Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood: Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other MatterWalter, J. Conway (James Conway)
History
Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood: Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter
Walter, J. Conway (James Conway)
Woodhall Spa (England)
There is one kind of foe which the hare finds more difficult to shake
off, or elude, than a pack of harriers or beagles. Stoats, foumarts,
polecats, _et id genus omne_, are becoming scarcer every year; although
the writer was recently told of a marten-cat—probably the Pine-marten
(martes abietum)—being killed in a tree, and sold for 10s. as a rarity.
I was a witness of the following:—Walking, in the small hours of the
morning, in a parish contiguous to Woodhall, on my way to a stream where
I was going to fish, I saw a hare in a field adjoining the road, which
was leaping about in a most extraordinary fashion, starting hither and
thither, plunging into the rushes, springing into the air, and performing
all sorts of strange antics, which I could only account for, had she been
“as mad as a March hare,” as the saying is; but this was in the month of
May. Presently she rushed forward, occasionally leaping into the air,
towards the fence which separated me from the fields. I expected to see
her appear through the hedge, in front of me; but she did not come. Out
of curiosity I got over the fence, when I saw the hare lying, a few yards
further on, stretched out as though dead. I went up to her, and found
that she was, indeed, quite dead; and fast on her neck was a weasel, so
gorged with her blood, that its usually slender body was quite bloated.
Following the proverbial national instinct, I killed the weasel; carried
the hare to a footpath, and left it there, that some labourer passing by
might take it home to regale his family.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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