Raising Hare: A Memoir

by Chloe Dalton

Hares in Poland that had been transported from their home range were found to travel roughly 250 miles to return to it, while scientists in Quebec recorded the movement of a female Arctic hare that covered over 240 miles in forty-nine days in Canada’s far north—a little more than the distance from New York City to Boston, and an average of five miles a day for seven weeks in a row—before

250 miles to return to it, while scientists in Quebec recorded the movement of a female Arctic hare that covered over 240 miles in forty-nine days in Canada’s far north—a

little more than the distance from New York ...

realised that my own home range had changed because of the leveret. Before, I had no settled pattern of my own. If anything, given the amount I travelled,

ceasing to turn the lights on at the first hint of night, I found myself more comfortable moving in darkness, and

first hint of night, I found myself more comfortable moving in darkness, and instead looking out into the landscape, waiting for its inhabitants to emerge.

instead looking out into the landscape, waiting for its inh...

carapace was a temperament that longed for quieter, more gentle rhythms.

The fox’s gaze was calm and keen, his gait unhurried—exactly how I imagined a fox would look had it just made a fine breakfast: “fat with nocturnal spoils,” in the words of one of the poems by William Somervile I had read about hare hunting.

Hares scattered across the fields at my approach, but none that I could recognise. I trailed home despondently, to find the leveret in the house, sitting back calmly on its hind legs by the fireplace, looking at me as if to ask what had taken so long.

At six months old, the leveret was nearly fully grown, with glorious long ears. The length and thinness of its legs was astonishing. Its slim haunches were taut with tendon and muscle, while the thick, soft pad of each hind paw was almost as long again as the rest of its leg.

My anxiety knew no bounds. I could not—would not—lock it in the house, I could not stop it leaping the wall at night, which it continued to do, and I could not prevent a predator from seizing it. My worry was not helped by spotting a fox again—this time in the garden itself, wandering coolly beneath my window at dead of

local vet and said in her usual kind, practical and direct way that if the hare continued to eat, I should take heart. “It’s when animals take themselves off into a corner and refuse food that you know they are going to die.”

feared that the experience, if not fatal, might shatter its trust in me. The leveret had never been put in a sealed box or transported, and I imagined its sensitive heart pounding away in such a confined space until it gave out. I told

Having watched a video of the leveret limping, he said it could be a sprain or a rolled ankle, which in theory should be treated with anti-inflammatory medication, but he had never treated a hare before, and the clinic’s stores contained no medicines specifically for them. The best he could offer was a treatment suitable for small dogs and a dose proportionate to the animal’s size. He asked me to find a way

carried it to the bathroom and stood on the scales. It weighed six pounds, a far cry from the scrap of fur and ears that I had found six months previously. I

He told me to inject the liquid into its mouth.

“OWNER.” I smiled, since nothing could be further from the truth. The leveret defied ownership, belonging only to itself.

It has an innocence and purity all its own. In the absence of verbal communication, we extend ourselves to comprehend and meet their needs and, in return,

lost my nerve altogether. What if I’d weighed the leveret incorrectly, or the medicine ruined its stomach, or the dose was too high and killed it? The thought was unbearable. In the end, the medicine lay unused in the fridge. I decided that the best thing I could do was ensure

Eventually, it made a full recovery, and I watched it stand on its hind legs and engage both front paws to rain plums out of a tree in the garden, the drumming it had practised in its early days being put to good use.

fields of stubble were ploughed; transformed within minutes to brown wastelands, churned-up battlefields of Somme-like proportions from the perspective of a hare. The earth was cut, broken up and turned over by a tractor dragging a plough, and then drilled and sowed with new seed. I pictured the hares fleeing the steel tractors, their hearts pounding in fear, only to return and find their forms—or their leverets—crushed beneath the vast oblivious treads, or later licking their back paws, unknowingly coating their tongues with chemicals, once the new crops were sprayed. The intensification of agriculture has been described as the “superfactor” leading to the decline of the hare population. The

“stook”

Trees were felled by hand—large trees by two people, one on either side of the trunk, pulling a double-ended saw to and fro between them.

but the costs to the planet have been high, as we now understand. One cost is noise pollution.

planes, cars, heavy vehicles and the intrusive squeal of their sirens and warning signals. In agriculture and forestry, machines have become huge and increasingly robotic.

uninterrupted sleep is vital for human health and that darkened rooms are essential for good sleep, yet we seldom think about the sleep of animals and birds or the ability of nocturnal animals to navigate.

