Arctic hare

The Arctic hare is a recurring presence in the tundra and around Lake Hazen, where its movements bring the surrounding wildlife into focus for Augustine and Iris. First seen bounding across the open ground, it becomes part of the landscape they reach and explore: a neighbor that watches, startles, and moves on according to its own rhythms. Its appearances also mark Augustine’s shift from attending almost exclusively to distant stars toward noticing the living world immediately around him.

Appearance and Observed Behavior

On the eastward journey, Augustine and Iris see an Arctic hare bounding across the tundra on its hind legs, making conspicuously high leaps. When they camp later that day, another hare—or perhaps the same one—is nearby. Iris explains that the height of the leaps helps the animals see farther. Her brief observation gives Augustine a practical glimpse of knowledge she has gathered from repeatedly reading a field guide. He recognizes that she knows about the wolves, musk oxen, and hares of the region, while he has spent years there with little deliberate attention to its wildlife.

The hare’s movement is rendered as a distinctive action rather than a static detail of the setting. Its vigorous bouncing seems to favor height over distance, and Iris’s explanation gives that motion a purpose within the scene: the animal is looking out across its surroundings. The humans can watch it, but the hare’s behavior belongs to its own way of moving through the tundra.

Hares on the Route to Lake Hazen

When Augustine and Iris arrive at the weather station beside Lake Hazen, hares are visible on a small island in the middle of the lake, leaping high and looking back toward the newcomers. Their presence accompanies a landscape in transition. The shores remain snowbound, but rocky ground is beginning to show; the ice creaks, and a gentler breeze replaces the wind that had swept across the tundra. The animals are part of this first view of the camp, where the frozen lake and its inhabitants make the unfamiliar place seem welcoming.

Augustine later sees hares bouncing along the island’s banks as he stands in the still, warming air. He wonders whether they remain there through summer, cross the ice to the mainland before it becomes water, or might even swim. These are his speculations, not answers supplied by the narrative. The uncertainty keeps the animals from becoming fully explained features of the human settlement: Augustine watches them, but does not know their movements beyond what he can observe.

Neighbors in the Changing Season

The hares remain part of the pair’s life at the lake. When Augustine and Iris skate across the ice and try to walk out toward the island, his legs begin to fail and they turn back. The hares watch them go with perked ears and quivering noses. Their attention briefly reverses the usual arrangement of observer and observed: the humans struggle across the ice while the animals remain alert on its edge.

During the weeks that follow, Augustine and Iris return to the island and sneak up on the hares. The animals bound across the ice in a panic, leap onto shore, and disappear into the mountains around the basin. The encounter is playful from the humans’ side, but it also records the hares’ response: they flee the approaching people and leave the immediate scene. Later, as the ice breaks apart and the lake warms, the animals continue to occupy the environment through a season of change that the narrative describes in detail.

Recurrence and Narrative Significance

As summer gives way to the dark of October, the hare remains among the recognizable presences of Augustine’s surroundings. In conversation, he describes Arctic hares scampering over the ice alongside the wolves that still howl in the mountains. The report places them within his everyday account of local weather and wildlife, not in the distant astronomical world that had formerly held most of his attention.

Across these appearances, the Arctic hare helps make Lake Hazen a lived-in habitat rather than an empty backdrop for human survival. It is watched from the tundra, seen on the island, approached on the ice, and heard in Augustine’s later account of the season. The animal’s recurrence also measures a change in his attention: Iris’s knowledge first exposes what he has neglected, while his sustained noticing of the hares belongs to a more immediate engagement with the place he now calls home.