Raising Hare: A Memoir

by Chloe Dalton

That’s a hind leg, I thought. It should not face up that way. I drew the cloth back and saw that the bigger of the two leverets lay on its front with its rear legs stuck straight out behind its body. What is wrong with it? I

existence. I looked out of the window at the mother hare, lying peacefully in the hedge, and wondered if she had noticed the deformity. Would she abandon her leveret if it could not keep up? What should I do if she did? What future could there be for a hare that could not run? I washed my hands and doused them with a little of the milk supplement I had used to feed the hare when she was a newborn, so that, if I now left any traces on her leveret, it might at least be a familiar scent. I pulled the curtain aside carefully and picked up the leveret to examine its hind legs. It made quiet puffing noises of anxiety—a touching series of soft, warning grunts—but did not seem to be

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

had fed her leverets three times in the night—at ten o’clock, at two in the morning, and then at five, by which time it was already light; a far more frequent feeding pattern than that described in the studies I had read, which asserted that mother hares only nurse their young once in twenty-four hours, after sunset.

They climbed over each other in their haste to press close to her, kneading her chest with their tiny paws. As the warm milk trickled into their eager mouths, their legs gradually gave way beneath them, until they collapsed entirely and she rolled them over to clean them while their back paws flailed softly in the air; then she darted away without warning, leaving them floundering on the carpet, warm,

Weasels ermine …minks?

African songbird