Hunters in the old days were interested in anything they could sneak home for the pot. A malicious witch could have changed herself into all sorts of different creatures to deceive them, but the stories are always about a witch-hare. In the thirteenth-century charm, 'The Names of the Hare', the hare is the brodlokere and the make-agrise �?the starer, the one who makes you afraid: and he has seventy-five other names, too (Evans and Thomson 1972: 202�?). George Gifford captures the same feeling, although he is writing sarcastically, at the beginning of his Dialogue On Witches. The believer in witches confesses, 'In good sooth, I may tell it to you as to my friend, when I go but into my closes I am afraid, for I see now and then a hare, which by my conscience giveth me is a witch or some witch's spirit, she stareth so upon me. And... there is a foule great cat sometimes in my barne which I have no liking unto' (Gifford 1931). Both these animals seem to be singled out as humans-in-disguise because they are usurping the human right to stare. Mowgli stared at the wolves, and they could not return his gaze; this is the magisterial gaze, which carries with it a right of dominion (Baker 1993: 158). People in authority look unflinchingly at their subordinates, who must not stare back at them �?but the cat is a heretic to this system of belief, because a cat can look at a king.

 

In the army, where all the outward forms of power have to be carefully conserved, this business of staring back is forbidden. Queens Rules make it a punishable offence, under the name of Dumb Insolence. Naturally one expects the insolence of animals to be dumb anyway, but in the stories they do sometimes get to speak. In Co. Roscommon a man went to shoot a hare, but it turned to look at him and said 'You wouldn't shoot your old grandfather now, would you?'. John Page of Clooncondra saw another hare jump up on an old wall, and followed it for a mile, waiting for the moment that a brown face would peer out from under the ivy so that he could bang at it with a stick. But when it did appear, the hare told him to mind his own business and then (as he seemed to be a little shaken by this) advised him to go home and pour himself a drink (Evans and Thomson 1972: 97, 159, 177). One of our Dorset hares was in the habit of jeering 'Huntsman, shoot better!' every time a shot whistled past her head, until one moonlit night a sportsman loaded up with a silver penny and so reduced her to silence (Udal 1922: 330).