Varying Hare 



since. At intervals of perhaps seven or eight years they came back in 

 scattered bands and endeavoured to establish themselves in their old 

 haunts but the result was always the same. 



Rather more than twenty years ago they were quite numerous 

 for several successive seasons in a neighbour's wood lot only half a 

 mile from here. I can just recall a cool afternoon, which I am quite 

 sure must have been sometime in the last of autumn, when my 

 cousin and I raced up the western slope of those woods with the sun- 

 light streaming in beneath the pines, and the one distinct thing in my 

 memory of that time is the image of a big, yellowish brown hare 

 hobbling up the hill before us. That must have been about the last 

 of their occupation of that place, and up to the present time I have 

 only on one occasion found as much as a track there. 



Several years ago our cat caught a young hare of this species, and 

 I think it must have been the following winter that I heard of several 

 having been killed in the neighbourhood. 



From that time until the fall of 1894 I was unable to learn of the 

 existence of any of these animals for miles around, though it seems 

 that on the slope of a certain low pine-covered hill only three or four 

 miles distant a colony have dwelt uninterruptedly from all accounts 

 since the time of the red men. In the fall of 1894 a gunner 

 told me that only a day before he had been shooting grouse along the 

 edge of a swamp hardly a mile away, and in pushing into a thick 

 clump of hemlocks to secure a wounded bird had started a white 

 rabbit which he succeeded in shooting. In the course of the next few 

 weeks I heard of several that were killed in those woods and 

 there were doubtless many others which I failed to hear of, but all my 

 tramps in that direction for the purpose of finding them proved 

 unsuccessful at least until the snow came. 



Late in the winter I took a snow-shoe tramp in that direction, the 

 first time I had been there since the first snow-fall of the season, and 

 within two miles found the unmistakable track of a white rabbit; 

 there was no mistaking the broad oval foot-prints, even if the distance 

 between them had not served to distinguish them from those of the 

 gray rabbit which crossed their line of march at frequent intervals. 



The track, which apparently had been made several days, led me 

 from the swamp into the low rolling birch land, and now other 

 and fresher ones of the same kind joined it until a well-beaten path 

 running east and west was formed and this presently joined another 



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