Harriet's Hare Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  About the Author

  Also by Dick King-Smith

  Copyright

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  All of a sudden, the hare said, loudly and clearly, ‘Good morning.’

  Hares don’t talk. Everyone knows that. But the hare Harriet meets in the cornfield one morning is different. He’s come from a far-off planet to visit Earth. He can transform himself into any shape and speak any language. And he creates some very special magic for Harriet.

  HARRIET’S HARE

  Dick King-Smith

  Illustrated by Valerie Littlewood

  Chapter One

  Harriet sat up, suddenly wide-awake. Whatever was that noise?

  It was a rushing, tearing, swishing noise – just the sound a rocket makes on Guy Fawkes Night, yet much much louder. But this was the start of a midsummer day and – she looked at her watch – early too, not five o’clock yet.

  She leaped out of bed and ran to the window.

  The farmhouse and its buildings were tucked into the side of a gentle hill, and in the little flat valley below were two large fields, the nearer one green, the further one gold.

  In the first, her father’s cows would normally have been waiting around the gateway for him to come and fetch them in for morning milking. But now the whole herd was galloping and buck-jumping around the pasture as though something had scared the wits out of them.

  The second field was of wheat, almost ready for harvesting, that looked from the house above like a square golden blanket, glowing in the morning sunlight. But there seemed to be a hole in the blanket. In one corner of the wheatfield, Harriet could see, there was a perfect circle of flattened corn.

  It took Harriet a quarter of an hour to dress and slip out of the house and run down the dewy hillside. By now the cows had quietened, and she ran through them to the wheatfield beyond, climbed over its gate and pushed through the standing corn to step into that perfect circle.

  What had made it? What had made the noise that had woken her and terrified the cows? Whatever had happened in the field called Ten Acre on Longhanger Farm at the start of this July day?

  Harriet walked into the middle of the circle. It was big, perhaps twenty metres across, and all the corn in it was squashed down to the ground, flat, as though an enormously heavy weight had rested there.

  As she stood there now, in the stillness, with no sound but distant birdsong, a hare suddenly came out into the corn circle and stopped and sat up. It turned its head a little sideways, the better to see her.

  Harriet stood stock-still. Aren’t you handsome, she thought, with your tawny coat and your black-tipped ears and your long hind legs. Don’t run away. I won’t hurt you.

  For a moment the hare stayed where it was, watching her. Then, to her great surprise, it lolloped right up to her.

  Surprise is one thing, but total amazement is quite another, and that was what Harriet next felt when all of a sudden the hare said, loudly and clearly, ‘Good morning.’

  Harriet pinched herself, hard. Wake up, she thought. This whole thing is a dream, hares don’t talk, and then she said it aloud: ‘Hares don’t talk.’

  ‘I’m sure they don’t as a general rule,’ said the hare, ‘but I’m a rather unusual hare.’

  ‘You certainly are,’ said Harriet. ‘Are you anything to do with this corn circle?’

  For a moment the hare didn’t answer but fell to grooming its face. Then it said, ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Harriet.’

  ‘Can you keep a secret, Harriet?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I,’ said the hare, ‘am a visitor from outer space.’

  ‘You mean . . . this circle was made by your spacecraft?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So you come from another planet?’

  ‘Yes. I come from Pars.’

  ‘Pars?’ said Harriet. ‘Is that near Mars?’

  ‘Oh no,’ said the hare. ‘Much much further away.’

  ‘But,’ said Harriet, ‘I thought that aliens were . . . well, little green men with four arms and eyes on stalks.’

  ‘Not far wrong,’ said the hare. ‘But you see, Harriet, we Partians have the ability to change. Imagine how strange your modern world here would seem to a caveman. Whatever would he make of microsurgery and satellite television and supersonic flight? You have to understand that on Pars we are as far ahead of you people on Earth as you are now ahead of the cavemen. One of the things we can do, for example, is to speak all earthly languages. But perhaps to you our most astonishing skill is that we have perfected the ability to change our shapes. When my colleagues left me here in this cornfield, I could, for instance, have decided to become a tiger (though that might have caused a bit of a stir in deepest Wiltshire) or a dog or a sheep or anything else you like. But I chose to change myself into a hare.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Harriet.

