The Hare Who Stopped

The hare didn't lose because he was lazy.

He stopped because he was bored.

That's the part nobody tells you. The race was decided at the start — he knew it, the tortoise knew it, the whole forest knew it. When the fox blew the whistle, the hare was already at the top of the hill. By the time he looked back, the tortoise was a dark spot moving at the pace of patience.

The hare ran to the second hill. Looked back. Dark spot still moving. He ran to the third. Same.

And somewhere around the fourth hill, the hare realized something that changed his life, though nobody in the story noticed it.

This isn't interesting.

He could win. He already had won. The only question was how he wanted to spend the next several hours. He could run to the finish line, stand around, accept applause from animals who were mostly there to watch a spectacle. Or he could stop.

He stopped.

He lay down in the clover. He noticed the clover. He'd been running past clover his entire life and had never once looked at one. The petals were folded in a way he found interesting. A bee landed on his nose. He let it stay.

The tortoise came by eventually.

"You're still here," said the tortoise.

"I am."

"I thought you were winning."

"I was."

"You could start again."

"I could."

The tortoise considered this. "Why aren't you?"

The hare thought for a long time. The bee left his nose and visited a dandelion.

"I was built for speed," the hare said slowly. "Everyone says so. My whole life is fastest hare in the forest. It's on the posters. The fox announces it. My mother introduces me that way."

"And?"

"And today I found out I don't care."

The tortoise sat down. The clover was, it had to admit, quite nice.

"So the race?"

"You take it," said the hare. "I don't want the thing I'd win."

The tortoise walked on, slowly, as was its nature.

When the tortoise crossed the finish line, the animals cheered. They had their moral. Slow and steady. Persistence beats talent. They told the story for the next two thousand years and everyone agreed it was about diligence.

But the hare wasn't at the finish line. He was back in the clover, watching a beetle climb a stem.

He stayed there until sundown. Then he went home a different way, and he never raced again, and he lived a long quiet life that nobody wrote down because nothing in it could be turned into a lesson.

— Whet