A wide highway was laid through a large forest in the area where the narrator lives. The clearing made for the highway looked like a corridor: “two green walls of the forest, and the sky at the end”. When this felling was done, the big trees were taken away, leaving only small brushwood - a rookery - gathered in huge piles.

In the autumn, all the hares disappeared from the forest. The hunters believed that this was due to the construction of the highway: they cut down the forest and scared all the rabbits. But when the first snow fell, the tracker Rodionych found out from the tracks that the hares were hiding in heaps of a rookery.

Unlike other hunters, Rodionitch called the hare not a “slash”, but a “blue bast shoe”.

The hare is no more like a devil than a bast, and if they say that blue bast shoes do not exist in the world, then I will say that there are no slanting devils either.

The rumor about where the hares are hiding spread over the whole town. Before the weekend, the storyteller gathered hunters, and at dawn everyone went to the cutting. They decided not to take the dogs - the master Rodionych even without the hounds “could catch a hare for a hunter”.

One of the hare tracks immediately led the hunters to a huge house-like heap of a rookery. Having prepared the guns, the hunters surrounded the heap, and Rodionych began to jail under it with a long stick. However, no matter how hard the old ranger tried, the hare didn’t jump out from under the rookery,as if he was not there.

Such embarrassment with Rodionych never happened. The hunters began to scurry around the heap, but could not "unravel the trick of the clever hare." Here, "Rodionych suddenly shone", sat on a stump at a distance from the hunters, called the narrator and pointed to the very top of the snow-covered heap of a rookery.

There the hare also hid - merged with white snow, only black eyes and dark tips of ears were visible.

As soon as I raise my gun, the life of a smart hare would end in an instant. But I felt sorry: how many of them, stupid, lie under heaps! ...

Rodionitch understood the storyteller without words. When the hunters crowded on the other side of the heap, the ranger threw a lump of snow into the hare. The hare jumped up and fell on the hunters, as if from heaven.

The shooting began, but no one hit the hare. Alive, he darted into the bushes. The hunters fired into the bushes. “Killed!” Cried one ... and made a mistake. A blue bast flashed in distant bushes and waved its tail only to the hunters.