The docs for WWW::Mechanize state that the find_link() method

returns a reference to a two element array which has the link URL and link text, respectively. If it fails to find a link it returns undef.

The returned value should be an array ref if it succeeded (not a hash as stated in your post). If you really are getting a hash ref, please post some code with example input and output so we can replicate it.

You can do something like this:

my $result = $a->find_link( text => "download" );

if( defined $result )
{
    my ( $url, $linktext ) = @{ $result };
    # use $linktext here
}
[download]

HTH

Update: This is true for WWW::Mechanize 0.48, the latest version that I found using PPM. The most recent version on CPAN (1.16) uses WWW::Mechanize::Link objects, as Your Mother indicated below.