Raising Hare: A Memoir

by Chloe Dalton

How the mother hare would behave now was a mystery to me. It occurred to me that she might react aggressively if I accidentally got between her and her leverets, or could generally be more wary of me. I received my answer just before nightfall, when the hare slipped back into the house. She came straight up to me in the kitchen, rearing back on her hind legs and patting my thigh with her feather-light paws. I crouched down, and she leant her body against my side. She stayed close to me for a while before drawing away, in the process uttering her soft call once again. The meaning of this tantalising sound still eluded me. Brown hares are said to squeal and grind their teeth when injured or threatened and to growl during mating. Canadian snowshoe hares reportedly make a clicking noise during the breeding season or to call to their young, but this still didn’t correspond to the noise I heard. Nothing I have found since comes close to describing the gentle sound the hare made after it had been feeding from my hand when it was a leveret, and that she continued to utter to me even after she became a mother. As night fell, the hare lay beneath her favourite plum tree, turned, as ever, towards the setting sun. I left her door open, climbed the stairs and went to bed, treading quietly, conscious of the leverets hiding in the room immediately