Two men sat one afternoon beside a spinney of beeches near the top of a wild bare down. Old shepherd Mordecai was admonishing a younger countryman, Eustace Cocking, now out of work, who held beside him in leash a brindled whippet dog, sharp featured and lean, its neck clipped in a broad leather collar. The day was radiant, the very air had bloom; bright day is never so bright as upon these lonely downs, and the grim face of storm never so tragic elsewhere. From the beeches other downs ranged in every direction, nothing but downs in beautiful abandoned masses. In a valley below the men a thousand sheep were grazing; they looked no more than a handful of white beach randomly scattered.

“The thing’s forbidden, Eustace; it always has and always will be, I say, and thereby ’tis wrong.”

“Well, if ever I doos anything wrong I allus feel glad of it next morning.”

“’Tis against law, Eustace, and to be against law is the downfall of mankind. What I mean to say—I’m a national man.”

“The law! Foo! That’s made by them as don’t care for my needs, and don’t understand my rights. Is it fair to let them control your mind as haven’t got a grip of their own? I worked for yon farmer a matter of fourteen years, hard, I tell you, I let my back sweat....”

The dog at his side was restless; he cuffed it impatiently: “and twice a week my wife she had to go to farmhouse; twice a week; doing up their washing and their muck—‘Lie down!’” he interjected sternly to the querulous dog—“two days in every seven. Then the missus says to my wife, ‘I shall want you to come four days a week in future, Mrs. Cocking; the house is too much of a burden for me.’ My wife says: ‘I can’t come no oftener, ma’am; I’d not have time to look after my own place, my husband, and the six children, ma’am.’ Then missus flew into a passion. ‘Oh, so you won’t come, eh!’

“‘I’d come if I could, ma’am,’ my wife says, ‘and gladly, but it ain’t possible, you see.’

“‘Oh, very well!’ says the missus. And that was the end of that, but come Saturday, when the boss pays me: ‘Cocking,’ he says, ‘I shan’t want you no more arter next week.’ No explanation, mind you, and I never asked for none. I know’d what ’twas for, but I don’t give a dam. What meanness, Mordecai! Of course I don’t give a dam whether I goes or whether I stops; you know my meaning—I’d much rather stop; my home’s where I be known; but I don’t give a dam. ’Tain’t the job I minds so much as to let him have that power to spite me so at a moment after fourteen years because of his wife’s temper. ’Tis not decent. ’Tis under-grading a man.’”

There was no comment from the shepherd. Eustace continued: “If that’s your law, Mordecai, I don’t want it. I ignores it.”

“And that you can’t do,” retorted the old man. “God A’mighty can look after the law.”

“If He be willing to take the disgrace of it, Mordecai Stavely, let Him.”

The men were silent for a long time, until the younger cheerfully asked: “How be poor old Harry Mixen?”

“Just alive.”

Eustace leaned back, munching a strig of grass reflectively and looking at the sky: “Don’t seem no sign of rain, however?”

“No.”

The old man who said “No” hung his melancholy head, and pondered; he surveyed his boots, which were of harsh hard leather with deep soles. He then said: “We ought to thank God we had such mild weather at the back end of the year. If you remember, it came a beautiful autumn and a softish winter. Things are growing now; I’ve seen oats as high as my knee; the clover’s lodged in places. It will be all good if we escape the east winds—hot days and frosty nights.”

The downs, huge and bare, stretched in every direction, green and grey, gentle and steep, their vast confusion enlightened by a small hanger of beech or pine, a pond, or more often a derelict barn; for among the downs there are barns and garners ever empty, gone into disuse and abandoned. They are built of flint and red brick, with a roof of tiles. The rafters often bear an eighteenth-century date. Elsewhere in this emptiness even a bush will have a name, and an old stone becomes a track mark. Upon the soft tufts and among the triumphant furze live a few despised birds, chats and finches and that blithe screamer the lark, but above all, like veins upon the down’s broad breast, you may perceive the run-way of the hare.

