up his traps, tethered his favourite mare and pack-horse, and devoted his whole energies to “panning out” the gold from the sand. His fortune made, he returned after a long absence to England, settled for a year in Lancashire and attended coursing-meetings all over the country. It was on his native downs that he had first seen a course, and it may be that the sight of a hare before greyhounds kindled old memories, for Digory Strout frequently found himself thinking about his native village and the wild moorland that runs up to it. At last a longing to see the old place got so strong a hold on him that he resolved to yield to it and pay a flying visit to West Cornwall. It was towards the close of a September day that the carriage which had brought him from Penzance reached the high ground above New Bridge, overlooking the scene he remembered so well. To the West, the roofs of St Just Churchtown were outlined against the bright sea; and to the North, grim and unchanged, old Cairn Kenidzhek crowned the bleak moorland and looked down on the lonely farms lying like islands in the waste. Digory gazed on these familiar landmarks with a choking sensation in his throat, and when at length he came in sight of the row of grey cottages where he was born, his eyes filled with tears. The people of St Just who remembered him when he set out as a youth, welcomed him warmly, and he resolved to spend the winter among them. His decision made, he sent for a famous greyhound he had bought, that he might enjoy a few days’ coursing during his stay.
The arrival of the greyhound was an event in the dull life of the parish, and the reason for the interest it aroused is not far to seek. The St Just men, the best of judges on a rich lode of tin and the points of a greyhound, had no sooner cast eyes on Digory’s dog than they recognised what a perfect creature she was. Such a greyhound had never been seen in West Cornwall before; and when it leaked out, as somehow it very soon did, that she had won the Liverpool Cup and had cost Digory Strout a thousand guineas, the St Just men were all agog that a challenge should be sent then and there to Farmer Pendre of Selena Moor, whose famous dog, Beeswing, had carried everything before it the previous season, and turned the heads of the men of Buryan. No doubt a coursing-match might have been amicably arranged by the owners, but unfortunately some of the miners let fall certain taunts which reached the ears of their rivals and stung them into a state of fury. Thus old enmities were aroused, the two parishes became once more involved in a feud, and Farmer Pendre, who was a hot-headed man, singled out Strout as his enemy. Digory drove about the countryside apparently unconcerned, but the feeling between the parishes grew worse and worse; and the constable at Buryan, foreseeing a fray and being anxious to take part in it, sent in his resignation. Matters soon came to a head. A fortnight after the arrival of Fleetfoot, as the greyhound was named, a fight took place inside the Quaker’s burial-ground between a St Just man from Dowran and a Buryan man from Crowz-an-Wra, and the St Just man got badly beaten.
This was a spark that threatened to set the inflammable material of the two parishes in a blaze; and no one knew this better than the manager of Balleswidden mine, who, as soon as he heard the result of the fight, knocked the ashes out of his pipe, and went and saw the parson. What happened in the study at the back of the rectory is not known; but, at all events, Parson Grose was seen galloping through the Churchtown before nine o’clock the next morning, and somehow everyone knew that he was on his way to Buryan. When he reached the high ground near Chapel Cairn Brea and could see the road below him, there, to his surprise, was Canon Roulson on his white horse coming uphill on his way to St Just. They met where the parishes meet, and by the boundary-stone they discussed the best means for allaying the animosities of their parishioners.