Protected by his thick winter coat the hare was able to withstand the nipping frosts that blackened all but the hardiest and most unpalatable herbage, to which he was for the most part now driven for support. He fed on furze and lichens and no longer looked forward to the joys of pasturing time. Instead, his thoughts turned to the nights of plenty, to remembered feasts on tender corn and sweet trefoil, to banquets on fragrant thyme and juicy sow-thistles, to titbits like the pinks, above all to the musk, the tastiest morsel that his beats had furnished. He never wearied of dwelling on the appetising list; he would rehearse it again and again, and wonder whether the good things of the honeysuckle time would ever come again. He quite lost himself in these reveries; the hissing of the wind, even the ring of the horse’s hoofs that broke in on his musings as the farmer rode away to market, failed to disturb them. He was trying to recall the flavour of dandelions as he dreamily watched man and horse cross the lowland which seemed to shrink and cower beneath the low-hanging sky. Clouds, grey and depressing, spread from horizon to horizon save in the south-west, where at close of day after day the red sun emblazoned the heaven, and for a brief while bathed ocean and promontory with its cheery rays. They were especially pleasing to the hare, coming as they did between the dull day and the dark night when he wandered far and wide after pasture. Yet widely as he roamed he never came across the packs of stoats which the host of birds had attracted, nor—a thing that excited his surprise—once encountered Grey Fox. Nevertheless he often thought of him, wondering what had befallen him: whether he had met his death from the lurcher or been expelled from the earth by the badgers and betaken himself elsewhere. Neither supposition was right. Like the stoat-packs, Grey Fox harboured in the valleys, attracted by the easily captured prey and making the most of his opportunity. It was well for him that he did. In the middle of December snow fell, shutting off food from the birds and causing all but the hardiest to perish of hunger.