Hares

Hares are part of the memoir’s lived rural landscape: quarry pursued with dogs, occasional food, and a source of genuine pleasure for the narrator when one is brought home. Their appearances are concrete and seasonal, linking hunting to the condition of the ground and to the close, practical relations between people and animals.

Winter Hunting

One hard winter, the narrator went hunting on Sundays with the Keegans, taking Toby, a black whippet. Toby was not much good at running down hares or rabbits; the Keegans considered him useful instead for turning them back toward the path of their larger fawn. When they caught two or more hares, they gave one to the narrator, who was as delighted to carry it home as his father was to bring back sacks of oatmeal from the mill. The comparison sets the boy’s excitement within the household’s material routines without reducing the hare to food alone: the gift itself mattered to him.

The season first favoured the hunt, but the frozen ground eventually made it impossible. The nails of both the greyhound and the whippet became torn and bleeding, and the hunters had to stop. The change in the ground therefore altered the animals’ bodies and ended the pursuit; winter is not merely scenery behind the hunting episode but a physical condition that governs what the dogs and people can do.

Dogs, Quarry, and Rural Use

The memoir distinguishes the dogs’ roles. Toby helped turn quarry toward the larger dog, while the Keegans’ fawn was the more effective runner. In the same hunting context, rabbits were caught with a ferret and sold to the Delahoydes. The contrast gives the account a matter-of-fact record of different methods and uses: hares were pursued over the open ground, while rabbits were driven from their burrows into nets.

Hare also belongs to the household’s limited range of meat. The family rarely ate meat beyond its annual pig and an occasional chicken, hare, or rabbit. This places the animal within the practical economy of rural life, although the winter episode foregrounds the narrator’s delight in receiving and carrying home a catch rather than describing its preparation or consumption.

Nellie and the Later Hunts

At another point, the narrator kept Nellie, a fawn greyhound, for Tom Gleeson, an agricultural instructor who lived in the tower of the Bawn. On Sundays he went with Gleeson to hunt hares across the open fields of the Plains. When Gleeson became seriously ill, he entrusted Nellie to the narrator to feed and mind until he recovered. The narrator and the dog grew attached: each evening she met him at the bridge on his way home from school.

The account of Nellie continues beyond the hare hunts. The children secretly fed her the cows’ heads that their father had bought cheaply, and she ate the brains, eyes, and black lips, burying the larger bones. The episode makes the dog a particular presence in the household, connected both to the Sunday pursuit of hares and to a quiet act of concealment around food. Hares themselves remain quarry rather than individualized animals, but their recurring place in the narrative is shaped by these specific bonds between hunters and dogs.

Narrative Significance

The hare episodes are brief, but they record a world in which hunting depends on weather, ground, and animal capacity. A catch becomes a boy’s treasured homecoming; frozen earth turns an ideal hunting season into a risk for the dogs; and, later, Sunday hunts accompany the narrator’s growing attachment to Nellie. Alongside the mention of hare as occasional meat, these scenes present the animal within both subsistence and companionship, without making either function the whole of its significance.