Raising Hare: A Memoir

by Chloe Dalton

In the dark, she became a different being. With her head held high, her muscular limbs, her regal ears, and her strong body standing over them, providing both shelter and nourishment, she must have seemed to her leverets—as she did to me—an almost mythical figure.

Sounds that I had noticed only intermittently before now reached me every night and were linked in my mind with the hare’s movements: the harsh cacophony of jackdaws settling in the tops of the wood at nightfall; the reverberation of nameless wings; fragments of whistling birdsong; and the piercing call of pheasants, all growing louder as the colours of the landscape merged into one. This nocturnal medley—wild, chaotic, and disconcerting to my ears—heralded the hours where the hare would be at her most alert and active.

Once again, I felt the subtle weight of the invisible bond of trust between us. It was as fragile as the whiskers that I occasionally found on the carpet—like miniature porcupine quills. The unbroken stretch of sunny days gave way to rain, and the chill was enough to warrant a fire. I crept past the mother hare on her bench to place another log in the stove.

Groomed to her satisfaction, she moved a short distance away before tucking her paws under her on the carpet, lying by the cooling embers of the fire. Her leverets dozed—or sat lost in reverie—just a few feet away, in the other room. The house smelled faintly like digestive biscuits: the scent of hares.

They jostled each other in the doorway out into the garden as they both tried to leave at the same time, and then slipped out one by one, milliseconds apart. I wondered what it must be like for them to encounter grass for the first time, to smell the wind over dry earth and plants heavy with flower, and to be assailed by all the sounds of the wild. Eventually, they grew bold enough to play in the flower bed together. I did not see them slip back into the house in the morning, but come daylight, there they were, each in their respective resting place.

In the morning, I would find both of them lying on the sofa like a pair of basking seals, close to each other, their ears cocked watchfully, or standing on the windowsill looking out at the world, their breath creating minute circles of fog against the glass. They would run leisurely for the open door as I entered, cautious but unafraid. Soon both leverets would climb up the stairs to sleep in my room, in a pattern uncannily similar to their mother’s when she was young. The sense of safety that had drawn her there seemed to appeal to them too. In the afternoon, they played in the garden.

In medical terms, superfetation is defined as “the fertilization of a second ovum some time after the start of pregnancy, resulting in two foetuses of different maturity in the same uterus.” According to research into the phenomenon—which remains in some doubt due to a lack of understanding of the biological mechanism by which it is enabled—it results in the growth of fertilised eggs in the uterus of a hare alongside a developed foetus. Superfetation has been observed to occur naturally in some 13 per cent of hare pregnancies, and has been carried out artificially under laboratory conditions.

Superfetation is believed to occur in the American mink and the European badger as well, but unlike hares’, their offspring are all born on the same day.

superfetation has been described as “rare” in the wild. I wondered if the fact that the hare was well fed, in good condition and sheltered had contributed to the occurrence. It was also striking to me that the foxglove plant was only separated by the width of a wall from the place where the hare had given birth to her second litter.

Man has nothing that the animals have not at least a vestige of, the animals have nothing that man does not in some degree share. —Ernest Thompson Seton, Wild Animals I Have Known, 1898

Larks filled the skies with rippling, rising song. A red-legged partridge marched along the ridge stone of the barn in the evening: a rotund, plucky figure, puffing out its chest, gradually working itself up to its song—a deafening cacophony of clicks, screeches and honks, like the grind of broken machinery. Singing its lonely heart out for a mate, it jerked its little tail up and down, ratcheting up the volume as it peered across the fields.

There were other, subtle differences: their whiskers were still short, sticking out from their cheeks at right angles, whereas hers formed a soft halo around the entirety of her muzzle, with those closest to her mouth curving down towards her paws.

It had taken their mother four months to learn to jump the wall, although I thought about the fact that they had the benefit of her example and might acquire the knack more quickly. In the meantime, they were vulnerable to predators creeping up on them in the hedge. On the other hand, if I let them out before they learnt to jump the wall, then I denied them the possibility of ever returning, and cut them off from their accustomed home.

I decided I had to let events take their course.

I believed that the larger leveret was a male and might therefore be more assertive than the mother hare. Instead of nibbling at the leaves on the hedge, he pulled down whole lengths of the long whippy branches with his front paws and snipped them off.

The tips of his paws easily reached over three feet off the ground, leaving overlapping arcs smeared on the glass. It was hard to believe that he had started his life only able to drag his legs behind him. If a leveret could be said to have swagger, this one had it.

The hare is vulnerable to wounds. It often takes only one lead pellet to kill a hare. —A. A. Cherkassov, Notes of an East Siberian Hunter, 1865

What a destructive, cruel being man is, how many living beings and plants he annihilates to maintain his own life. —Leo Tolstoy, Hadji Murat, 1912

No wild animal dies of old age. Its life has soon or late a tragic end. It is only a question of how long it can hold out against its foes. —Ernest Thompson Seton, Wild Animals I Have Known, 1898

At this age, their mother had first conquered the wall, and it seemed only a matter of time before they would do the same. I hoped that when they did, they would find their way back if they wished or needed to, and that they would live long, free and unburdened lives in a landscape which was immeasurably more beautiful for their presence. Their safety should lie in their own habitat, not in the unnatural environment of a human home, no matter how much that household accommodated their needs.

The female of the two leverets showed little inclination to leave. She took to slipping into the house alone and lying for hours upon the sofa, easing a long, languorous back leg and furry paw out over the edge, her head flat against the fabric and her whiskers catching the light, twitching gently with the rise and fall of her breath, like a cobweb shimmering in the breeze. At night she would reappear and lounge in the same spot until dawn, her eyes two round glowing orbs in the infrared light of the camera.

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.