“Why can’t a man live like a hare?” broke out the younger man. “I’d not mind being shot at a time and again. It lives a free life, anyway, not like a working man with a devil on two legs always cracking him on.”

“Because,” said Mordecai, “a hare is a vegetarian creature, what’s called a rubinant, chewing the cud and dividing not the hoof. And,” he added significantly, “there be dogs.”

“It takes a mazin’ good dog to catch ever a hare on its own ground. Most hares could chase any dog ever born, believe you me, if they liked to try at that.”

“There be traps and wires!”

“Well, we’ve no call to rejoice, with the traps set for a man, and the wires a choking him.”

At that moment two mating hares were roaming together on the upland just below the men. The doe, a small fawn creature, crouched coyly before the other, a large nut-brown hare with dark ears. Soon she darted away, sweeping before him in a great circle, or twisting and turning as easily as a snake. She seemed to fly the faster, but when his muscular pride was aroused he swooped up to her shoulder, and, as if in loving derision, leaped over her from side to side as she ran. She stopped as sharply as a shot upon its target and faced him, quizzing him gently with her nose. As they sat thus the dark-eared one perceived not far off a squatting figure; it was another hare, a tawny buck, eyeing their dalliance. The doe commenced to munch the herbage; the nut-brown one hobbled off to confront this wretched, rash, intruding fool. When they met both rose upon their haunches, clawing and scraping and patting at each other with as little vigour as mild children put into their quarrels—a rigmarole of slapping hands. But, notwithstanding the delicacy of the treatment, the interloper, a meek enough fellow, succumbed, and the conqueror loped back to his nibbling mistress.

Yet, whenever they rested from their wooing flights, the tawny interloper was still to be seen near by. Hapless mourning seemed to involve his hunched figure; he had the aspect of a deferential, grovelling man; but the lover saw only his provocative, envious eye—he swept down upon him. Standing up again, he slammed and basted him with puny velvet blows until he had salved his indignation, satisfied his connubial pride, or perhaps merely some strange fading instinct—for it seemed but a mock combat, a ritual to which they conformed.

Away the happy hare would prance to his mate, but as often as he came round near that shameless spy he would pounce upon him and beat him to the full, like a Turk or like a Russian. But though he could beat him and disgrace him, he could neither daunt nor injure him. The vanquished miscreant would remain watching their wooing with the eye of envy—or perhaps of scorn—and hoping for a miracle to happen.

And a miracle did happen. Cocking, unseen, near the beeches released his dog. The doe shot away over the curve of the hill and was gone. She did not merely gallop, she seemed to pass into ideal flight, the shadow of wind itself. Her fawn body, with half-cocked ears and unperceivable convulsion of the leaping haunches, soared across the land with the steady swiftness of a gull. The interloping hare, in a blast of speed, followed hard upon her traces. But Cocking’s hound had found at last the hare of its dreams, a nut-brown, dark-eared, devil-guided, eluding creature, that fled over the turf of the hill as lightly as a cloud. The long leaping dog swept in its track with a stare of passion, following in great curves the flying thing that grew into one great throb of fear all in the grand sunlight on the grand bit of a hill. The lark stayed its little flood of joy and screamed with notes of pity at the protracted flight; and bloodless indeed were they who could view it unmoved, nor feel how sweet a thing is death if you be hound, how fell a thing it is if you be hare. Too long, O delaying death, for this little heart of wax; and too long, O delaying victory, for that pursuer with the mouth of flame. Suddenly the hound faltered, staggered a pace or two, then sunk to the grass, its lips dribbling blood. When Cocking reached him the dog was dead. He picked the body up.

“It’s against me, like everything else,” he muttered.

But a voice was calling “Oi! Oi!” He turned to confront a figure rapidly and menacingly approaching.

“I shall want you, Eustace Cocking,” cried the gamekeeper, “to come and give an account o’ yourself.”