That evening, when her father came up to say good-night to her, Harriet said ‘Dad. D’you think you’ll ever get married again?’
Her father sat down on the bed.
‘Would you be pleased if I did, Hattie?’ he said.
‘Well, yes, I suppose so. If it was someone you liked.’
‘Only liked?’
‘Well, loved then.’
Harriet’s father took hold of her hand and with one finger idly tickled the palm of it, just as he used to when she was little and he played ‘Round and round the garden like a teddy bear’ with her.
‘I don’t honestly think it’s very likely,’ he said. ‘Just because Mummy’s not here any more doesn’t mean I’ve stopped loving her. And anyway, I don’t meet anybody much, do I?’
‘No.’
‘I don’t like to think of you being lonely.’
‘I’m not a bit lonely,’ said Harriet. ‘I’ve got you and Breeze and Bran and all the other animals.’
She yawned.
‘And Wiz,’ she said sleepily.
‘Who’s Wiz?’ said her father.
‘Oh,’ said Harriet. ‘Oh . . . that’s my nickname for Mrs Wisker.’
Mrs Wisker was a stout middle-aged widow, a thorough cleaner but not the world’s fastest worker.
‘Funny name for her,’ said Harriet’s father. ‘You don’t call her that to her face, do you?’
‘Oh no,’ said Harriet. ‘She might not like it. But I like her – she’s nice isn’t she?’
‘Perhaps I’d better marry her then?’
‘Oh, Dad!’
That night, Harriet dreamed about Wiz. He had somehow climbed up to her bedroom window and come in.
When she woke, she got out of bed and leaned on the windowsill to scan the valley below, but it was hareless.
There was a house martin’s nest in the eaves just over her window, and she watched one of the parent birds returning from hawking insects. It swooped up with a beakful, just a metre or so away from her face, and she could hear the cheeping of the hungry youngsters in their cup-shaped nest of mud above.
As the martin wheeled away again, a sparrow fluttered out of the creeper on the house wall and landed on the sill, right beside Harriet, and chirped at her.
‘Cheeky thing!’ she said, expecting it to fly off at the sound of her voice so close. But instead it flew past her into the room.
Harriet turned round, to see the hare sitting up on the bedroom carpet. Of the sparrow there was no sign.
‘Wiz!’ cried Harriet. ‘How on earth did you get here?’
‘Not so much on earth as off earth!’ said the hare. ‘I flew.’
‘You were that sparrow? You changed into it?’
‘And back again, I’m glad to say. I don’t think I much fancy being Passer domesticus.’
‘More Latin?’
‘Yes.’
‘But you’ll have to fly out again. You can’t just jump out of the window.’
‘True. But next time I think I’ll be a less ordinary bird. In the meantime, how are you, Harriet?’
‘Quite well, thank you,’ said Harriet. ‘And you?’
‘I’m really rather enjoying my holiday on Earth,’ said Wiz. ‘It’s a lovely bit of country, up here on the Wiltshire Downs. Very different from Pars.’
‘What’s Pars like?’ asked Harriet.
‘Absolutely flat. Not a hump nor a hollow anywhere. That’s why I like it here. And I like being a hare too – it’s fun. We Partians are slow movers, but now I can run like the wind.’
‘Have you come across any other hares?’ said Harriet.
‘Since you ask, Harriet,’ said Wiz, ‘I did meet a rather attractive young doe.’
‘Did you speak to her?’
‘Of course.’
‘Not in English?’
‘No. In Leporine.’
‘Oh. So you can speak animal languages as well?’
‘Certainly.’
In the yard below, Bran barked.
Harriet looked out of the window to see her father and the dog setting out to fetch the herd for milking.
‘Well then, what’s Bran saying?’ she asked.
‘He’s saying a number of things,’ said the hare. ‘One is a message to the cows, that he’s on his way. One is a greeting to your father, that he’s glad to be with him. And one is just a general expression of well-being: “It’s a lovely morning and I’m a healthy, happy old dog who’s glad to be alive!”’
