As the light began to fade, the leverets emerged from their separate hiding places, and gradually converged on a bare patch of earth surrounded by grass teeming with clover flowers, bone-grey in the near-darkness. The hare watched them for about half an hour, keeping her distance, during what must have been the period of greatest peril for her and the leverets, when they would be visible to passing predators. 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
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