190 IN BERKSHIRE FIELDS 



species can offer any real resistance to their foes — 

 the great horned owls, the foxes, wildcats, hawks, 

 and weasels, not to mention dogs and men. Speed 

 is their only recourse, once they are discovered. 

 In winter the varying hare escapes detection by 

 his white coat, if there is snow on the ground. The 

 cottontail, on the other hand, plays dead in the face 

 of danger almost as successfully. I have known a 

 rabbit in my garden to sit motionless between two 

 frost-browned cauliflower plants till the dogs were 

 within two feet of him, and neither the dogs nor I 

 noticed him till he jumped. The cottontail has one 

 habit to his advantage — he burrows in winter (al- 

 ways by himself, so far as I have observed), while 

 the snow-shoe lives the year 'round under no better 

 roof than a low evergreen limb or tangle of briers. 

 The cottontail, also, takes a little longer and better 

 care of its numerous young. I have seen a mother 

 cottontail, after her nest in the grass was discovered, 

 take all five babies, one by one, in her mouth, and 

 hop with them two hundred yards away into a safe 

 thicket. Observers agree that the varying hare 

 never carries anything in its mouth. 



But, for all that, the odds against the larger 

 species do not seem so great as to account for the 

 fact that our Colonial ancestors, by rabbit or hare, 

 meant the big fellow, and most of us to-day, by 

 rabbit, mean the cottontail. Indeed, many readers 

 of this book have probably never seen a varying 

 hare, in his pure-white coat, crouched beneath his 

 snow-laden, fairy roof of evergreen boughs, his ears 

 erect and listening for the danger signal. They 

 have missed, however, one of the prettiest sights in 



