AUTUMN SHOOTING. 331 



A sharp whistle, or the simulated bleat of a fawn, will 

 cause either the one or the other of these wary animals to 

 stop short in full career, within point blank range of the 

 gun ; and the hare, at such an interruption, will sit up on 

 end, with one ear cocked forward and the other backward 

 to catch the smallest sound. 



The hare has the power and the habit, it seems, in a 

 great degree, of turning its large and prominent eyeballs so 

 as to turn its range of vision, when pursued, as it does its 

 ears, almost directly backward ; and it must be something 

 very abrupt and decided in the way of sound or sight, 

 directly in front of it, which shall attract its attention. 



This does not appear to me to extend to such a length 

 in the American as in the European hare ; which latter, 

 when flying in terror from sounds behind it, as in a 

 battue, seems to be wholly blind to every thing in front of 

 it, and has been known to run actually into the mouth of a 

 dog, and to break its neck by coming into collision with 

 one of its fellows flying in similar consternation, along 

 some winding woodpath. 



Though it is, however, easy enough to get shots at the 

 hare running before hounds in covert, it is by no means so 

 easy to shoot him ; and many men, who can follow a wild 

 duck cutting the air at the rate of ninety miles an hour 

 which, by the way, is his ordinary measured speed with a 

 heavy duck-gun, and bring him down to a certain, will be 

 puzzled and foiled completely by a hare dodging in a 

 brake, or glancing across a wood road, seen for a second, 

 and lost as soon as seen. Here no following is possible, 

 and the man who expects to kill his hare by shooting at 