  ‘Because in this world the hare has always been thought to be a beast of magic. People said that hares were witches and could melt away and reappear, to dance and play in the light of the moon. (Incidentally some still say that if you look at the full moon, it is not a man’s face that you see there, but the shape of a hare.) And others believed that hares could change their sex at will.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Harriet. ‘Which are you at the moment?’

  ‘I,’ said the hare, ‘am a buck and fully intend to remain so, for the length of my stay on Earth.’

  Harriet felt suddenly dreadfully disappointed. Here she was, in her father’s wheatfield, deep in conversation with a magic hare, but perhaps he would only be around for a very short time.

  ‘How long are you staying?’ she said.

  ‘It depends,’ said the hare, ‘on how much I like it here. This is actually my first Earth holiday.’

  ‘You’ve come here for a holiday?’ asked Harriet.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said the hare.

  ‘Everyone on Pars takes a holiday abroad every so often. Interplanetary travel is so quick and easy nowadays, you know – to anywhere in the solar system that you fancy. I’ve been to a number of heavenly bodies but never to Earth. I just fancied going somewhere quite different this year, somewhere rather primitive, where the technology was not very far advanced and one could relax among the simple, ignorant natives. So I came here. But that’s enough about me, Harriet. Tell me a bit about yourself. All I know is your name.’

  ‘Well,’ said Harriet, ‘I’m nearly eight and I go to the village school, and my dad’s a farmer and we’ve got cows and some sheep and some chickens, and Dad works the farm all by himself except sometimes he gets a relief milker in so that we can have a bit of a holiday.’

  ‘But your mother helps with the animals, I expect?’ said the hare.

  ‘My mother’s dead,’ said Harriet. ‘She died when I was quite little. I don’t really remember her. But I help Dad. I look after the hens, and I feed the calves, and this year I bottled three lambs. They’d lost their mother too.’

  ‘You like animals,’ said the hare.

  ‘Oh yes. Specially my pony. She’s a strawberry roan, twelve and a half hands. She’s called Breeze. By the way, I don’t know your name.’

  ‘Nor do I,’ said the hare, ‘if you see what I mean. On Pars I had a perfectly good name, but I really haven’t given a thought about what to be called now
that I am a specimen of Lepus europaeus occidentalis.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Latin name for a hare.’

  ‘You speak Latin too?’

  ‘I told you. Partians are omnilingual.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Harriet. ‘Well, what am I going to call you?’

  ‘Whatever you like,’ said the hare. ‘You choose.’

  Harriet thought.

  A visitor from outer space that speaks all languages, that can transform itself into any shape, a creature of witchcraft, a magician. He’s a wizard, that’s what he is.

  ‘Wiz,’ she said.

  The hare, who had remained sitting in the middle of the corn circle throughout the whole of this conversation, stood up on his long hind legs. His ears raised, his large brown eyes enquiring, he looked the very picture of astonishment.

  ‘Wiz?’ he said.

  ‘Yes. That’s what I shall call you.’

  ‘Oh, very well,’ sighed Harriet’s hare. ‘Wiz it is.’

  Chapter Two

  Suddenly a dog barked. Harriet turned to see her father coming down the hill towards the cow pasture, the old sheepdog, Bran, running ahead of him.

  Bran’s barking said quite clearly, today as every day, ‘Come along, you silly cows, whatever you’re doing – it’s time for milking.’ And as soon as the farmer opened the gate, Bluebell, the master cow whose right it was to be first through any gate, began the climb up the trackway through the home paddock, the rest of the herd following behind her.

  ‘That’s my dad,’ said Harriet, but she found she was talking to herself, for the hare had vanished.

  She climbed back over the gate of the wheatfield and ran towards her father.

  ‘Hattie!’ he called in astonishment. ‘What in the world are you doing out so early?’

  Harriet thought quickly.

  ‘Can you keep a secret?’ Wiz had said. She must say nothing about him.

