The Mystery of the White Hare

The following is an excerpt from The Leaping Hare by George Ewart Evans and David Thomson.


When he lived in Nairn as a boy, Norman Halkett used to borrow his uncle's field glasses and bicycle out to the moors, usually alone, but sometimes with a friend, and lie down to watch birds and animals. He remembers two with the greatest pleasure: the capercailye, a bird now rare which haunted the woods about Cawdor, and the white hare on the moors above. The capercailye is something like a grouse, but almost as large as a turkey and the sudden flapping of its wings when it took flight among the tress as he crouched watching in the shadows where all had been silent was to him like the Angel of Death.

The mystery of the white hare sometimes frightened him too. He says that when it was sitting or lying down it looked as if it had been frozen to death or stuffed in a hunched up position like a cat that is feeling the cold. Its staring eyes were like glass eyes. Then watching through the field glasses he would ask his friend to clap hands or bang two stones together. The hare would crouch even lower in its form. They would approach it cautiously. It would watch them stilly until they were very near. The friend would run on towards it, and he would see through his field glasses how it leapt from the form with a twist of its hindquarters and land about ten feet away in order to leave no scent from its paws. Then it would bound in an easy regular gait, a series of smooth unhurried jumps that reminded him of a horse gently cantering, to the summit of the nearest ridge usually less than a hundred yards away. It would sit up there with its ears erect and look back to survey the danger. Sometimes when it ran on more level ground it would seem like a puff of smoke rising and falling, blown by the wind. It would often vanish suddenly near a rock or a high clump of heather.

When he tried to imagine the Holy Ghost he thought of the white hare. The mysterious sin against the Holy Ghost was to kill a white hare.

– George Ewart Evans & David Thomson
The Leaping Hare
pp. 36-37

See also the previous posts:
• The White Hare
• The Ghostly Mountain Hare
• Inspiring and Intriguing
• White Hare Over Water
• Mountain and Moorland
• Winter Hare
• Tragedy and Retribution

Image 1: Amanda Clark.
Image 2: Catherine Hyde.