The welcome after-summer lasted a full fortnight, and was abruptly terminated by sea-fogs, that came rolling in from the Atlantic and enveloped the land as with a dense pall. Much as the hare had disliked the gossamer webs he disliked the fog still more, not only because it shut out the view and the light of the sun and the moon, but—what was much more serious—because it afforded cover to the foxes, who moved about as fearlessly by day as by night.
These prowlers became a positive trouble; scarcely a day passed but at least one went by; amongst them a big grey fox, whom he had never seen before, but of whom he was to see more than he liked in the terrible winter that followed. Yet close as these marauders approached the seats, they never discovered the hare.
In fact, the time of chief danger was the night. He was abroad then, but it was impossible to see more than a few yards ahead, so that once he almost ran into the farm cat in the mushroom field; two nights later he brushed close past a badger that was stretching itself against the upright of a cromlech. However, no harm ensued; for the hare leapt aside and was lost to sight in the fog as effectually as if he had been covered with a mass of cotton wool.
He got glimpses of other animals in his wanderings, though so vaguely that he failed to identify them. Moreover in the strange conditions the hare himself sometimes proved a terror to creatures he stumbled on, causing a hedgehog to curl up in affright on the Five Acres, and scaring a heron out of its senses on the moor beyond. The fog was as impervious to scent as to sight, and he was on his victims before they heard him, for the fog deadened all sound, of footfall, of bird cry, even of the great foghorn on the Longships, which sounded like a penny trumpet.
But of all the ills attendant on those ceaseless mists, the one which caused the hare most discomfort was the moisture that collected on the herbage and dripped on his back as he sat in the form. Two days he endured the misery; then he left the comfortable seat for the shelter of the fallen masonry of the chantry, and sat cheek by jowl with an enormous toad who resented his company till he got to understand and like him.