  ‘There’s a corn circle, Dad!’ she cried. ‘In our wheat. I saw it from my bedroom window.’

  Leaving Bran to take the cows on up the hill, the farmer walked back with her to the cornfield.

  ‘I’ve heard about these, Hattie,’ he said, ‘but I’ve never seen one, except in photos.’

  ‘What made it, Dad, d’you think?’

  ‘There are lots of theories. Some say badgers, rolling in the corn, but it would have taken a hundred giant badgers to make this. Most likely it’s caused by a kind of whirling vortex of wind, like a tornado. Though of course there are always the nutters who say that corn circles are made by spacecraft!’

  ‘That’s rubbish,’ said Harriet.

  ‘It is!’ said her father.

  Somewhere in the standing corn there was a rustling noise.

  ‘Rabbit in there,’ said Harriet’s father.

  ‘Or a hare perhaps?’ said Harriet.

  ‘Could be. They’d better be out of it before I put the combine in.’

  He takes his gun with him when he rides the combine, Harriet thought. I must warn Wiz.

  ‘When will this field be fit, Dad, d’you think?’ she asked.

  Her father pulled off an ear of wheat, rubbing it between his hands to free the kernels and then chewing them to test their ripeness.

  ‘Not long now,’ he said.

  From the top of the hill, Bran barked. Again there was no mistaking his meaning: ‘The cows are in the yard. I’ve done my bit, so what d’you expect me to do now – milk ’em?’

  ‘Come on, Hattie,’ said her father. ‘I’ve got work to do.’

  ‘So have I,’ said Harriet. ‘I’m going to load the washing-machine before I start getting your breakfast. And the downstairs wants dusting.’

  ‘I’d forgotten,’ said her father. ‘It’s the start of your school summer holidays, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Harriet, ‘but there’s a lot of work to be done.’

  Poor girl, thought her father as he let the first cows into the milking-parlour. She’s had to grow up fast without a mother. Though I think she’s mostly forgotten her now. Which I never shall. I just worry that it’s not much fun for Hattie, stuck here alone with me. What she needs is a bit of magic in her life. Children believe in magic. She probably thinks that corn circle was made by extra-terrestrials. Load of rubbish.

  Later that morning, when the washing was in the drier and she had flicked a duster about (a woman from the village came twice a week to do the cleaning), Harriet went back down to the corn circle. She half expected to see Wiz waiting for her, but the circle was empty. Where had he gone? When would she see him again? Would she see him again? Like her, he was on holiday, but the fact that she was staying here, on Longhanger Farm, didn’t mean that he was. He could go wherever he liked.

  She trudged back across the cow pasture. He might be miles away by now, loping across the downs, simply enjoying being a hare, with no thought for her at all.

  Just then she saw, not five metres away, a brown shape squatting motionless in a clump of grass, long ears flat to its head.

  ‘Wiz!’ she cried, and at the sound of her voice the hare leaped up from its form and sped away.

  ‘Come back!’ called Harriet, but to no avail, and she felt the prick of tears as the animal disappeared through the nearest hedge. He didn’t want to have anything more to do with her. Never again would she speak with the magical visitor from Pars. Or maybe, thought Harriet, I’m going potty and I just imagined it all.

  ‘Wrong hare,’ said a voice behind her.

  ‘Oh, Wiz!’ cried Harriet. ‘Am I glad to see you! I was beginning to wonder . . .’ She stopped.

  ‘If you’d dreamed the whole thing?’ said the hare.

  ‘Yes . . . no . . . I didn’t know what to think.’

  ‘Did you tell your father about me?’

  ‘No. I promised not to. But Wiz, you must be careful, because soon he’ll be harvesting the wheat and that means he goes round and round the field on a big machine called a combine, and he shoots any rabbit that runs out, specially at the end when there’s only a little square of corn left in the middle. People eat rabbits, you see.’

  ‘But I’m not a rabbit.’

  ‘Hares too,’ said Harriet.

  ‘People eat hares?’ said Wiz.

