and hustled my mother and us little
ones out of the wheat-field into the big wood by which it is bordered.
As we left the field I saw two tall creatures that afterwards I came to
know were men. They were placing wire-netting round the field--you see I
understand now what all these things were, although of course I did not
at the time. The two ends of the wire netting had nearly come together.
There was only a little gap left through which we could run. Another
young hare, or it may have been a rabbit, had got entangled in it, and
one of the men was beating it to death with a stick. I remember that the
sound of its screams made me feel cold down the back, for I had never
heard anything like that before, and this was the first that I had seen
of pain and death.

The other man saw us slipping through and ran at us with his stick. My
mother went first and escaped him. Then came my sister, then I, then my
brother. My father was last of all. The man hit with his stick and it
came down thud along side of me, just touching my fur. He hit again and
broke the foreleg of my brother. Still we all managed to get through
into the wood, except my father who was behind.

"There's the old buck!" cried one of the men (I understand what he
said now, though at the time it meant nothing to me). "Knock him on the
head!"

So leaving us alone they ran at him. But my father was much too quick
for them. He rushed back into the corn and afterwards joined us in the
wood, for he had seen wire before and knew how to escape it. Still he
was terribly frightened and made us keep in the wood till the following
evening, not even allowing my mother to go to her form in the rough
pasture on its other side and lie up there.

Also we were in trouble because my brother's forepaw was broken. It gave
him a great deal of pain, so that he could not rest or sleep. After a
while, however, it mended up in a fashion, but he was never able to run
as fast as we could, nor did he grow so big. In the end the mother fox
killed him, as I shall tell.

My mother asked my father what the men with the sticks were doing--for,
you know, many animals can talk to each other in their own way, even if
they are of different kinds. He told her that they were protecting the
wheat to prevent us from eating it, to which she answered angrily that
hares must live somehow, especially when they had young ones to nurse.
My father replied that men did not seem to think so, and perhaps the