There was a time in my adult life when, each autumn, the idea would come into my head that I should eat a hare. I had this notion, I don't know where from, that eating the dark powerful meat of this wild animal would protect me in some way from winter’s morose moods and the accompanying afflictions of viral irritants that drag on through endless nights running into weeks, without ever inspiring the slightest sympathy from others.

I had not yet been a year in Donegal but walking through the woods and hills I saw hares more often than I ever had before. At first, flashes of glimpsed brown that I could not be sure if I had imagined. Later, when my eyes had learned the landscape, the beasts themselves appeared in flight or sometimes, for one hardly believable moment, motionless before me, before darting off again in a lightning zigzag. The wonder and excitement of such moments were demonstrations of a richness that cannot be put into words. But of course they also brought the lesson that I was but one of many species, and an English one at that.

However, I must confess: all this came with a savage desire to eat a hare before winter.

I had a dog, Fli, a grey whisp of a lurcher who had fed me for years with English rabbits and hares. But here in Donegal the landscape was unmauled by agrarian revolution, industrial farm practices or the ravages of landownership. It seemed it was as it had been forever, certainly a hundred thousand years, and my hound had no chance of catching a hare amidst thick woodlands, unhedged fields and pathways known only to native wildlife.

I asked around here and there and looked in the windows of butchers for the meat. I even used the Irish giorria, pronouncing it carefully ger-ee-ya, but this utterance only elicited a wordless shake of the head and turning of the back. As many times as I’d seen a hare, I'd seen a van emblazoned with the livery McDaid’s: Plumber, Builder, Hunter rattle up and down the lanes, and I thought to myself, he'll get me a hare.

Don't get me wrong, it was not an obsession. I am not some crazed hedge-witch. But as the days shortened and the temperature dropped, my fear of winter grew, and sightings of hares seemed to taunt me with more frequency on my solitary walks.

There’s a sadness in the golden beauty of autumn. The still bright skies in Donegal bring out the bronze softness of dying leaves, catching emerald flashes on those tiny evergreen leaves that remain. But there’s something about the old gold of the light, or the clementine leaves, or both, that make the swathes of moss on great black rocks appear to vibrate and shimmer with greenness, glow like fairy tales. Lord, it’s as if the very stones they wrap around are giving them a charge like great batteries. A walk through such woods with all that fading light, before the clocks change, with chestnut leaf meal under foot and a steel-cold head of rushing stream roaring through like a blue wand and, my god, I’d be soaked in all the magical beauty of death.

One morning that week, it would have been after ten, I passed the Bridge Bar and there was a solitary van in the lot - McDaid’s - so I walked in. The man himself was sat at the bar: work trousers, a ribbon of pale flesh, a black fleece and a pint of stout before him. I took a seat to his left, a stool between us. Bríd, who ran the place, was in the corner. I greeted her and nodded to McDaid. Bríd picked up a glass and held it under the tap as soon as I sat. McDaid looked up from his drink, disturbed from tranquil perusal.

“Ye boy…” he said, returning his eyes to contemplation of the thick cream crowning his pint.

Bríd expressed surprise that we hadn’t come across each other and uttered a couple of low phrases I couldn't catch. These were enough to make McDaid look at me and say, “How’s she cuttin?”

I nodded and replied, “Grand.”

My half-poured pint was sitting on the bar getting to know itself. McDaid drank from his and replaced it before him. I looked at his pint and nodded towards mine. He cocked his head and winked assent, and Bríd began pouring him another.

I told him I'd seen his van and had been hoping to run into him.

“Construction, you’re wanting?” he asked.

I shook my head hoping he would come to the hunting but he was silent, waiting for me to reveal myself. Bríd placed my pint in front of me and I stayed my impulse to take a sip. It was unseemly to grasp at a Guinness. I'd learnt to wait. I watched until the crowded rust of milky coffee shades between the head of cream and the jet darkness had settled.

“Do you ever get a hare?” I asked.

“There's plenty about now,” he replied.

My pint settled, a single, dualistic line. Black, White, Good versus Evil. You didn't want to mess with that. I took a sip, a gulp, two…

“But do you ever get one?” I asked.

