Hares

Hares are among the novel’s clearest signs of the reach and cost of Dingo’s predatory life. They appear as animals pursued in the countryside, as quarry whose numbers have fallen, and as subjects turned into saleable images. Across these appearances, the hare connects animal skill and habitat to human observation and commerce, without becoming merely a backdrop to either.

Quarry and dwindling numbers

At Ponteilles, a local account places Hares among the animals Dingo can catch at speed. The speaker describes the chase as swift and exhilarating to watch, then adds that there are hardly any Hares left. The remark makes Dingo’s prowess inseparable from its consequence: the animal’s capacity to take quarry is admired even as the scarcity of that quarry is acknowledged. The village’s dwindling supply is not presented as an abstract concern but as part of an everyday report about what Dingo can still catch.

The account also places Hares alongside partridges in a countryside where Dingo’s hunting has become conspicuous. The details distinguish the prey and the methods involved: the report specifically says Dingo runs Hares down. It does not explain the full causes of their scarcity, so the episode does not establish that Dingo alone has depleted them. It does, however, set his individual hunting ability against the broader impression that the animals are becoming harder to find.

Dingo’s knowledge and the signs of a chase

Later, after a three-day absence, Dingo returns and approaches Flamant, who recognizes that he has been hunting. Flamant’s repeated observation that Dingo knows the good places where Hares are found makes the dog’s knowledge of the landscape part of the scene. The animal is not described as waiting for a human to direct him to quarry: he has learned where to look, and his knowledge is legible to someone who hunts too.

A small trace confirms what the conversation suggests. Flamant notices a grayish tuft caught at the corner of Dingo’s jaws, clotted with saliva and blood, and identifies it as Hares’ fur. The identification turns a brief physical detail into evidence of the recent hunt. It also anchors the narration’s account of Dingo’s predation in a particular sign rather than leaving it at the level of reputation or inference.

The narrator frames Flamant and Dingo as kin in the limited sense of a shared hunting instinct. Flamant watches for animals; Dingo forces them to run. Neither is likened to a Sunday sportsman who hunts as a recreational convention: the passage presents both as hunting for themselves, when they choose. Hares are the specific quarry behind this comparison, making their pursuit the point at which human and animal skill seem to converge without becoming identical.

From living quarry to painted subject

Hares also enter a very different economy through an acquaintance’s paintings. The painter says that his still lifes of Hares, shown hanging by a hind leg against a background of terrycloth, sell as soon as they are finished. He claims he can produce ten a day and sell each for two louis. In this account the living animal, pursued in the countryside, becomes a repeated commercial image. The detail of the number and price gives the paintings a practical value within the speaker’s boast about artistic success.

The paintings do not erase the chase from the novel’s account of Hares. Their posed presentation depends on the recognizable form of quarry, while Dingo’s pursuit is described through speed, local knowledge, and traces left on his muzzle. The contrast is not developed into an explicit judgment on the painter; instead, the two appearances place distinct human relations to Hares beside Dingo’s predatory relation to them. One turns them into pictures that can be sold, while the other encounters them as animals to be caught.

Habitat, freedom, and hunting

The later forest episodes broaden the setting in which Dingo’s hunting takes place. After becoming subdued in Paris, Dingo is taken to a rustic house near Veneux-Nadon, with a garden opening directly onto the Forêt de Fontainebleau. The narrator says that Dingo soon lives almost entirely in the forest and is seen far from the house, moving rapidly with his nose close to the ground. The setting helps explain why the novel associates him with finding animals and pursuing them, though it does not state that every reported hunt occurs in a particular part of the forest.

A separate scene of a deer hunt supplies a contrast in how wild animals are encountered. The narrator recalls seeing deer and does grazing undisturbed in the forest the previous evening, then imagines one of those animals fleeing the organized hunt. That episode is about deer rather than Hares, and it does not identify a hare in the hunted group. Its relevance is contextual: it sets the quiet presence of free-ranging animals against a human spectacle of pursuit, while Dingo’s hunting of Hares elsewhere is presented as individual, self-directed predation.

Narrative significance

The novel gives Hares several connected but distinct roles. Their reported scarcity measures the consequences associated with Dingo’s skill without assigning him sole responsibility for the decline. Their known locations reveal a relationship between Dingo and the landscape, while the tuft of fur supplies concrete evidence of a successful chase. Their painted likenesses, meanwhile, show how the same recognizable quarry can be converted into a commodity for human buyers.

Together, these appearances resist reducing Hares to a single symbol. They remain animals whose pursuit matters in its own right, while also making visible the different systems that surround them: hunting, local knowledge, economic value, and the changing conditions of rural and forest life. The novel’s attention moves between a dwindling population, a dog that knows where to find its prey, and images produced for sale; the hare persists across those scenes as both living quarry and human representation.