it is difficult to imagine a wild creature making a harder struggle for existence than a hare in west penwith. from beginning to end its life is one of persecution. as a leveret it can hardly escape falling a victim to the stoat, carrion crow, or magpie; or, when full grown, becoming the prey of the polecat or the fox. if it be objected that puss has to run the gauntlet of these enemies elsewhere, it may be answered that in few parts of england is vermin so abundant. this is only in a measure due to the many strongholds which this wild country affords. in the land’s end district game is not preserved, and the absence of the gamekeeper and his traps accounts for the prevalence of predatory creatures, furred and feathered. it is curious too, to note how interest in the hare and the protection afforded it, have declined before the popularity of fox-hunting. time was when it was highly esteemed as a beast of the chase, and when money was freely spent on the destruction of its enemies, though to a much less extent than is now lavished on poultry-funds for the perservation of the fox. in those days, as parish registers attest, the churchwardens paid with an easy conscience five shillings for a fox, a shilling for an otter, a shilling for a grey or badger, twopence for a fitcher or marten, and a penny for a hedgebore or kite. whether the register of buryan church contains entries referring to the payments of these fees, i do not know; but there is evidence that in this, the largest parish of the land’s end district, the hare formerly flourished, its pursuit forming the chief diversion of the local gentry. of these, squire levelis of trewoofe was, perhaps, the most enthusiastic sportsman, and it is related of him in an old cornish romance, that one day after a very arduous chase, at the moment his hounds were on the point of running into a hare, the astonished squire suddenly found himself confronted, on the spot where the scent failed, by a witch. the belief that witches at times assumed the shape of a hare lingered in west cornwall at least as late as the early part of the last century, for it is related of sir rose price that on his entering a cottage into which his hounds had driven their quarry, he found to his astonishment not a hare but a haggard old woman, whose torn hands and face removed all doubt as to what he had been in pursuit of. this occurred at kerrow in the parish of zennor. squire levelis’ uncanny adventure took place in the lamorna valley; and within the memory of those still living, this wild “bottom” has resounded with the merry music of “hare-hounds.” no pack of harriers exists in west penwith to-day, but the greyhound is very much in evidence; and all things considered, the latter state of poor puss is far worse than the first. what with “long dogs,” foxes, vermin, snares, and cheap guns, this most timid of creatures lives in a state of perpetual apprehension. nevertheless, it makes a stubborn struggle for existence on the lone upland wastes, where it enjoys partial immunity from its natural four-footed enemies, which, for the most part, harbour in the wild overgrown valleys that tin-streaming has rendered worthless for agricultural purposes. it says something for the keenness of the miner and the crofter that they should search miles and miles of bleak moorland on the remote chance of finding a hare which will, if found, in all probability run their dogs to a standstill. small wonder that to these men the few surviving hares should seem to bear a charmed life, and that those remarkable for stamina and endurance and recognisable by some slight distinguishing mark, should be as well known as a bob-tailed fox to the members of a hunt.
st buryan church.
of such none was more famous than the little jack of bartinney, whose life history was typical of that of his race. his first home was amidst a clump of rushes bordering a lonely pool on the high ground between two of the cornish heights. even when maternal instinct is strongest, fear of detection kept doe and leveret apart during the day; but she never failed to suckle him at nightfall and before sunrise, on her way back from the feeding-ground on the lowland. from dawn to dusk the leveret lay in the snuggest of couches in the trough between the hills, and when not asleep would watch the reeds waving over the shallows, or the moor-hen, whose nest was on the opposite bank, swim on the open water. one morning he saw her issue from the reed-bed with four fluffy little red-billed creatures following in her wake. this novel sight aroused his curiosity, and when the moor-hen and her brood skirted the little bay near him, he jumped out of the nest and ran to the edge of the water. at that instant a raven flying overhead, on the look-out for food for its young in bosigran cliffs, espied him, and the next minute the ominous shadow of the marauder darkened the bright grassy margin, scaring the leveret and making him flee for his life. quick as the moor-hen and her chicks had dived, before the depredator could transfix him with its powerful beak, he made for the thickest of the rushes, squatted and, though the raven made careful search, escaped. this was the one fright of the happy days spent by the side of the pool. there he got to know the varied voices of nature—the carol of the lark, the scream of the gull, the hum of the insects, the murmur of the wind, and the music of the ripple in the reed-bed; the chief sounds that broke the silence of the upland. from below came faintly at times the bark of the dog, the crowing of the cock, and at night the yelp of the fox, the snarl of the badger, the whurring of the night-jar, and the song of the sedge-warbler. once he heard, from the direction of the land’s end cliffs, that mysterious roaring of the sea, which when the farmers hear they say “g’envor is callin’.” his growth was very rapid, and when a month old, a spirit of restlessness and a desire to roam possessed him, and thrice he accompanied the doe in her night rounds and got a knowledge of the lay of the country.