‘You can’t tell all that from a bark,’ said Harriet.
‘Oont,’ said the hare.
‘Oont?’ said Harriet. ‘What does that mean?’
‘It’s a Leporine word,’ said Wiz. ‘A sort of mild protest. In this case it means, “Surely, Harriet, you don’t think I’d lie to you?”’
‘Actually, I don’t,’ said Harriet. ‘I believe everything you tell me, Wiz. And by the way, I’ve got something to tell you. Dad’s going to combine the wheat today.’
‘In that case I must remember to make myself scarce,’ said the hare, ‘but before that I’d better make myself into something else. Let’s see – how about Carduelis carduelis?’
‘What’s that?’
‘Have a look in your bird book.’
Harriet took down from her shelves A Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe, and looked in the index.
‘I’ve found it!’ she cried after a bit. ‘It’s a goldfinch!’
‘Switt-witt-witt-witt!’ piped a voice in reply, and there, perched upon her bedrail, was a beautiful little bird with a head of scarlet, black and white, and black and yellow wings, as colourful as the sparrow had been drab. For a few seconds it fluttered before Harriet’s face as though bidding her goodbye, and then it flew out of the window and away.
Watching, Harriet saw the goldfinch alight among a large patch of thistles in the home paddock and disappear amongst them. A little later, if she had not turned away to get dressed, she would have seen a hare come out of the thistle clump and lope off down the trackway.
After breakfast, when her father had gone out to clean the parlour and yards, Harriet was washing up when Mrs Wisker arrived. Always she made the same remark.
‘Puffed I am,’ she said, ‘pushin’ that old bike up the hill. But then, ’tis lovely freewheelin’ down again.’
‘We’re going to cut the wheat on the Ten Acre today, Mrs Wisker,’ Harriet said.
‘Are you now, my duck? You goin’ to ride on the combine?’
‘I expect so. To start with anyway.’
‘Rabbit-pie then, eh?’ said Mrs Wisker.
‘I wish he wouldn’t shoot them really,’ said Harriet. ‘I think I might be a vegetarian when I grow up.’
‘Bad for you that is,’ said Mrs Wisker, ‘doin’ without meat. I likes my meat. A nice fat rabbit. Or a hare. Now a hare’s lovely, my late lamented hubby always said, provided you let it get a bit ripe.’
Harriet shuddered.
‘Some people say that hares are witches,’ she said.
‘Course they are, duck, everybody knows that,’ said Mrs Wisker, ‘but that don’t stop me eating one if I gets half a chance.’
‘But you believe in magic, do you, Mrs Wisker?’
‘Course I do. Anyone with any sense does, stands to reason. Even my late lamented hubby did and he hadn’t no more sense than an old sheep. How else are you goin’ to account for that old circle in your dad’s wheat? Got to be somethin’ funny about that.’
‘You don’t think it’s due to natural causes?’
Mrs Wisker gave a loud piercing shriek, the sort of noise someone makes while being murdered, but Harriet knew it was only her way of laughing.
‘Natural causes, duck?’ she cried. ‘Not on your nelly! ’Tis spaceships as makes ’em, I reckons. UFOs, some do call ’em, but I calls ’em UHTs.’
‘UHTs?’
‘Unnatural Heavenly Things!’ said Mrs Wisker with another ear-splitting screech.
Later that
morning, once the dew was off, combining began on the Ten Acre. A neighbouring farmer came with his tractor and trailer to help haul the grain away, while Harriet’s father drove the combine harvester and she stood beside him on the platform.
At first she could see one or two rabbits moving about in the shelter of the corn, but she knew that it was not until the still uncut square of wheat became quite small that they would begin to break from cover and make a run for it across the stubble.
‘I don’t want to see you shoot them, Dad!’ she shouted above the roar of the machine. ‘I don’t like it. Let me get down and go home.’
Thank goodness I remembered to warn Wiz, she thought as she walked up the hill, hearing behind her an occasional bang. Though of course if he had been in the wheat, he could always have changed himself into something else – a mole perhaps, that would burrow down into the ground out of harm’s way.