  ‘I’m afraid so. Jugged hare is very good.’

  ‘Jugged?’

  ‘Yes. Cut up in bits and stewed with wine and herbs. Sorry, but they do.’

  ‘How primitive!’ said Wiz. ‘So bad for you, all this meat-eating. How fortunate that I chose to become a hare and not a tiger. Your grass is really excellent.’

  ‘Are you all vegetarians on Pars?’ asked Harriet.

  ‘Absolutely. No-one kills anything for food.’

  ‘But what about wars? People here on Earth are always killing one another.’

  ‘So pointless,’ said Wiz. ‘You really are still like savages. We Partians like to live as long as possible. Admittedly we haven’t yet cracked the riddle of everlasting life, but we like to reckon on a couple of hundred years or so apiece before we’re bottled.’

  ‘Bottled?’

  ‘We don’t bury bodies or burn them like you barbarians,’ said the hare. ‘We preserve our dead in a special solution. Standing upright, in bottles.’

  ‘They must be very big bottles,’ said Harriet.

  ‘No. We’re very small people. All you need is a couple of shelves and you can keep all your ancestors. You never really lose anyone.’

  How horrible, thought Harriet. She felt suddenly angry.

  ‘I lost my mum, remember?’ she said.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Harriet,’ said the hare. ‘I do apologize – I wasn’t thinking what I was saying. Too fond of the sound of my own voice, that’s my trouble. Will you forgive me?’

  Harriet nodded.

  ‘You didn’t mean any harm,’ she muttered.

  ‘On the contrary,’ said Wiz, ‘I should like to do you some good. Perhaps I’ll be able to, one of these fine days. And talking of fine days
, I must remember to watch out for your father on his combine. I want to get back to Pars in one piece.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Harriet, ‘you must be careful, Wiz. It isn’t only Dad. You might meet a poacher with a gun or with dogs, or a fox might get you in the night, or you might be run over on the roads.’

  ‘Good heavens!’ said the hare. ‘Maybe I should have been a tiger after all.’

  ‘I’m glad you’re not,’ said Harriet, and she knelt down and stroked the hare’s tawny back.

  ‘I’m sorry I snapped at you, Wiz,’ she said.

  ‘I deserved it,’ said the hare.

  ‘We’re friends again, aren’t we?’ Harriet said.

  ‘Certainly,’ said Wiz. ‘You are literally my one and only friend on Earth.’

  He stood up on his hind legs and, turning his head slightly to one side, gazed up the hill towards the farmhouse.

  ‘Eyes on the sides of one’s head are a nuisance,’ he said. ‘We Partians have three hundred and sixty degrees sight – stalk-eyed, you know – and even you humans have binocular vision. But a hare, it seems, doesn’t see straight ahead too well. Which is your bedroom?’

  ‘The right-hand one of the three upper windows,’ said Harriet. ‘That’s mine.’

  ‘I might come up and pay you a visit some time,’ said Wiz.

  ‘But how? Hares can’t climb up walls.’

  ‘I’m an unusual hare.’

  ‘Well, for goodness sake don’t let Dad catch sight of you, or our dog, Bran.’

  ‘They won’t see me,’ said Wiz, ‘but I’ll be seeing you,’ and he lolloped away across the field.

  Chapter Three

  For a couple of days Harriet saw nothing of Wiz.

  From her window she could spot the occasional rabbit in the valley below, but she saw no hare, European or Partian. She rode over the farm on Breeze, now and again calling, ‘Wiz! Wiz!’ but no-one answered.

  ‘Wish you could talk like he does,’ she said to the pony. ‘We could have ever such interesting conversations,’ and Breeze blew a bubbly snort of agreement.

  ‘At least,’ said Harriet, ‘I can tell you all about Wiz. That’s not breaking my promise to him, because although you can understand a lot of things I say, I doubt if a magic hare from outer space would mean much to you. And I can’t talk about it to Dad, or Mrs Wisker the cleaning lady, or the postman, or the vet, and I haven’t got a mum to tell even if I could. I wish I did – have a mum, I mean. It must be nice.’