Still, it is impossible not to observe and admire her qualities, and to associate them with some of the human qualities to which many of us aspire: patience, dignity, calm and strength among them. Were it in my power, I would replace “mad as a March hare” in our language with “as gentle as a hare,” “as faithful as a hare” and “as constant.”

The hare lends itself as a symbol of the transience of life and its fleeting glory, and our dependence on nature and our careless destruction of it. But in the hare—and nature’s—endless capacity for renewal, we can find hope.

If it is possible, as William Blake would have it, “to see a world in a grain of sand,” then perhaps we can see all nature in a hare: its simplicity and intricacy, fragility and glory, transience and beauty.

She will never be tame. The language she listens to—the sounds her ears search for—are the sounds of the wild. But she seems to feel comfortable with me, and sometimes she rests near me.

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.

I return often in my mind to the question of whether or not a hare can be domesticated. I now see that this is not really the point. To domesticate is to alter the nature of an animal in order to fit it into our way of life as humans. For innately wild animals such as the hare, a better way is to coexist.

Coexistence gives our own existence greater poignancy, and perhaps even grandeur. My wish now is for an environment that is safer for hares and other creatures of the land, wherever they may live: not at the expense of humans, but in balance with our priorities.

Under the subtle influence of the hare, my own wants have simplified. To be dependable in love and friendship more than in work. To leave the land in a more natural state than I found it. And to take better care of what is to hand, seeing beauty and value in the ordinary.

The grass in the centre of the field reached my waist in places, and I startled hares that ran and leapt, cresting the tops of the grass with a smooth flowing motion, dolphins of the meadow.

The leaves on the edge of the wood were tinged, in places, with the first traces of autumn gold. The spruce trees were rich in sticky pendulous fir cones, the holly gaudy with scarlet drupes, clustered as thickly as ripe grapes. In the shadow of the wood, legions of thistles stood decaying into otherworldly desiccated shapes, their dried seed heads hanging sorrowfully amid tussocks of tangled clover. The hedgerows were spread with a banquet of blackberries, a feast for passing birds.

Everywhere was abundance, fullness. The season was turning, but summer was still welling, overflowing every bank and verge. Skeins of migrating geese flew above, fleeing ahead of the coming cold, their wingbeats forceful and the leave while you can of their urgent, strident calls punctuating the air. A pair of deer locked horns in the lee of the wood. I startled a milk-white barn owl out of a pine above me. It swooped over my head, turning slowly, showing me the white underside of its wings and body and—for a moment, I was sure—looking down at me.

The presence of the owl was testament to the success of the wildflower margins around the fields, which were already increasing the supply of voles and mice. I peered up at the branches of other trees, hoping for a glimpse of the owl. Instead I found a grey squirrel frozen flat against the trunk of an oak, its body in shadow, the fur on its face, short rounded ears and agile paws tawny-orange in colour. The charcoal-grey fur of its tail was edged in contrasting white—a trick of camouflage similar to the hare’s but in this case suited to the tones and textures of bark.

I startled a buzzard bent over a lifeless form on the ground before me. It took flight with one pulse of its immense wings and circled nearby, waiting to see if it could return to the kill. My heart lurched as I recognised the body of a hare on its back, belly to the sky, its slim white stomach opened up from chest to tail.

I turned away from the sight of fresh blood beading on its fur, the words arterial blood red, head of the cock goldfinch rising unbidden to my mind. I did not think it was the mother hare, although she could have easily ranged this far, but I was reminded of the mortality bearing down on her, and on all living things, myself included.

I found myself looking at an open field of freshly sown corn, where I counted ten hares loitering in pairs or lying singly upwind of me, basking in the day’s last burst of sunshine. I wondered if “my” hare was among them.

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.

Since that first day when I found her it has felt as if a spell was cast over this corner of the earth, and me within it. I have stepped out of my usual life and had the privilege of an experience out of the ordinary. Had it not been for the unique circumstances of the pandemic, I would never have come across the hare, and my life would have continued along its familiar grooves. How glad I am now that I did not leave for the city the moment it became possible. I am grateful for every additional day that I gazed out of the window.

I take comfort in the fact that this process of self-discovery has been felt by millions before me, and that there is nothing original in finding consolation and inspiration in nature. It is there for all of us, perhaps our one true shared heritage and source of hope for regeneration in our own, hard-pressed lives.

I think of the hare, stepping lightly on the earth, taking cover if the wind blows. We are not so dissimilar. If we do not achieve all upon which we have set our hearts, or are beaten back by headwinds stronger than our desires, we too can lay up a while, watch the glitter on the grass, and renew our strength.

Despite having spent thousands of hours asleep in the house, the only traces the hare has left are a shallow, almost imperceptible indentation in the carpet across the doorway to my office, where her warm, long body has worn the surface smooth with its minute daily adjustments; six of her whiskers, scattered over the years; and a few weightless tufts of fur. The damp footprints she leaves on the floor on wet or dewy mornings evaporate within minutes. The emotional impact she has left, by contrast, is immense.

She has taught me patience. And as someone who has made their living through words, she has made me consider the dignity and persuasiveness of silence. She showed me a different life, and the richness of it.

The sensation of wonder she ignited in me continues to burn, showing me that aspects of my life I thought were set in stone are in fact as malleable as wax, and may be shaped or reshaped. She did not change, I did. I have not tamed the hare, but in many ways the hare has stilled me.

The atmosphere of calm suffused by her throughout the house lingers even when she is gone. I hope always to be able to summon it at will, along with the memory of the light and trusting touch of her paws in the palm of my hand, and her steady, unfathomable gaze. And when one day I can no longer see her, I will watch the hares in the field knowing that her being is woven into theirs, and that I have only to look up at night to see her symbol etched in the stars.

I will remember her leaving, but will know that before she did, she always, first, looked back.