All the same, after the combining was finished, she had to nerve herself to ask her father if he had shot anything.
‘Couple of bunnies,’ he said.
‘Was that all?’
‘And a hare.’
Despite herself, Harriet felt a cold shiver of fear.
‘Was it a buck or a doe?’ she said. Say it was a doe, please, she thought.
‘It was a buck. A big jack-hare. Though I don’t see what odds it makes. Either way it’ll taste the same.’
Harriet made herself go and look at the three bodies hanging, heads down, in the scullery – two grey, one tawny. By the side of the rabbits, the dead hare looked very long. Its ears hung limply down and there was dried blood on its nose.
It can’t be Wiz, she thought.
It can’t.
Can it?
Chapter Four
‘I’m not eating it,’ said Harriet at breakfast next morning.
Her father looked up to see her spooning cornflakes into her mouth.
‘Not eating what?’ he said.
‘That hare you shot.’
‘Why not?’
‘I like hares.’
‘Well, you like cornflakes but you eat enough of them.’
‘No, I don’t mean “like” like that, Daddy. Anyway, I’m not going to eat it.’
‘What about the rabbits?’
‘Nor them.’
‘I was going to give them to Mrs Wisker anyway,’ her father said.
‘Well, give her the hare too. Please, Dad,’ said Harriet.
‘Hasn’t it struck you,’ said her father, ‘that I might be looking forward to eating that hare? I’m very fond of jugged hare.’
‘Please give it away,’ said Harriet in a rather choky voice.
She’s near to tears, her father thought. Why? A woman would know, I suppose. It’s not easy, trying to be father and mother to her.
‘OK, Hattie love,’ he said. ‘Your Wiz can have the lot.’
‘What?’
‘That’s what you call Mrs Wisker, you told me.’
‘Oh. Oh yes. Thanks, Dad.’
So the next time Mrs Wisker came to Longhanger Farm, she freewheeled away down the hill again even more happily than usual. In the saddlebag of the ancient bicycle that somehow bore her weight was a hare, and a rabbit swung from each handlebar. As for Harriet, walking about the farm or riding around on Breeze, she looked with mounting impatience for her friend from Pars, so anxious had she now become to prove that he was not in Mrs Wisker’s stewpot. Even if he wasn’t, he might, she told herself, have assumed some other shape as a change from being a hare. But all the animals she approached ran or hopped or flew away from her.
Until at last, a few days later, she went into the kitchen garden to get some carrots and there was a hare, helping itself to their feathery tops.
Harriet looked hastily around to make sure that neither her father nor Bran were near.
‘Wiz?’ she said.
‘Oh, hello, Harriet,’ said the hare with his mouth full. ‘Hope you don’t mind – these carrot tops are delicious.’
‘Where have you been?’ said Harriet. ‘I’ ve been so worried.’
‘Oh, here and there,’ said the hare. ‘What’s been worrying you?’
‘Dad shot a hare in the Ten Acre,’ said Harriet. ‘A buck. I just thought it might be you.’
‘Oont,’ said Wiz.
‘What d’you mean?’
‘Did you think I was that stupid? You warned me, remember? I spent that day up on the downs – with a friend.’
‘I should have known it wasn’t you,’ said Harriet, and she bent and stroked the hare’s yellowy-brown back.
At that instant Bran barked, to say – the hare could have told her – ‘Here she is, I’ve found her,’ and Harriet turned to see her father following the dog into the kitchen garden.
‘Look out, Wiz!’ hissed Harriet from the corner of her mouth, but when she glanced round, he was nowhere to be seen.
‘Going to pull some carrots?’ her father said.
‘Yes.’
‘Something’s been eating the tops, I see.’
‘Yes.’
‘Rabbits, I expect.’
‘I expect so.’
‘I’m going down to the village. Want to come?’
‘OK.’
‘In about five minutes then,’ her father said, and walked off again.
On the stalk of one of the chewed-off carrot tops, Harriet saw, was a snail. For a moment she wondered where on earth Wiz could have got to, and then the penny dropped.
