Hare

Hare is a large animal whom Makar catches in a trap and confines in a cage. Hare’s brief escape does not end in freedom: after reaching the meadow, Hare turns back and re-enters the hutch. In The narrator’s recollection, this reversal makes Hare more than an example of escape thwarted by an enclosure. The cage has become internal, binding the mind and heart and weakening the body even when its door is open.

Capture and Confinement

Hare is described as fine and large, with an apparent drive toward powerful leaps, playful tumbling, and swift escape. In the cage, that energy becomes visible as rage: Hare stamps and beats against the walls. After several days of restlessness, Makar, furious with Hare, throws a heavy tarpaulin over the cage. Hare struggles beneath it but eventually gives up. In time Hare becomes tame and eats from The narrator’s hand. The sequence marks a stark change in outward behavior, from forceful resistance to apparent accommodation, though the later escape complicates any suggestion that this change is simple contentment.

The Open Door and the Return

One day Makar gets drunk and leaves the cage door open. Hare jumps out and heads toward the meadow. The narrator expects a great leap into the tall grass and permanent disappearance, but Hare instead sits with ears pricked. The recollection grants Hare a world of perception beyond the human observer: distant field and woodland sounds, and smells and fragrances that Hare alone can hear or appreciate. For a moment, freedom belongs to Hare as an immediate experience, not merely as an idea supplied by The narrator.

Then Hare changes. The alert ears flop; Hare sags and seems to grow smaller. Hare jumps once, whiskers raised, but does not flee. The narrator whistles in an effort to prompt recognition of freedom. Hare turns and moves slowly toward the hutch, stopping to stand and look back before passing Rabbits who watch and jumping inside. The narrator closes the door, although Hare’s return has made the lock unnecessary. The contrast is not between an open cage and a closed one, but between physical release and an inward condition that prevents Hare from using it.

The Hare as a Figure of Inward Captivity

The narrator recalls Hare while confronting a different kind of freedom: whether to leave with the parents who have found him. He has imagined that a boy his age should be free to choose whom to follow, yet feels an inner force preventing him from running away. The remembered Hare gives that conflict a concrete shape. Like Hare, The narrator faces an open possibility of departure and feels pulled back by an attachment that cannot be explained as a simple external restraint. The comparison does not make the two situations identical; it gives the narrator a way to register how freedom may feel uncertain rather than liberating.

The closing image of Hare carrying the cage in the brain and heart, with muscles paralyzed, turns the animal’s return into the recollection’s central consequence. Freedom had distinguished Hare from the other resigned, drowsy Rabbits, but it fades like fragrance from crushed, dried clover. Hare’s story therefore holds two facts in tension: the open door makes escape possible, while the habits formed under confinement remain powerful enough to draw Hare back. Its force for The narrator lies in that unresolved tension between the desire to be free and the bonds that persist within.