Raising Hare: A Memoir

by Chloe Dalton

The mother hare has given me a sense of an animal that is intelligent, wise, playful and devoted. A sun-loving, frugal, dignified creature, raising its young on the few remaining scraps of land left to it in a hostile world. An animal that is not solitary by character, but out of caution; that gives every sign of taking pleasure in its existence; that has a capacity to learn; that is faithful to a stretch of land—and even to a single patch of earth—for the duration of its life; and that will chase off a predator to protect its young. A creature of habit, set hours and favourite places, that walks so lightly on this earth, and that can be trusting on its own terms.

Not once has she approached me in the fields, and I assume that beyond the wall she runs from me as she would from any human. But I find I do not need to know any more than I already do. I am content with the small part of her life that overlaps with mine. Ours are different worlds. She can cross into mine, but hers will always be out of reach to me, and that is as it should be. Perhaps, like Cowper’s hare, she might live to old age if she were kept shut up in the house. But that would be to alter her nature. Instead, she lives the life of the wild hare: hard-pressed, short perhaps, but free.

The hare will soon be three years old. She has survived three winters and three harvests, given birth at least three times to at least six leverets—and probably more—and she has survived one serious injury. She has already lived a long life for a hare in the wild. She leaps the garden wall into a world of dangers, some from other animals, others human-made. Every minute she chooses to spend in my vicinity feels precious and fleeting.

I prefer to think of her stepping delicately through the corn stubble, sampling the wind, then racing, outstripping all the other hares until she chooses to let one catch up. I picture her occasionally looking back from afar to see the gleam of the light in the window of the room where I am sitting now to write, waiting for her to leap over the wall once more, shake out her ears and slip into the house, sure of her safety and her welcome.