80 



of the limbs towards their extremities, appear to be al- 

 ways retained. This is much as in L. americanus. The 

 periods of the change are April and November. 



In noting the habitat of the Prairie Hare, we must 

 exclude from its range those portions which are wooded. 

 Emphatically an animal of the plains, it never, so far as 

 I have observed, enters timber, though ranging up to the 

 very edge of the woods. Thus, we find it in the under- 

 brush, sometimes quite heavy, of the river bottoms of 

 the larger water courses in the west, bnt not in the woods 

 that immediatel}^ fringe the rivers. It remains with us 

 as we approach the timbered foot-hills of the liocky 

 Mountains, but we lose it in half a day's journey as we 

 fairly enter the timber belt. It is as characteristic of the 

 great sage barrens of the west as the sasfe cock itself; and 

 in the more favored, grassy regions it is equally abundant. 

 I have found it also in vast alkaline deserts I have trav- 

 ersed, and in those scarcely less forbidding tracts where 

 a scanty herbage struggles with patches of prickly pear, 

 milj after mile. In the more desolated regions, the only 

 associate of its kind is the sage rabbit ; near most of the 

 water courses it will be found that the timber contains 

 another ally, the common cottontail ; but out on the 

 broad rolling prairie, peculiarly its home, it flourishes 

 almost alone. 



Nor is the prairie hare in the least gregari(jus. I have 

 never seen nor heard of several together, and indeed it 

 is rare to find even two together, at any season whatever. 

 It is one of the most solitary animals with which I have 

 become acquainted. As we measure the weary miles of 

 a day's march, a hare springs almost from beneath our 

 feet, and another and another appears in succession, but 

 always separated and independent of each other. I have 

 never found any kind of locality even, which, presenting 



