At this point I thought that I had heard enough, and slipped away when their backs were turned.  For, friend Mahatma, I had just seen a fox shot, and now I knew what shooting meant.

*****

About a week later I knew better still.  It came about thus.  By that time the turnips I have mentioned, those that grew in the big field, had swelled into fine, large bulbs with leafy tops.  We used to eat them at nights, and in the daytime to lie up among them in our snug forms.  You know, Mahatma, don’t you, that a form is a little hollow which a hare makes in the ground just to fit itself?  No hare likes to sleep in another hare’s form.  Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I answered, “I understand.  It would be like a man wearing another man’s boots.”

“I don’t know anything about boots Mahatma, except that they are hard things with iron on them which kick one out of one’s form if one sits too close.  Once that happened to me.  Well, my form was under a particularly fine turnip that had some dead leaves beneath the green ones.  I chose it because, like the brown earth, they just matched the colour of my back.  I was sleeping there quite soundly when my sister came and woke me.

“There are men in the field,” she said, her eyes nearly starting out of her head with fear, for she was always very timid.

“I’m off.”

“Are you?” I answered.  “Well, I think I shall stop here where I shan’t be noticed.  If we begin jumping over those turnips they will see us.”

“We might run down the rows, keeping our ears close to our backs,” she remarked.

“No,” I said, “there are too many bare patches.”

At this moment a gun went ‘bang’ some way off; and my sister, like a wise hare, scuttled away at full speed for the wood.  But I only made myself smaller than usual and lay watching and listening.

There was a good deal to see and hear; for instance, a covey of partridges, troublesome birds that come scratching and fidgeting about when one wants to sleep, were running to and fro in a great state of concern.

“They are after us,” said the old cock.

“I remember the same thing last year.  Come on, do.”

“How can I with all these young ones to look after?” answered the hen.  “Why, if once they are scattered I shall never find them again.”

“Just as you like, you know best,” said the cock.  “Goodbye,” and away he flew, while his wife and the rest ran to a little distance, scattered and squatted.

Presently, looking back over my shoulders without turning my head, as a hare can, I saw a line of men walking towards me.  There was the Red-faced Man whom Giles called Grampus behind his back and Squire to his face.  There was Giles himself, with his hurt hand tied up, holding a kind of stick with a slit in it from which hung a lot of dead partridges whose necks were in the slit.  One of them was not dead or had come to life again, for it flapped in the stick trying to fly away.  He held these in the hand that was tied up, and in the other, oh, horror! was a dead hare bleeding from its nose.  It looked uncommonly like my mother, but whether it were or no I couldn’t be quite sure.  At least from that day neither my sister nor I ever saw her again.  I suppose you haven’t met her coming up this big white Road, have you, Mahatma?