I worried it might not develop a sufficiently thick coat because of the time it spent indoors. But its winter pelt came on rapidly, including a generous ruff of fur below its throat that swelled like a mane as the weeks passed, and that it would sink its neck into while

sometimes emerging from fog like a wraith. Returning one afternoon,

ghost/spirit

When I watched it lie huddled against the wall of the house during the first snowstorm,

One dusk I spotted it loitering by the gate in the near-darkness, waiting to be let out. I opened it, and the hare took off confidently, then stopped a few yards away and looked back at me. For a moment I wondered if it thought of me as a strange species of hare and expected me to follow it off into the misty evening.

one year old the leveret passed imperceptibly into adulthood. It had not lost its energy. It loved to race in through one door of the house, out through another, and back around, jinking in the air and turning 180 degrees while airborne, then accelerating off in the opposite direction.

hare still stayed near to home,

strings of hares running in huge, sweeping arcs across the fields beyond the garden wall. The frontrunner would race away from the rest of the chain, in a series of sharp zig-zag lines, with acute and astonishingly fast changes of tack seemingly designed to shake off its pursuers. It would at times pivot on its front paws

A particularly intense bout of boxing near the barn one late afternoon produced great tufts of fur that were distinctly visible, flying in the low sun. Courtship fights can last several days, and it is the male hare’s repeated touching of the

body of the female that stimulates ovulation.

the pugilistic behaviour of hares entered the lexicon long ago as a synonym for madness—“as mad as a March Hare,” in Lewis Carroll’s phrase, or “harebrained” as shorthand for the ill-judged, rash or imprudent schemes of people.

gradually lost its winter pelt it developed whorls of pale fur on its face—vivid patterns like those I’d noticed on other hares. It continued to show its uncanny meteorological awareness—drumming on the outside of the sitting-room door one afternoon, demanding admittance, moments before a dramatic storm of hailstones. The

indigenous hare, Lepus capensis. I hoped I might catch a glimpse of the desert-dweller and ancestor to the brown hare,

I saw birds building a nest in the middle of a roundabout amid a tangle of concrete flyovers, persisting in their struggle to survive and reproduce despite the heat and choking fumes, and felt new respect for their tenacity and dignity.

I read that pregnant hares—like most other animals—spend time choosing a safe place as they reach full term.

Any time one of the three made an unauthorised foray during daylight hours, the mother hare pounced fiercely, diving at the offending leveret with outstretched paws, until it ducked back into its hiding place.

At dusk, she would feed her leverets under my bedroom window, in a spot where the land was highest and the view on all sides was clear. As

At some shift in the light, undetectable to me, she raced over until she covered them completely with her body. As they fed, she washed them vigorously with her tongue. She was firm, and brisk, and constantly on guard for danger.

around. She seemed to make a point of avoiding giving away their locations by spending time either inside the house or in the inner courtyard, where she had otherwise not been for months.

On several occasions I watched her lunge fearlessly at crows that came too close,

wielding her front legs like a battering ram and successfully chasing them off her territory, despite their larger size and formidable beaks.

The Greek orator Demosthenes warned, in his speech “On the Crown,” against living “the life of a hare, in fear and trembling.” Aesop’s fable “The Hares and the Frogs” describes hares as “very timid,” saying that “the least shadow sends them scurrying in fright to a hiding place.”

the hare in her maternity was tenacious and courageous, and the care she took to confront a threat to her leverets showed resourcefulness rather than neglect.

contrasted more sharply with my experience. Instead of being cowardly, the hare and her leverets were careful. Rather than being fearful, they were inquisitive, lively and even sociable.