HARE 327 



the marshmen call hares to them, as some do partridges and 

 pheasants (by aid of a bit of sand-paper). By this method, 

 on moonlit nights, the poachers make this sucking noise if 

 they see an old hare, and it generally sits up on hearing the 

 sound, and gets knocked over. When the height of the 

 love-season is over, they get more regular in their habits, 

 and return to their forms (often near the villages) at the peep 

 of day (which is the best time to shoot a hare), and lie there 

 with their hind-legs beneath them, and their heads resting on 

 their fore-paws, lying as a cat lies, but with one eye open ; 

 for they see any one directly they enter the field, though 

 they do not move. They like a sunny place for their forms, 

 and sleep most in the morning, being more wide-awake 

 after two o'clock in the afternoon. They will return to the 

 same form for a month together, but should they be hunted, 

 they'll return to a favourite form on the third day ; but often 

 they will make another form close by the old one, sometimes 

 within a yard of it. They do not get shy of villages or rail- 

 ways either. I know a field through which the line runs 

 where I have seen fifteen hares turned off in an afternoon. 



At " shutting in time " they draw out for food, wandering 

 miles, even swimming broad dikes in search of it. They eat 

 grass, young clover, young rushes (which they bite through), 

 turnips, wheat, mangolds (not a favourite food), carrots, celery, 

 cabbages, vetches, rye, young poppies, sow-thistles, dande- 

 lions, and even hay. 



When you study this list of foods, when you think of those 

 long greyhound-like quarters of theirs, and the speed with 

 which they get over the ground, and when you couple these 

 facts with their wandering propensities, you begin to wonder 

 what harm they cannot do to the farmer. A hare will nibble 

 a hundred wheat-straws in a night ; he will bite into endless 

 roots, leaving depressions where frost and water lodge and 

 foster rot; he will tear the hearts from the clover crops; 

 and when you know seventy hares have been counted in a 

 field, you begin to wonder what the farmer loses by these 