one day at dusk he left the nest and the narrow grassy green amidst the rushes where he had gambolled, and made his way down to the tableland alone. he soon learnt that the country over which he roamed was full of enemies, finding to his surprise that even the rabbits were unfriendly to him. his first form was on a pile of earth in the middle of a field from which the hay had recently been carried. wild growth luxuriated there, and before he abandoned the heap it was gay with the golden corymbs of the harvest-flower. thence he could hear the voices of the hoers in the turnip-fields, the rumble of wheels in the near lane, and morning and evening shep’s bark as he drove the cows to the milking-shed. lying there all day, his long black-tipped ears flat on his back, and his dark, hazel-rimmed eyes that never wholly closed watchful of every movement in the life around him, the hare was a timorous spy on the ongoings of the farm where he was an unknown guest. for nearly two months he occupied the form undisturbed, but when the clover had grown again bullocks were turned into the pasture to graze, and one morning a lurcher dog that accompanied the farmer on his round, found him in his seat and pursued him so closely across three fields that he would not have escaped its jaws but for the wiles he instinctively used. he did not return to the seat for some days and then, detecting that the stale scent of a dog tainted the ragwort, he abandoned the field altogether, and resorted to another form he had but rarely used in the valley below sancreed beacon. it was made amongst withering bracken on a mound skirting a small stream, and dawn always found him sitting in it. to baffle any enemy that might follow his trail, he would run past his form, keeping some twenty feet wide of it, and then double on his foil. when opposite his seat he made a sidelong spring, and then another which took him across the stream to the mound. his eyes, ears, and nostrils satisfying him that no enemy shadowed him, he crept under the arch formed by the drooping fronds and lay concealed until evening. he never failed to take these precautions, and he soon had proof of their necessity. once, shortly after he was esconced, he heard a slight rustling in some brambles on the opposite bank a little way down stream. presently a long-bodied creature with dark fur emerged from it. though short of leg its agility was remarkable, and with its nose to the ground it was evidently in quest of some victim’s trail. it was a polecat, which, on hitting the scent of the hare at the spot whence he had taken his second spring, became terribly excited. as if familiar with the wiles of its favourite prey, the blood-thirsty creature began at once to quarter the ground in its attempt to discover the track. at length in making a wide cast it hit the line, but followed it in a direction contrary to that of the hare and, running heel, disappeared with long bounds through the gap where the jack had passed less than half an hour before. soon afterwards the light crept down the hillside, and the hare knew that the chattering, archbacked fiend would not return, that the danger was past. during the time he watched his enemy he never stirred, and had the polecat discovered him he could not have escaped, so helpless were his limbs from a strange terror that possessed them—one which he had not experienced when found by the lurcher. fortunately for the jack, his greatest trials did not overtake him until he came to his full strength and had a perfect knowledge of the hills, where in order to avoid his enemies he now made his forms. these he never left—not even during the breeding season—before sundown, when he stole down to the tableland.
stone circle at boscawen-un.
one dark night he was cropping clover in a field at boscawen-un, near a circle of stones belonging to a grey past of which no man knows the history. whilst browsing, he stopped now and again to listen, as was his wont, and anon he heard a cry that made his blood run cold. at first he thought that two stoats were fighting on the other side of the stone wall that bounded the field, but as the horrid noise drew near the gap through which he had come not long before, he stood up on his hind legs and looked towards it. then he saw not two but five stoats come between the stone pillars where a gate had once hung, and knew at a glance it was his trail they were following. the dread of the weasel is so paralysing that some hares—for, like men, all hares have not the same courage—would have crouched on the ground, or dragged their limbs in lessening circles until their fate overtook them; but not so this little jack. he was away at once at full speed, and the pack of fiends, sighting him as he passed the rubbing-post near the middle of the field, extended themselves at full gallop and, as they seldom fail, when hunting together, to run down their prey, reckoned they would soon be sucking his blood. if the hare had had only the danger behind to fear, his greater speed would soon have enabled him to out-distance his pursuers, astoundingly fleet of foot though they are for their size. it was far otherwise; for at every gap, at every gate, he paused and snuffed the air for tainted snare or lurking fox, and this allowed the stoats to lessen the space that would else have separated them. so that it gladdened the jack’s eyes, when he had left the hamlets of brahan and crowz-an-wra behind, to see at last the murky cone of chapel cairn brea rising before him against the scarcely less black sky. once free of the cultivated land he breasted the hill at his best pace, but on reaching the summit paused near a ruined chantry, to listen. his long ears were pricked to catch the slightest sound that should break the unusual silence.
