FAMILY OF HARES AND RABBITS 



277 



" Varying Hare, the books call him ; and he 

 takes his changeable color-notions, perhaps, from 

 the swamps, wearing in summer the brown of 

 their slow water — brown with just a hint of 

 blue in it — but remembering always the waxy 

 white of the blossom-heads above him. Half 

 alien he seems to these months of heat, and he 

 is seen then — if seen at all — as a typical " limp- 

 ing hare " of the poets, lean and listless, with 

 small suggestion of his winter vigor. Yet he 



winter." Thus writes Edward A. Briggs, in 

 Field and Stream, who continues : 



" If the first frost spells joy to other fur-bear- 

 ers, the big hare finds in it a tang of ecsta;y. 

 Essentially a northern breed, his kind range even 

 to the Arctic circle ; the Canadian timber swarms 

 with him ; generations of New England boyhood 

 have snared him in his paths. 



" When the brief October ffare has died down 

 to iron and ashen November, he works his mir- 



By permission of the New York Zoological Society 



PRAIRIE HARE 

 Known also as the White-taUed Jack " Rabbit." A very large Hare with extremely long, mule-shaped ears 



plies a sure activity, in the green cover, harbor- 

 ing his queer, big-headed young in secret surface 

 nests, and cutting clean paths on which he and 

 they may reach with ease the choicest feeding- 

 grounds far up the barrens, or flee back to the 

 quick safety of the swamps. Forking and cross- 

 ing and fading into nothingness, these paths are 

 the surest clue to his presence, summer and 



acle, whereby to pay due homage to the North. 

 The snows are just ahead ; and was he not born 

 beneath a snowy rhododendron bloom? It is a 

 true miracle, not complete in an hour or a day. 

 First, the merest silvering on his brown sides; 

 then a growing pallor that smothers him in a 

 smoky drab, but leaving transient blots and 

 splashes of brown along his spine and especially 



