i£2 IN BERKSHIRE FIELDS 



know. I have seen all my raspberry shoots cut off 

 at snow-line and my young apple-trees girdled by 

 a rabbit which lived under the veranda of an un- 

 occupied cottage on the place in winter and in the 

 grass behind the garden in summer. After the 

 summer came, however, he never molested the gar- 

 den. I have seen him hop between two rows of young 

 lettuce to eat clover in the lawn. On or near almost 

 every place on that village street a cottontail lived, 

 despite the dogs. But the varying hare is a creat- 

 ure of the deep woods, the wild pastures. With us, 

 he is invariably shot, if at all, well up the moun- 

 tains and far from any house or frequented clearing. 

 Something in his make-up prevented him from tak- 

 ing kindly to the advent of ax and plow, and he 

 appears to me to have shrunk just as our area of 

 primeval forest has shrunk. He has paid the pen- 

 alty for not being temperamentally adaptable. 



A few years ago some unspeakable person in New 

 York State imported several European hares, which 

 in size and speed resemble the jack-rabbit of our 

 Western states, and which are capable of becoming 

 quite as much of a pest — or so we thought during 

 the cold, snowy winter of 1917-18. By that time, 

 these hares, which all our farmers called jack-rab- 

 bits, had come over the state line in great numbers, 

 and were spreading out to north and south along 

 the eastern base of the Taconic range. Some had 

 penetrated into Connecticut, but only a stray rab- 

 bit or two crossed to the east side of the Housatonic 

 River. During that winter I wrote that the grey- 

 hound would soon be our most popular dog, after 

 watching one of them leave an ordinary dog behind 



