But this is the Law of the Camp, and as beautifully untrue of the Jungle, and of my woods and pastures, as Hathi’s account of how, before Fear came, the First of the Tigers ate grass. Still, Nebuchadnezzar ate grass, and he also grew eagles’ feathers upon his body. Perhaps the First of the Tigers had feathers instead of fur, though Hathi is silent as to that, saying only that the First of the Tigers had no stripes. It might not harm us to remember, however, that nowadays--as was true in the days of the Sabretooth tiger (he is a fossil)--tigers eat grass only when they feel very bad, or when they find a bunch of catnip. The wild animals that Hathi knew are more marvelous than the Wild Animals I Have Known, but Hathi’s knowledge of Jungle law is all stuff and nonsense. There is no ogre, Fear, no command, Obey, but the widest kind of a personal permit to live--joyously, abundantly, intensely, frugally at times, painfully at times, and always with large liberty; until, suddenly, the time comes to Let Live, when death is almost sure to be instant, with little pain, and less fear. But am I not generalizing from the single case of the fox and hounds? or at most from two cases--the hen and the hawk? And are not these cases far from typical? Fox and hound are unusually matched, both of them are canines, and so closely related that the dog has been known to let a she-fox go unharmed at the end of an exciting hunt. Suppose the fox were a defenseless rabbit, what of fear and terror then? Ask any one who has shot in the rabbity fields of southern New Jersey. The rabbit seldom runs in blind terror. He is soft-eyed, and timid, and as gentle as a pigeon, but he is not defenseless. A nobler set of legs was never bestowed by nature than the little cotton-tail’s. They are as wings compared with the deformities that bear up the ordinary rabbit hound. With winged legs, protecting color, a clear map of the country in his head,--its stumps, rail-piles, cat-brier tangles, and narrow rabbit-roads,--with all this as a handicap, Bunny may well run his usual cool and winning race. The balance is just as even, the chances quite as good, and the contest as interesting, to him as to Reynard. I have seen a rabbit squat close in his form and let a hound pass yelping within a few feet of him, but as ready as a hair-trigger should he be discovered. I have seen him leap for his life as the dog sighted him, and bounding like a ball across the stubble, disappear in the woods, the hound within two jumps of his flashing tail. I have waited at the end of the wood-road for the runners to come back, down the home-stretch, for the finish. On they go for a quarter, or perhaps half a mile, through the woods, the baying of the hound faint and intermittent in the distance, then quite lost. No, there it is again, louder now. They have turned the course. I wait.