Maybe the hare’s dubious reputation, I thought, has less to do with the hare itself than our habit as humans of persecuting the things that we do not understand, and our own conflicted natures. The word “hare” comes from the Old English word for the colour grey—appropriate, perhaps, for an animal that still eludes definition. To me, the young leveret seemed still too small a creature to bear the weight of so much history, superstition and expectation, and I resolved to take it as I found it.