I felt something tighten in the air. Perhaps it was how he took his breath in and shifted his position rather than answering me. Bríd was listening at the other end of the bar, an eye on the fire just starting in the grate, an eye on us, an eye on the weather, an eye on her daughter a hundred miles away in Belfast studying law, year three. Nothing escaped that woman, nothing. I looked up to her for guidance and she knew me a little. Years before, before I’d come to live here, I’d been in her bar and, without malice, had been the centre of a small drama. I didn't think she'd recognise me but the very first time I looked in, she smiled and without judgement or rancour said, ‘There he is himself’. I relied on her for protection and the finer points of diplomacy but now she was giving nothing away, waiting to see what happened.

My question still hung in the air. Here, a question was always answered – not always with words, but always answered.

“I won't touch a hare,” McDaid replied.

He picked up his pint and drank till it was done.

For some reason I started talking about the best ways to cook a hare and how good it is to eat, and then began romanticising my habit of having one before each winter. I gabbered on as if the silence was something that had to be filled, and filled by me.

Soon the sound of my voice was embarrassing, and when Bríd came over with his new pint she flashed a look at me, enough to shut my mouth, like a slap on a child's wrist.

Perhaps it was the sight and majesty of his pint that made him take pity on me and throw me a bone.

“Will you know why?” he asked.

“I will,” I replied.

“Sure I don't believe it myself, but I swear to God there are those that believe a ban sí takes the form of a hare.”

I wasn't sure what he meant but Bríd had appeared in front of us and was tutting at him.

“Come on now Jamie, it is not even 11 o'clock of the morning and here’s yourself going on about the fairies.”

“In fairness now Bríd I don't believe it myself, but I’ll tell you what happened, and it is as true as this pint, as true as these hands.”

He looked down at his hands, rough and scarred with outdoor work, each one as broad as a shovel, and began. His father had been a hunter and you couldn't find a better shot between here and Ballyshannon. One day, out since dawn for the family pot, he'd seen a hare at arm's-length inside a five-bar gate. Before even thinking he took the shot and knew he had it. But the hare turned and ran. He was so shocked the animal should have been alive that he stood rooted to the ground for a moment. That wee beast should be dead, but it’s not feckin dead, he said to himself, before following its flight.

McDaid’s father ran, knowing after generations on the land which way a hare might turn. Here on a bramble thorn snagged with a scrap of dark fur and there by a raised rut of mud were drops of blood, blood he'd spilled. He ran at a swift pace, as fast as he could move without losing power, over rough ground, along deer and badger paths, slipping between brambles thick and strong as cable, ploughing through caramel tangled brushes of spent ferns, pushing through like an icebreaker, up hills, over bogs, beyond fallen oaks and holy wells.

McDaid looked from my drink to Bríd and told us there were hunters who killed their prey and there were hunters who thought their prey out, and then there were those who became their prey. Men who ironed out the space between man and beast, he said. His father was such a man, and when, after many hours, he looked around him, he was in a place he had never known.

Bríd was pouring me another pint. It was not yet eleven in the morning and although I could work a single pint of Guinness into my day, two would put a stamp on it that could not be easily altered. I let it go: that stamp had been sealed the moment I’d walked through the door. Nothing that had been done could be undone, not by mortals.

As light faded on the chase, McDaid's father reached an airy cage of beech trees higher than a cathedral. He followed the way the hare had led him and the trees shrank down in height until he was crouching amidst a coppiced wood, which all at once opened into a clearing. He stopped and stared ahead. Before him was a cottage, dry stone, the windows, frame and all, long ago ripped out or rotted, its slate roof fallen through. McDaid's father knew the name and history of every dwelling for miles around but he didn't know this. The hare should never have gone into such a place. Yet there was nowhere else it would be.

The doorway of the ruined cottage was framed by four broad slabs of wolf-grey stone and as he stooped to enter, he paused, noticing a splatter of blood anointed on the pale rock. Shotgun cocked, he blundered within and as his eyes found their way in the darkness he made out a hunched figure in a rocking chair by a low turf fire. It was, he thought, an aged woman in a hooded cloak, hair spilling out, a comb in one dry hand. He blurted out an apology - he’d no idea anyone was living there. As he backed out of the cottage the chair rocked and she did not turn or speak, but beneath her was a pool of blood.

‘So I’ll not touch a hare’ he said, as Bríd placed a fresh pint before me. ‘Will you take one yourself Bríd?’

‘Holy Mother, there’s no use pretending we’re in the same place we were after such a yarn. I’ll take a glass Jamie, and pour a couple on the Bridge for you two filas….’

McDaid glanced at me and we both looked down into our pints, waiting for the darkness to settle.

(Note: Bríd can be pronounced Breedge in English and ban sí - banshee)