Apollodorus's Bibliotheca sets out the third labor as a deliberately different kind of challenge from the ones surrounding it. Where the first two labors, the Nemean Lion and the Lernaean Hydra, were tests of raw strength against monstrous, straightforwardly hostile opponents, the Ceryneian Hind presented Heracles with a creature he was expressly forbidden to harm: a hind sacred to Artemis, gold-antlered, bronze-hooved, and so fast that no hunter had ever run it down. Eurystheus's order was to bring the hind back alive, a condition that turned the labor into a test of patience, endurance and restraint rather than of force, since killing so swift a beast would have been, in several tellings, considerably easier than capturing it unharmed, and would in any case have risked Artemis's direct anger at Heracles for the act.
Accounts diverge on the chase's length and its ending. One tradition holds that Heracles pursued the hind for a full year across a wide stretch of Greek territory, wearing it down gradually through sheer persistence rather than superior speed, until exhaustion finally let him take it. Another has him catching it more quickly at a river crossing, wounding it just enough with a well-placed arrow, pinning its forelegs together without drawing serious blood, to slow it to a pace he could close. Both versions agree on the outcome that mattered for the labor's completion: the hind was taken alive, presented to Eurystheus, and, in the fuller accounts, released again afterward unharmed, restoring it to Artemis's domain rather than keeping or destroying it.