The Wansdyke & District Forums

The hare comes up so often in our folklore that I wanted to gather what people know. The old belief, all over these islands, is that a witch could take the shape of a hare, and that the way you knew was if you shot or coursed a hare and later found a woman of the village nursing a wound in the same place. There are dozens of these stories, always the same shape: the hunted hare escapes into a cottage, and inside is only an old woman, out of breath. The hare was the witch's travelling-shape, the part of her that went out across the fields at night while her body lay at home. I do not think it is only superstition. I think it is how country people talked about something they could see and could not name: that some people are not entirely where their body is.

my old uncle wouldnt shoot a hare, not for anything, and hed never say why, just shook his head. plenty of hares on our ground and he left them be. i always thought he was just soft about it, but maybe he had a reason he wasnt telling. theres a March when they go mad in the field, boxing and standing up at each other, and ill admit it doesnt look like ordinary animals. doesnt make em witches though.

Your uncle was keeping an old courtesy, Bill, and he was wise not to explain it; the not-explaining is part of the keeping. The mad March hares are the does fending off the bucks, science will tell you, and science is right, and it is also not the whole of it. A thing can be a doe fending off a buck and a creature that does not behave as it ought, both at once. The folklore is not wrong about the strangeness; it is only putting a face to it. The country eye sees a hare behaving as no hare should, and reaches for the only word it has.

Just so, Annie. And I would add only this: the hare-witch is always crossing, isnt she. Out of the body and into the field, out of the woman and into the animal, between the hearth and the dark. The hare is the creature of the boundary, the one that slips across. That is why she is the witch's shape and not the cow or the sheep. Some creatures belong to the edges of things, and so do some people.