The Spirit of the Golden Hare

Most people are familiar with rabbits, but when they see hares they are taken by their size, speed, and large eyes on each side of their head below their distinctive long ears.

Hares have long occupied the fens and marshes around the Wash long before they were drained and cultivated. The hare was subject to many legends and superstitions. Some deemed the hare as a witch’s familiar; others viewed it as half human, a changeling that changed to human form at night; some viewed them as magical animals that changed sex each year.

Even Samuel Pepys swore by the magical properties of the hare’s foot he carried: “Now am I at a losse to know whether it be my hare’s foot which is my preservative against wind, for I never had a fit of collique since I wore it.”

Fishermen and miners would view hares as unlucky. These beliefs reached into the fens and as late as 1956 the Cambridgeshire Independent Press and Chronicle published the following: “A curious point arises in connection with a fire at Fordham. It is part of old Cambridgeshire folklore that a fire always follows if a hare runs down the main street of a village. The week before last a hare did run down the main street of Fordham. It was pursued by Mr. Richard Nicholls, a septuagenarian, and it was killed in a shed within three yards of where this fire broke out.”

 I always wonder what was behind these stories. In modern times such magic and legend has little space, but having heard the following tale  from an old wildfowling friend of mine I sometimes wonder.

My friend, Sam Thorpe, is an old wildfowler. He was a long-standing farm worker for the local Hayshaw family that had farmed land up to the sea wall in the Holbeach and Long Sutton area for generations. Sam loved his job and he loved the marsh. His job enabled him to enjoy the later, for once sugar beet was lifted mid to late October he had two to three months of little work enabling him to pursue geese and ducks on the marsh owned by his employer, but let to the local wildfowling clubs of which he was a member. Sam is a man of simple pleasures, happy with his lot, happily married with five children that have all gone on to start successful lives themselves. One night, sat in The Ship, Sam told me this magical story over a few pints, of a hare that he felt had saved his life and brought him good fortune.

Sam went back many years to when he was a young man in the late 1950’s. He told me that early in his wildfowling days he had just come off the marsh one November morning when he could hear the pitiful cry of what sounded to him like a human baby. Climbing over the sea wall the sound got louder and Sam headed towards it. On the far side of the sea bank he found the cause of the pitiful cries, a leveret with its leg caught in a snare. Sam and I both agreed that the sound of a wounded hare is like that of a wounded child and as a result both of us declined the offer of joining local hare shoots. Equally neither of us like eating hare as we find it strong, although I do admit I can eat leveret which is less strong in flavour.

Having found this pitiful creature Sam bent down to it and carefully freed it from the snare. Immediately the leveret went silent and stared at Sam as he held it. Sam noted the young hare’s golden colour and distinctive white tips on its ears. Fortunately for the hare the snare had only lightly cut into the leg. Sam let the hare free. However it did not run off immediately. It stayed where Sam had squatted down to free it and licked his hand as if to thank him before running off.

Sam did not think anything more about the hare until the following year. Over the summer, under the guidance of a local wildfowler he had built a punt and bought a larger 8 bore shotgun. Come December he found himself out in the punt near Gedney Marsh stalking a pack of teal and successfully bagged three with one shot. He paddled over, retrieved the dead duck from the water into his punt. After he had picked the last teal  out of the water he looked up and realized  a thick fog had descended upon him and he had lost his bearings. Not a problem to him, as like all good wildfowlers he carried a compass. At least that’s  what he thought until he felt in his pocket and realized it was not there. So there he sat in a punt on the Wash at high tide, totally surrounded by a pea souper of a fog unable to tell which way to go. He looked at his watch, high tide was at its peak and was moving neither way. He knew that once it started to go back out he would struggle to fight against it and risked being pushed further out. Keeping calm he lit up a Lambs Navy Cut cigarette and thought for a moment. He plucked a feather from one of the birds and placed it on the water to see if it moved. The feather stayed still, so at least the water was still slack.

Although fog can make a wildfowler blind it compensates for this by making sound louder. As Sam sat there quietly contemplating which way to go he thought he could hear a feint squeak. Sam slowed his breath and sat very still to prevent the water lapping too loudly against the punt. He was right, he could hear a squeak and he was pretty sure he could tell from which direction it came. He took one last draw on his cigarette before throwing it in the water, if he had looked he would have noticed it was starting to float away from him. He grabbed his paddle and paused, he could hear the squeak again, ever so slightly louder. Picking up the paddle he headed towards it through the foggy gloom. He repeated this process five or six times, increasing the number of strokes as the water began to flow against him until eventually he could make out the marsh edge, but the topography was not familiar to him in this fog.