the night was still as death, as if nature held its breath at witnessing this tragic chase of its own ordering, and before very long the hare heard the weasel-cry coming from the direction where his ascending track lay. at first it fascinated him as it does all his tribe, and he felt inclined to stay and await his fate; but the love of life was too strong within him, and shaking off the paralysing feeling that was numbing his limbs, he set his head in the direction of bartinney. with his back to the danger, terror seemed to add wings to his feet, and like the wind he went down the eastern slope of chapel cairn brea until he reached the margin of the lidden’s pool. instantly he dashed through the shallows and, losing foothold where the water deepened, swam across it in a slanting direction as he had more than once seen the doe, his mother, do. having landed, he repeated his usual ruse, and then squatted in a seat in some sedgy growth not a stone’s throw from the clump of rushes where he was born. with the sheet of water, which is some fifty yards wide, between him and his pursuers, he believed he was safe. indeed, it did not much disturb him to hear them coming down the hill, but when he saw them take to the water, on the black surface of which their glowing eyes showed like green beads, he was filled with dismay. they landed near him, for they had swum straight across the pool, and at once, without staying to shake their wet fur, strove to pick up the lost line, two working the margin one way, and three the other. presently one succeeded, at the spot where the hare had landed, near the extremity of a finger-like creek, and making a cry, called the rest of the pack, which flew to it. then together they followed the scent through the belt of rushes and over the sable face of the heather, and coming to the end, spread out like a fan, the while making a chattering noise, and displaying an activity more fiendish than hound-like in their ineffectual attempts to recover it beyond. a stoat which seemed to be the leader, for he it was that came first through the gap and afterwards led the others across the pool, returned on the trail, making short casts on each side of it, and only just failed to find where the hare had landed from his first spring. wearying at last of his efforts, or fearful of being discovered at daybreak on such a bare expanse of moorland, he uttered a strange cry which summoned the well-disciplined band around him. less than a minute later the terror-stricken hare, who had watched their every movement, saw the baulked marauders steal away over the shoulder of the hill by a path slightly barer than the ground about it, where a much-used bridle-track had been in the days of pack-mules, before wheels rumbled over the roads that now “ribbon” the countryside.
after this horrible experience it was long before the hare ventured down to the lowlands. save for an occasional raid on a labourer’s garden at the foot of the hill, he contented himself with the less succulent fare of a farm on the barren upland between bartinney and caer bran. the harder life was not without its compensations. by journeying over the hills in search of food—for at times he would wander far to browse on wild thyme and other tender herbage in sheltered spots of the waste—he got to know his beats as well as the earthstopper knew every step of the rough ways between the fox-holts. to this knowledge, and to his powers of endurance thus strengthened, he owed his many escapes from greyhounds, which he led by paths that gave him the advantage.
his favourite seat at this time, when persecution had driven him from his old ones, was amongst the sere grasses that grew on an ancient earthwork or “gurgoe” near the summit of bartinney. in winter-time few bleaker spots can be found than the crest of this cornish height, to which the scanty herbage clings close like a skull-cap, and on which stonecrop and lichen make nearly as hard a struggle for existence as the hare. yet for one thing the spot is favoured, inasmuch as it catches the earliest rays of the sun when the slopes are yet grey and the lowlands lie in gloom. this advantage the hare did not fail to utilise. returning wet from the dew-drenched grasses in the troughs of the hills, he would, before entering his form, stand on the boulder crowning the crest, and dry his fur as a cormorant dries his wings after fishing.
during the great frost before the blizzard he clung to the hilltop, and lay there under the snow, with just a breathing-hole in the side of his white hut. for three days he fed on the shoots of the furze, but at last, hunger dispelling his fears, he ventured down to a mowhay and had his fill of clover from a stack near a dog-kennel. fortunately, snow fell that night and hid his tracks, so that he was not followed next morning by poachers, as he had been once before despite the long round he took and the various shifts he resorted to for the purpose of throwing them off his track.
“the many musets through the which he goes,
?are like a labyrinth to amaze his foes.”
in snow, storm, and sunshine, the hare clung to the summit of the upland, and but rarely used the form near the pool. its solitude and the great silence that brooded over it were almost as sweet to him as life itself. rarely did anything move across the broad slopes he overlooked save the fleeting shadows of the clouds. all the summer through but one man came up the hill—an aged botanist he was, of world-wide fame—who more than once toiled to the top, and the hare got accustomed to the gleam of his big spectacles and the flapping of his long coat-tails, and somehow knew that he was harmless, though his eyes, like those of the men who had sought him with dogs, were always on the ground.
on the dry bank, with the thick grasses to screen him from the hot rays and the sea breezes to fan him, he would sleep through the noontide heat when the lizard left the sparse brake to bask in the sun, and “king-crowner” butterflies flitted above the crest, or settled on the outcropping rocks to open and close their gorgeous wings though there was no eye to admire their beauty. in these neighbours the hare had nothing to fear, nor in the kestrel that hovered over the hill, nor now, in the raven that winged its way high overhead as it crossed from the northern to the southern cliffs.
this happy time lasted until the splendour of the dwarf furze faded, and chill october stripped the storm-bent thorns of foliage; with the advent of the black month (as the ancient cornish styled november) it came to an end, and the hare was called upon to bear the greatest trial of his life.
