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Varying Hare — Part 4
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From that time until the fall of 1894 I was unable to learn of the existence of any of these animals for miles around, though it seems that on the slope of a certain low pine-covered hill only three or four miles distant a colony have dwelt uninterruptedly from all accounts since the time of the red men. In the fall of 1894 a gunner told me that only a day before he had been shooting grouse along the edge of a swamp hardly a mile away, and in pushing into a thick clump of hemlocks to secure a wounded bird had started a white rabbit which he succeeded in shooting. In the course of the next few weeks I heard of several that were killed in those woods and there were doubtless many others which I failed to hear of, but all my tramps in that direction for the purpose of finding them proved unsuccessful--at least until the snow came.
Late in the winter I took a snow-shoe tramp in that direction, the first time I had been there since the first snow-fall of the season, and within two miles found the unmistakable track of a white rabbit; there was no mistaking the broad oval foot-prints, even if the distance between them had not served to distinguish them from those of the gray rabbit which crossed their line of march at frequent intervals.
The track, which apparently had been made several days, led me from the swamp into the low rolling birch land, and now other and fresher ones of the same kind joined it until a well-beaten path running east and west was formed and this presently joined another at right angles. The latter proved to be the main highway with several branch roads similar to the first.
But I was unable to catch sight of any of the members of the community which, judging from the tracks, must have numbered several dozen at least, and as the snow was again falling rapidly and obliterating the maze of tracks I was endeavouring to unravel, I was obliged to give it up for the time being.
Several times in the course of the next month I visited those woods, sometimes finding the tracks I was in search of and sometimes not, for the colony was apparently an unsettled and roving one and I seldom found it established twice in the same place, though at times it must have stopped for several days or even weeks before starting off in search of new feeding grounds and seldom moving any great distance each time. I failed as at first, however, to see the hares themselves, though a dog would undoubtedly have driven them into sight for me had I chosen to take one along.
In March, with a companion, I was skirting the western border of the swamp and while still half a mile or more to the south of where I had seen any of their tracks, a white rabbit started out of the bushes only a few yards away and after creeping rather slowly along under cover of the ground laurel for a little distance, broke all at once into a series of tremendous bounds that soon carried it out of sight among the trees.
The snow was frozen hard, with patches of bare ground on the southern slope, so that tracking was out of the question. We tramped about there for some time and saw white rabbits running before us in four or five different instances, and though we may have seen the same rabbit twice, there were certainly more than one, and I believe three or four that we saw.
At last on the very edge of the swamp, where the dry and frozen swamp-gaass and bushes stood in clumps between the ice-bound alders and maples, a big white fellow sprang out of the thick tussock and in attemping to dash away over the ice got fairly caught between the close-growing stems of a bunch of red willows and was easily secured.
It proved to be a large male whose smooth white fur showed but little sign of the spring shedding, only a spot here and there that hardly showed at all when the animal was in motion.
A few days later there was no sign of them to be found at that place or in the woods near by, and I am convinced that purely by chance we had intercepted the little band in its march southward and that those killed in this and the neighbouring towns that season where none had been seen for years, were wanderers from somewhere farther north, impelled southward by the same unreasoning impulse that is said once in every seven or eight years to drive the lemmings southward from the Arctic Ocean, and which, to a lesser degree appears to affect most of the smaller fur-clad animals of the North.