Many years before Pitts heard the story, a Guernsey gentleman went over to Sark and sat on the cliffs above Havre Gosselin. He noticed a flock of birds, mostly wild duck, circling round and round. He fired his musket and hit nothing, and, to his surprise, did not even frighten them off. Wild duck are shy birds, and he became convinced something was wrong. Back in Guernsey he consulted a well-known wizard, who told him that a musket loaded with a piece of silver bearing a cross would take effect on any transformed witch.
He went back to Sark with his silver bullet and found the birds circling again over Havre Gosselin. He picked out the finest of the flock, which seemed to be leading the others, and fired. He winged it, although it disappeared and he thought it had got away.
That evening, on the boat back to Guernsey, a girl who crossed to Sark almost every day, and about whom people talked, appeared "with a bad wound in her hand, about which she would vouchsafe no explanation, but looking very white and frightened." He identified her with the bird in his own mind but kept quiet for years. The story belongs to the Guernsey belief, recorded by MacCulloch, that a transformed witch can be wounded only by silver. Havre Gosselin is reached down a steep path from the west of the island.
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