‘I should have known it was you,’ said Harriet, and she bent and stroked the snail’s yellowy-brown back.
Hardly had she left the garden than there sounded a harsh cackling cry, the alarm call of a startled blackbird. It was the first and last blackbird in the world ever to peck at a small defenceless snail and then, suddenly and magically, to be confronted with a large and angry hare.
That afternoon, Harriet rode up to the top of the farm and out on to the open downland, where she let Breeze have her head. Then she saw ahead of her not one but two hares, and she reined the pony in to watch their curious antics.
They were standing up on their hind legs and sparring with one another, striking out with their forefeet like boxers.
When at last they saw her, their reactions were opposite. One, the slightly larger of the two, took to its heels and raced away until it disappeared from sight. The other came hopping towards her and said, ‘Hello!’
‘Hello, Wiz,’ said Harriet. ‘Are you hurt?’
‘Hurt?’ said the hare.
‘Well, you were fighting with that other hare and he was bigger than you.’
‘I wasn’t fighting,’ said Wiz, ‘and it wasn’t a he.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said Harriet. ‘I didn’t mean to interrupt.’
‘That’s all right,’ said Wiz. ‘That’s the nice thing about being on holiday – there’s no hurry about anything.’
‘How much longer are you staying?’ said Harriet.
A lot longer, I hope, she thought. Things will never be the same without my magic hare.
‘Well,’ said the hare, ‘return flights from Earth to Pars are always at the full moon. But don’t let’s talk about the end of my holidays – I just want to enjoy them. Come on, I’ll race you.’
The downs were empty of people that July afternoon, but the hundreds of sheep grazing there stared wide-eyed at the sight of a girl on a strawberry-roan pony galloping flat out over the close-nibbled turf, yet never quite catching a hare that sped effortlessly before them.
At home that evening, Harriet looked in the big diary that her father kept beside the telephone.
Against July 24th, the first day of her own holidays, she had put a tiny ‘w’. If her father had noticed it, he would have taken it for a scribble, but it stood for ‘Wiz’, marking the day she’d met him. Today was the last day of July.
She turned over the double page and there, to her dismay, it said:
Monday, August 2nd
Bank Holiday (Scot
land)
Holiday (Republic of Ireland)
O (Full Moon)
‘Oh no!’ Harriet said. ‘Is he only here for two more days?’ She turned the pages. The next full moon was on September 1st. On which date would Wiz leave?
All through Sunday she looked about for the hare to ask him, but by the evening of the Monday, the day when the moon was to be at the full, she still had not, as far as she knew, set eyes upon him in any shape or form.
She woke in the middle of that night and went to the window to look out at the great pale disc sailing across the sky with, it seemed to her, the shape of a hare upon it.
Tomorrow, would he be on the way to Pars or still on Longhanger Farm?
The Tuesday was one of Mrs Wisker’s days, and when she had arrived and mopped her large red face, and had said what she always said, she added a bit extra.
‘What d’you think, duck?’ she said to Harriet. ‘When I was comin’ up the trackway just now, I looked out in the paddock and I could see a shape there, down in the grass. Well, I remembered what my late lamented hubby always used to say. “If you sees a shape in the grass,” he said, “and when you walks towards it, it gets lower and lower, then ’tis an old hare. If it gets higher and higher as you walks towards it, then ’tis only a lump of muck.” Well, I leans the old bike against the fence and I climbs over and I walks towards this shape, and the nearer I gets, the lower it gets. And sure enough it was an old hare. But here’s the funny thing, my duck. ‘Stead of runnin’ off, that hare sits up as bold as brass and looks me in the eye. “Get along with you,” I says, and then – would you believe it – he says somethin’ back.’
‘What!’ cried Harriet in disbelief. Surely Wiz hadn’t actually spoken to Mrs Wisker!
‘What did he say?’ she asked.
‘Well,’ said Mrs Wisker, ‘’twasn’t a proper word, of course. Fancy a hare speakin’ English!’ and she let out one of her deafening screeches.
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