PETER QUINCE
I was walking along a -footpath beside a wood, enjoying the brisk stir of spring going on all around, when I almost trod on a large brown hare. It propelled itself from where it had been crouching with a mighty leap, then sped across the field with a rapidity which suggested that it was at least as startled as I by the encounter. Hares arc usually infallibly alert to approaching danger and I don't remember surprising one at such close quarters before. But then, this is the month when hares are notoriously erratic in their behaviour.
We have a fair number of hares in my part of the country, so they are often to be seen loping about the fields. They used to be even more numerous, and perhaps still are in some places, although the odds are against the survival in great numbers nowadays of any animal so large and so noticeable. In Yorkshire years ago, I remember, I once came across some forty or fifty hares all assembled in one moonlit stubble field. It was a remarkable sight, and I confess that my first impression on seeing them in the dim light was that they were the small north country sheep, an impression they dispelled by suddenly bounding off into the distance with a most un-sheeplike promptness and decision. Today I never see more than a couple at a time, but I always enjoy watching their tremendous turn of speed when startled.
Their peculiar behaviour in the present season is well known, although probably more by traditional knowledge than by actual observation. The hare's March mad- ness.is, of course, simply its own variety of the ancient folly which all the animal king- dom succumbs to when the sap is rising. Nevertheless the males do go in for the most insane-seeming antics in their rivalry for the females; they buck about like the wildest of kicking broncos, they bound over each other trying to inflict blows from mid-air with their powerful hind legs, they stage extraordinary boxing-matches in which each participant sits up like a fighting kangaroo in a circus. At times they look positively ferocious. It is a strange manifestation of ardour in a species which in every other respect is a by-word for timidity and shy- ness.
'This harmless and inoffensive animal. destitute of every means of defence, and sur- rounded on all sides by its enemies, would soon be utterly extirpated, if Nature, ever kind and provident, had not endowed it with faculties, by which it is frequently enabled to elude their pursuit'—thus Thomas Bewick, the great master wood-engraver of the Eng- lish natural scene, in his General History of Quadrupeds: and it is a fact that but for its quivering watchfulness and its great speed this powerfully-built animal would be help- less before its enemies. Yet it discovers great reserves of pugnacity to direct against its own kind in the stresses of the mating season.
Even its gift of speed when pursued has been turned to its disadvantage through the ages, for the hare was the favourite quarry of the hunt long before fox-hunting was thought of. In the days before the ancient English forest was felled, open country was largely a matter of the fields surrounding a village ; beyond that stretched the green- wood, on and on for miles, and anyone who tried to hunt a fox soon found that the chase petered out as the fox took refuge in the forest. The hare, knowing no safety except in speed, kept in the open, adopting his characteristic tactic of running in wide circles when pursued. Fox-hunting was a lowly business, a mere matter of keeping down vermin, when hunting the hare was accorded all the honours of the chase.
Anyone who has read Parson Woodforde's journals knows how important a place hare hunting occupied among country pursuits in eighteenth-century England, and less than a
century ago Wilfrid Scawen Blunt's 'Old Squire' declared : '1 love the hunting of the hare Better than that of the fox 1 like to be as my fathers were In the days ere I was born.'
Not finding much pleasure in hunting any- thing, myself, I have no preference for either Pursuit. but I am always pleased to come across hares in our fields There is a super- stition that it is unlucky for a hare to cross Your path, because witches were said to transform themselves into hares when it suited their business to do so. but I am not aware of many witches in this parish now. adays, so this is a risk I am prepared to take. Another ancient belief about the hare Was that it was cursed with a peculiar melan- choly, which it tried to overcome by (for some reason unexplained so far as I know) eating wild chicory Admittedly there are some things about the hare's place in the scheme of things to account for a touch of sadness—its helplessness. and its attraction as meat for fiercer creatures: but hares don't look particularly gloomy to me. certainly not in March. Neither have I ever experi- enced a sense of melancholy after a dish of jugged hare, which is what those who ate hare were supposed by the scientists of the Middle Ages to suffer
As to their other characteristic, noted in his scholarly way by Sir Thomas Browne in Psetododoxia Epidemica. and which he de- fined as Tetrorningencv. or pissing back- ward', whereby men observing both sexes 'to urine backward, or aversely between their legs. they might conceive there was a foemin- ine part in both. Wherein they are deceived • •
'—as to this, I am afraid my observations of hares do not provide any evidence either way. But I do know that it used to be be- lieved that hares were sexless, or else that they changed sex every year. a point noted in John Fletcher's The Faithful Shepherdess. Printed in 1610. How any countryman came to believe that hares were sexless. especially in March when they are battling with each Other in continuous amorous frenzy, is some- thing I cannot explain.
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