rds the wood through the
soft, yielding snow that rendered her journey difficult and tiresome,
she unexpectedly discovered, near the hedge beyond the furrows, a tasty
leaf or two of the rest-harrow, together with a few yellow sprouts of
young grass where a stone had been kicked aside by a passing
sheep--these were the tit-bits of her provender.

In the early morning, the hare, too cautious to re-enter the "form,"
which, now that its surroundings were torn asunder, had become a
conspicuous rent in the white mantle of the old quarry, crept over the
hedge into the woods, and, moving leisurely beneath the snow-laden
undergrowth, where her deep footprints could not easily be tracked,
selected a suitable spot for a new "form" in the friendly shelter of a
fallen pine.

But even in this woodland sanctuary she encountered an enemy. A cat from
the farm on the hill, having acquired poaching habits, had strayed, and
taken up her abode among the boulders at the foot of a wooded precipice
adjoining the lower pastures of the estate. In a gallery between these
boulders, she had made her nest of withered grass and oak-leaves, where,
at the time of which I write, she was occupied with a family of kittens.
The wants of the kittens taxed the mother's utmost powers; she prowled
far and wide in search of food, and was as much a creature of the night
as were the fox and the polecat that also lived among the rocks.

There is no greater enemy of game than the renegade cat. She is far more
destructive than a fox. Many animals that can evade Reynard are helpless
in the grip of a foe armed so completely as to seem all fangs and
talons. The special method of slaughter adopted by the cat towards a
victim of her own size is cruel and repulsive in the extreme. Grasping
it with her fore-claws and holding it with her teeth, she lies on her
back and uses her hind-claws with such effect that often her prey is
lacerated to death.

Roaming at night in the shadow, the cat came unexpectedly on the scent
of the hare and traced it to the "form," but the desired victim was not
at home. The cat returned to the spot before dawn, and lurked in hiding
beneath the hawthorns. The hare, however, was not to be easily trapped.
Coming into the wood against the wind, she fortunately detected the
enemy's presence quite as readily as the cat had discovered her "form"
amid the grass-bents. With ears set close, and limbs and tail twitching
with excitement, the cat crouched