The Ghostly Mountain Hare

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

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The mountain hare is not very much bigger than a large rabbit. . . . Its summer coat is an excellent camouflage especially in flowering heather or the mosses and course grasses of the moors. On bare stony ground and against the blue shadows of lichened rocks on a sunny day it is perfect. In summer too there are many places where hares can hide in long old heather or grass. But the winter coat is a terrible danger to the hare unless there is snow.

. . . When he lived in Nairn [in the Grampian Mountains of Scotland] 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.

. . . The mystery of the white hare sometimes frightened him. 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 field glasses he would ask his friend to clap hands or bang two stones together. The hare would crouch even further 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 high clump pf heather. When [Halkett] tried to imagine the Holy Ghost he thought of the white hare. The mysterious sin against the Holy Spirit was to kill a white hare.

– Excerpted from The Leaping Hare by George Ewart and David Thomson (Faber and Faber, 1972), pp. 36-37.