140 TEN YEARS OF GAME-KEEPING 



seemed to prove that rabbit fertilizer was better than 

 none at all. 



Rabbit-snarers often will complain that someone 

 steals their rabbits because the string securing the 

 snare to the peg apparently has been cut. I do not 

 say people will not take rabbits, and sometimes the 

 snares in which they are caught as well. But a 

 rabbit can cut a string with its teeth as cleanly as a 

 man can do it with a knife. Once when I was 

 ferreting in a dell a rabbit came up to a net, nipped 

 a mesh, and hopped through the aperture, within a 

 yard of my face. Occasionally I have had a fine 

 dig when a rabbit has cut the line on a ferret. One 

 rabbit cut a new line three times, as fast as I sent in 

 a fresh ferret. Curiously enough, this happened in 

 the same burrow of the dell where the rabbit had 

 nipped the mesh of the net and escaped. We always 

 suspected the same rabbit of all the cutting. 



Once or twice I have trapped hares at the mouth 

 of a rabbit-hole, to which I concluded they must 

 have gone in search of a sheltered seat. I know of 

 one instance only in which a hare has gone right 

 down a rabbit's burrow. I was with a shooting- 

 party walking some sainfoin for partridges, when a 

 leveret about two-thirds grown jumped up, and 

 offered a gun an easy crossing shot ; but as the 

 range was not more than twenty yards, there was no 

 hurry. However, just as the trigger was pulled the 

 hare disappeared as if swallowed by the earth, and 



