The Hare Who Answers the Moon

E. M. Thornbury
Field Correspondent, The Isles & the Otherworld

Fieldnotes — the hills west of Chengdu, late autumn

I first met this belief in a battered edition of the Bowuzhi, propped open on a folding table somewhere in the foothills west of Chengdu, rowan already turning orange along the ridge line. Zhang Hua, writing in the third century, gathered into that book everything strange and true he could find, and among the entries on stones that swim and trees that bleed sits a plain claim: the wild hare conceives by gazing at the moon. No mating is described. No season is fixed. Only the animal, upright in the grass at night, eyes fixed on the disc overhead, taking something into itself that will become a litter of young.

It is a tidy explanation for something any hunter of the period would have noticed, that hares sit bolt upright for long stretches after dark, ears flattened, perfectly still, watching. Add to that the hare's genuine fecundity, litter upon litter through a single season, and the moon becomes an obvious culprit. The moon in Chinese cosmology was already a place of hares; the Jade Rabbit stood at Chang'e's side pounding the herbs of immortality in her mortar, an animal drawn up out of the world and set to permanent, patient labour. The wild hare on the hillside is its unransomed cousin. It looks at the same moon, answers the same pull, and then goes back to the grass. It was never carried off. It never pounds anything for anyone.

I have sat out on clear nights hoping to see the behaviour that gave rise to the story, and mostly failed; hares are shy of lamps and shyer of watchers. But once, on a slope thick with rowan not far from where the range folds up towards Tibet, I found one sitting so still in the moonlight that I mistook it for a stone until it turned its head. Sorbus in that country grows in more shapes than I had known existed, dozens of species crowding the same mountainsides, their berries hanging red and untouched long after the leaves go. Rowan carries its own reputation further west, a tree planted at doors and gates in Britain and Ireland to keep bad luck out, and the two traditions, hare and tree, sit oddly well together, though nothing in the old text ties them formally.

Britain has its own moon-hare, a creature that turns up in later folklore staring up at the moon in something close to worship, and it is tempting to read the two beliefs as one idea passed hand to hand across the continent. I found no evidence for that continuity and I would not claim it. What the two traditions share is simpler than transmission: the hare's own strangeness, its sitting-up stillness, its habit of appearing at dusk as if summoned, has struck more than one people as evidence of a private commerce with the moon. The Chinese version is unusual in giving that commerce a precise mechanism, conception by sight alone, and in setting beside it a tame counterpart already settled on the moon's surface, so the story becomes as much about the wild hare's refusal as about its gaze. It looks up. It takes what it needs. It does not go.

That refusal is the part I kept turning over on the long drive back down out of the hills, rowan branches passing the window heavy with fruit no one had picked. An animal can answer the moon and still keep its own ground.

E. M. Thornbury is a field correspondent of the Wyrdlore Society, reporting from the Isles & the Otherworld. She walks boundaries — parish bounds, hedge banks, the lines where one field's law stops and another begins, and the markers people put there to make the change legible. She keeps meticulous notes, and distrusts every conclusion in them, including her own.