Awhile she stood beneath the ledge and looked up. Too feeble to do more, she meant to return at dusk to pit her wit against the hare’s, in some way to get at him, drive her fangs into his great vein and drink deep of his blood: she was even thinking of the feast in prospect as she crawled away on the trail of the pack. She was, however, reckoning without her host. In as wild a dawn as ever broke upon the Land’s End, the hare leapt from his sanctuary and stole over the rain-lashed moor to Chapel Carn Brea, where, happy in the thought that the downpour would destroy all trace of his trail, he fell soundly asleep, nor even dreamt of the terrible ordeal through which he had passed. CHAPTER XI _L’HOMME S’AMUSE_ As if to compensate the persecuted animal for his recent trials, the hare now enjoyed what was to him a long immunity from molestation, for during January and part of February no enemy waylaid or pursued him. At the end of that time the weather, which had again become bleak and inclement, suddenly softened with the return of the westerly wind, becoming so mild as to savour of spring. The change was felt and responded to by every creature. On St Valentine’s Day when Golden Valley resounded with the love songs of birds, the hare had already set out in search of a mate. Whether influenced by reason or by instinct, he did not seek her along his usual beats, on which he had not once crossed the trail of his kind, but set his face to the north, to the unexplored land he had often looked down on from Bartinney and Chapel Carn Brea; there he was in high hope of meeting her. So intent was he on his quest that he never stopped to browse, leaving untouched patch after patch of tender herbage in the moorland farms he crossed. Yet he never saw a living thing. He came to the wild which is crowned by the weird rocks of Carn Kenidzhek, and here, standing near the summit, he scrutinised the moonlit waste, apparently a desolate land, a land without life. Just before daybreak, however, there came into view, ghostly as the stoats but very much larger, a creature threading its way in and out among the furze bushes as it made for the Carn. The hare was puzzled as to its identity until it began to ascend the slope, when to his surprise he saw that it was that uncommon thing, a white badger. It presently winded the hare, stood, gazed at him, then after a glance at the faint glow in the depressions between the hills, hurried to its earth. As soon as it had disappeared the hare sought a couch in the heather, and sat with his face to the far-off Carns, whose crests were soon bright in the rays of the rising sun. “In that golden land,” he thought, “I shall surely find her. To-night I will go there.”