Now the marsh does not always do what a man thinks it will do, and water can flow in different ways that defy expectations. Sam knew he had to find a specific creek in order to get his punt ashore, but despite his experience he could not be sure which way to go. Then along the tide edge came a hare. Sam paddled up to the water’s edge towards it and kept himself against the shore. The bow of the punt just touched the shore. The hare, a beautiful golden colour, strode towards the punt and paused. After a minute or two it approached the punt and, smelling it, carefully hopped onto the deck. Here the hare appeared perfectly at home, turning its head from side to side with no concern. The hare then indulged at great length to sniff at the muzzle of his 8 bore. The scent of the gunpowder evidently proved distasteful and the hare bounded back out of the punt back onto shore and ran out of site for about a minute. Then the hare came back and stared at the punt cocking its head to one side as if to say, “follow me.” Sam took to his paddle and followed the hare along the shoreline until he thankfully came to the creek he needed to navigate home, at which point the hare disappeared.

“Do you think it was the same hare Same?” I asked him.

“ Well,” he replied, “when it was sniffing around my gun I noticed a mark on its rear leg, the same leg that I freed that leveret from, and it had white tips on its ears. So I figure it was the same hare.”

“Was that the last time you saw it ?” I asked.

“Funny, you should say that. I did see it along the sea wall several times that year. It was so distinctive, being more a golden colour than brown. It always ran in front of me along the sea wall, but only when I was on me ‘sen. If anyone else was about I didn’t see it.”

“When was the last time you saw it?”

Sam paused, looked at his empty glass, “Buy me another pint of Tom Smith’s and I’ll tell you.”

Glasses refilled, Sam went on to give account of the last time he saw the golden hare, four years after he first freed it.

It was a sharp frost in mid-January and Sam had ventured for a morning flight from Shep White’s on the sea bank to an old bank out on the marsh known as the Rabbit Bank. There was a cold wind from the north and the clean smell of coming snow was in  the air. The previous night had scattered a few snowflakes that stuck to the marram grass on the Rabbit Bank like glitter as the pre-dawn sky began to lighten from deep purple  to lighter blue and green. Sam was lucky, a skein of pink feet flew over very high, with a lone straggler dropping down behind them into range. He lifted his gun and fired. The goose folded and fell to the ground with a solid thump just a few yards from where he hid behind the Rabbit Bank. Seeing it was clearly dead he left it within sight whilst he waited for the sun to rise.

As the gloom of night lifted and the hint of the top edge of the sun first touched the horizon the temperature plummeted and frost formed along the top ridge of his shotgun. Within twenty minutes a full fiery orange ball nestled on the horizon and the sounds of the marsh became louder with the sound of curlew whooping and the redshank, the aptly named “warden of the marsh”, screeching over his head advertising his presence to all. Sam figured it was time to collect his bag and plod off home via a welcome fry up at Frankie’s Café. He carefully laid down his gun and stepped over the ridge of the Rabbit Bank to collect his goose. When he got back, goose in hand, he was met by the golden hare. The hare looked him up and down and then went to the butt end of his gun and started scratching away as if to make a “form” to lie in. Sam watched it for a few minutes then went to pick up his gun and place it safely into his gun slip. The hare moved to one side. Then as Sam started to walk off the hare ran to his feet and then back to where his gun had laid and scratched away. This peaked Sam’s curiosity and he went to where the hare was and to see what he was up to . The hare had scratched away quite a small form and Sam could just see a feint sparkle of sunlight from the soil and he bent down to take a closer look. There was something shiny in the soil. He bent down and scratched away with his bare hands until he had uncovered all of the object whilst the hare stood to one side and watched. The object he had retrieved was about four inches long, and with very little effort the soil dropped away from it revealing a beautiful hare made of gold. The hare looked up at an incredulous Sam and pulled his front paws over his ears before running off along the Rabbit Bank to the shore.

“What did you do with it?” I asked Sam.

“I did the right thing boy,” he retorted and Sam smiled, pulled out his wallet, and in between the folds was a yellowed newspaper article folded neatly. He unfolded the paper and handed it to me.

It read, “Anonymous farm labourer and farmer each awarded a quarter share of the value of a golden hare found in the Parish of Gedney.” The article read on that a Treasure Trove Court had awarded a quarter share to the finder and the land owner with the rest going to the Crown. The golden hare was valued at £380,000.

“That hare put my kids through college and  bought me my bungalow when I retired,” he chuckled.

“Did you ever see that hare again?” I asked.

“No boy”, he replied, “I figure we were more than even. “

With that the landlord called time and we each went our separate ways. As I was riding home on the bus I peered out the window into the dark fields. Now I don’t know whether it was that last pint of Tom Smith’s Lancaster Bomber, but I swear as I peered out from the road edge, running alongside the bus in the field was a hare that was a little more golden than usual.