The Machinery of a Hare by Tim Hannigan

Look – hares! Through the blackthorns, behind the bulrushes. A brace of them, moving stiffly along the line of the next hedge, gingery in the forest-green of the ryegrass.

We were on the Esker road, Cara and I, a mile or two outside of Athenry, County Galway, late in a day of flat grey light. I’d wanted to show her a footpath I’d found – always a rarity in rural Ireland: a wriggling map-stitch between a white house with a boxer dog in the garden and the Lady’s Well road. We’d traversed it, waving away the clouds of St Mark’s flies. With their trailing legs, they’d looked as though they had snatched up tiny bipeds, little coal-coloured faeries, and flown off, grasping them to their bellies. Now we were walking back towards the town.

And there were the hares, in a narrow field north of the road. They were the first wild mammals I’d seen all spring. I’d caught punchy gusts of fox-stink along every hedge, and one day, crossing a ditch near a small block of forestry, I’d seen what looked an otter spraint on a tussock. But no sight of a live creature. Now, though: hares – the animal I’d always ask for, given the choice.

*

I must have been twelve or thirteen the first time I saw a hare. In western Cornwall, where I am from, they existed as little more than rumours. People said there might be a few on the great whaleback hill at Bartinney, out towards Land’s End. But that seemed to be leftover knowledge from an earlier generation. Once, before I was born, my father knocked one down driving at night on the old A30 near Connor Downs, and took it home to eat. But Connor Downs is east of the Hayle River, outside Penwith proper. Again, before I was born, some of the older farmers had brought hares down to course with greyhounds. They’d tapped into the hidden networks of the human countryside, got them live from upcountry gamekeepers who caught them in long-nets, then put them down on the country. Willie Mann, who farmed to the cliff side from Morvah Churchtown in my home parish, and his brother Arthur who lived at Trewey in Zennor, had been big men for the coursing. I’d seen a photograph of them from the 1950s, posing with their piebald longdogs on the little green by Morvah church. Arthur managed to nurture a hare colony on the downs above Trewey for a while. But they never flourished. People said there was something wrong with the soil, or that the fields were too small, or they didn’t like the salt in the air. By the time I was born, they belonged to the realm of cryptozoology. If someone said they’d seen a hare locally, you reacted in much the same way as you would to the tales of mystery big cats that were rife all across the West Country in those days.

But there really were hares on the Lizard – Cornwall’s table-flat southern sub-peninsula. (Lizard: Lys Ardh, ‘High Court’ – or perhaps ‘High Ringfort’ – in Cornish much as it would be in Irish; there is a Lissard, Lios Ard, between Woodlawn and Ballinasloe in County Galway.) We had friends who farmed on the Lizard, a merrily ramshackle place above a valley at the end of a long white track. And in the biggest of their fields – vast by Cornish standards at twenty acres – there were hares. One day, on a visit from Penwith, we walked up there to see them, fanned out under instruction in a loose line: two women and four children.

The first hare came up at my feet. I recall a noise like a gas burner igniting – phhht! But it’s a sound that my mind has supplied for the memory of every erupting hare I’ve ever seen since. The actual moment is always so swift and so sudden that observing the details coolly is impossible. There may well be no sound at all. This first-seen hare swept away to my right, arcing first towards the thick hedge and then out into the cougar-coloured vastness of the field. Everyone paused and pointed and shouted. I saw the deep rich brown underfur and the black guard hairs; I saw the impossibly long ears go back as it accelerated to warp-speed; saw the strange length of its face and the blazing amber eye, saw its frightening strangeness. I’d imagined hares as nothing more than overgrown rabbits. But this cat-sized creature seemed to belong not just to a different taxonomic order, but to an entirely other world.

I’ve seen plenty of hares since, but the sense of the uncanny at each encounter has never entirely faded. It’s easy to understand why traces of medieval apocrypha hung about them for so long.  Their reputation as witches’ familiars is well-known, but as late as the eighteenth century scientific treatises were still reporting that hares could change sex over winter, that they occasionally grew antlers. When the authors George Ewart Evans and David Thompson were out and about collecting hare-lore for a book in the early 1970s, a Leitrim man told them that Irish country folk wouldn’t eat hare-flesh, because, as he put it, ‘They are not right.’

They are not right… The image of my parents, bent over a table in the gloom of a small cottage kitchen, eating a roadkill hare, prompts a shiver of unease here.

These two hares, beside the Esker road, were not the same as those I’d seen on the Lizard as a child. Those had been brown hares, naturalised immigrants to Britain, perhaps introduced by the Romans, or perhaps by Iron-Age Britons before them. But these were Irish hares, older natives of the more westerly island, and by some reckonings the only mammal entirely unique to Ireland. They do look rather more like big rabbits than do brown hares – a little fluffier, a little shorter of ear and face. But they have the same ability to ignite from the middle of an apparently empty field – phhht!

Irish hares are, in conventional scientific view, a subspecies of the mountain hare. Mountain hares, with minor variations, are found all the way from the Atlantic seaboard to the eastern terminus of the Eurasian landmass, but the Irish variety is the only one to make itself properly at home in the lowlands. The Irish hare is also the only member of the mountain hare clan that does not routinely change its pelage to match the winter snow – though if subjected to extreme conditions, the scientists say, they still ‘possess the genetic machinery to turn white…’

Possess the genetic machinery – what a phrase! what a concept! If these hares still harbour the unused ability to turn themselves white, then why not also the ability to change their sex in the winter darkness, to sprout antlers, to morph into the form of a woman? And what other unused genetic machinery might any of us possess, awaiting the trigger of an unusually cold winter or an abnormally wet summer? Might we all wake one day to find our own skins miraculously turned, to find webbing grown between our fingers, or a thick fleece sprouted across our backs?

*

Today, the hares in the field by the Esker road remained unchanged, retained their usual rusty brown. Only their tails were white, flicking like tufts of bog cotton as they went away down the hedge-line. But the rest of their machinery was in full use. At a slow lope their overpowered haunches made them awkward, like stilt-walkers trying to move on all-fours. But as we watched they came up effortlessly to speed, stretched out with the beginnings of a leftward curve in their trajectory, then were gone, away through a small tear in the normal fabric of space and time.

When we walked on, I could feel the faint fizz that a running hare always leaves in its passing. I looked back the way they’d gone, felt for the line in the contoured map of the countryside. Over the brow by Pollacappul; down into Kilcornan with a flying leap across the ditch; along the levels to the edge of the forestry; then around through Kingsland North, already coming back towards us from the opposite direction – because a harried hare will always run in a circle.

***

Tim Hannigan is a writer and academic, originally from the far west of Cornwall, but now based in Ireland. He is the author of several books, including A Brief History of Indonesia and The Travel Writing Tribe. His most recent book is The Granite Kingdom: A Cornish Journey. His essay ‘A Circle on the Map (the horse rake)’, appears in the anthology Going to Ground. He teaches writing and literature at the Atlantic Technological University Sligo, and is currently working on a book about countryside access in Ireland.

Photograph at the head of this essay from Pixabay.