[Wounds inflicted on an animal into which a witch has transformed herself are inflicted on the witch herself.]

Again, the wounds inflicted on a witch-hare or a witch-cat are to be seen on the witch herself, just as the wounds inflicted on a were-wolf are to be seen on the man himself when he has doffed the wolfs skin.  To take a few instances out of a multitude, a young man in the island of Lismore was out shooting.  When he was near Balnagown loch, he started a hare and fired at it.  The animal gave an unearthly scream, and then for the first time it occurred to him that there were no real hares in Lismore.  He threw away his gun in terror and fled home; and next day he heard that a notorious witch was laid up with a broken leg.  A man need be no conjuror to guess how she came by that broken leg.[774] Again, at Thurso certain witches used to turn themselves into cats and in that shape to torment an honest man.  One night he lost patience, whipped out his broadsword, and put them to flight.  As they were scurrying away he struck at them and cut off a leg of one of the cats.  To his astonishment it was a woman’s leg, and next morning he found one of the witches short of the corresponding limb.[775] Glanvil tells a story of “an old woman in Cambridge-shire, whose astral spirit, coming into a man’s house (as he was sitting alone at the fire) in the shape of an huge cat, and setting her self before the fire, not far from him, he stole a stroke at the back of it with a fire-fork, and seemed to break the back of it, but it scambled from him, and vanisht he knew not how.  But such an old woman, a reputed witch, was found dead in her bed that very night, with her back broken, as I have heard some years ago credibly reported."[776] In Yorkshire during the latter half of the nineteenth century a parish clergyman was told a circumstantial story of an old witch named Nanny, who was hunted in the form of a hare for several miles over the Westerdale moors and kept well away from the dogs, till a black one joined the pack and succeeded in taking a bit out of one of the hare’s legs.  That was the end of the chase, and immediately afterwards the sportsmen found old Nanny laid up in bed with a sore leg.  On examining the wounded limb they discovered that the hurt was precisely in that part of it which in the hare had been bitten by the black dog and, what was still more significant, the wound had all the appearance of having been inflicted by a dog’s teeth.  So they put two and two together.[777] The same sort of thing is often reported in Lincolnshire.  “One night,” said a servant from Kirton Lindsey, “my father and brother saw a cat in front of them.  Father knew it was a witch, and took a stone and hammered it.  Next day the witch had her face all tied up, and shortly afterwards died.”  Again, a Bardney bumpkin told how a witch in his neighbourhood could take all sorts of shapes.  One night a man shot a hare, and when he went to the witch’s house he found her plastering a wound just where he had shot the hare.[778] So in County Leitrim, in Ireland, they say that a hare pursued by dogs fled to a house near at hand, but just as it was bolting in at the door one of the dogs came up with it and nipped a piece out of its leg.  The hunters entered the house and found no hare there but only an old woman, and her side was bleeding; so they knew what to think of her.[779]