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.