The Hare and the Great Flood

Write George Ewart Evans and David Thomson in The Leaping Hare:

The original creation [of the world] is repeated every morning and every spring but there is always the fear that the little death of sleep and the longer one of winter will last forever. What could look more barren than a dried-up seed in winter, its husk as hard as the frozen earth? This fear is expressed in the story of the Flood. The conception of flood as the end of life on Earth is universal. Stories almost identical with the Old Testament one occur all over the world. But as those who know them are alive to tell the tale, and have animals and plants about them, it is clear that the seeds of life were saved. The Flood is the story of death and resurrection, winter and spring, the darkness of the soul and its creative light. The survivors mark time, so to speak, in some kind of boat, a coconut shell or an eggshell.

Noah's Ark is symbolic of the egg or the husk of a seed, and there are stories of how it sprang a leak and the last hope of new life on Earth seemed about to be lost. It is usually a hare, hedgehog or snake that saves the day:

"All through the days of the Flood, the Devil tried to sink the Ark by making holes in it. Noah put a plug every time. But at last he had no plugs left. He cut off the hare's tail and stopped the last hole with that. When the Devil saw this he fled. But since then hares have no tails. [sic]"* In another version Noah cuts off the foot of the female hare for a plug. She dies, and that would have been the end of hares. But when the animals leave the Ark God allows the male hare to give birth to one child, a female. And so the race goes on. This female can be recognized by the white star on its head. **

When the flood begins to subside, a bird is released to discover land, but in an American Indian legend a hare is sent out. In that story the survivors do not have to use a boat. They took refuge on top of a mountain from which presumably they could see the extent of the waters. They brought a hare with them and knew that the flood had subsided when one day, after its release, it did not return.

* Oskar Dähnhardt, Natursagen, Leipzig and Berlin, 1907-12, Vol. I, p. 277.
** Ibid., p. 278