A sweet-natured hare wins the heart of a writer

In times of great stress, people often find comfort in the natural world, sometimes by forging unexpected connections with wild creatures. This has resulted in a bounty of beautiful books, including Helen Macdonald’s “H is for Hawk,” Amy Tan’s “The Backyard Bird Chronicles,” and Catherine Raven’s “Fox and I,” along with Craig Foster’s documentary film, “My Octopus Teacher.” 

Chloe Dalton’s “Raising Hare” is a welcome addition to these stories of transformative, interspecies trust-building. It follows a classic narrative: a busy city person with a demanding job who, due to circumstances beyond her control, is forced to stop and smell the flowers. During the pandemic lockdown, Dalton, a London-based political adviser who traveled frequently for work, retreats to her country home, a converted barn that “stood alone in a broad expanse of arable farmland, quartered by streams and hedgerows and interspersed with stands of woodland.”

One cold winter day, walking along an unpaved track, Dalton comes upon a newborn hare – a leveret – lying helpless on a grass strip. She wavers about interfering with nature, but when she returns hours later, the tiny creature is still there. She carries it home, wrapped in handfuls of grass, which she hopes will protect it from her scent. 

Uncertain how to proceed, Dalton consults several animal experts, who tell her unequivocally that hares, unlike rabbits, cannot be domesticated. She had no intention of taming the leveret, merely of rescuing it, “But it seemed that I had committed a bad error of judgment.” Too late to turn back, she bottle-feeds it a powdered milk formula meant for kittens, which gives her the rare “luxury of observing the leveret at close quarters” in its “trembling, milky ecstasy.” 

“Raising Hare” is filled with fascinating information gleaned from both close observation and research. Although rabbits and hares belong to the same order of animals, Lagomorpha, hares are generally twice the size of rabbits, and the two species never interbreed. Unlike rabbits, hares are capable of carrying two litters simultaneously in serial, overlapping pregnancies – a feat called superfetation. 

While children’s literature is filled with anthropomorphized rabbits, including Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit, Margery Williams’ Velveteen Rabbit, and Margaret Wise Brown’s Runaway Bunny, hares are somewhat rarer. Dalton points out two notable, unflattering exceptions: the mad March Hare in Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” and Mark Twain’s “jackass rabbit” in “Roughing It.” 

Through trial and error, Dalton learns what works and what doesn’t. Corralling the leveret in a makeshift pen for its protection is upsetting to the sensitive creature. So, too, are male visitors, loud noises, and bright lights. Rather than forcing her houseguest to adapt, Dalton changes her habits to accommodate the animal. She refrains from turning on lights at dusk and even installs a door for the leveret to go in and out to the walled garden at will.  

From the outset, her plan is to release the animal back into nature once it’s weaned, and to give it as much freedom as possible in the meantime. She resists naming it, because “to name the hare was to proclaim it a pet.” This leads to some narrative challenges, especially when – spoiler alert – new generations of leverets enter the picture.

Dalton finds that the hare she’s sheltering is neither mad nor jackass. Charmed by the growing leveret’s “gentle temper and unwavering sweetness,” she becomes a champion of these crepuscular creatures, which are most active at dawn and dusk. 

She is alarmed by how vulnerable they are to predators like hawks, owls, buzzards, and snakes, but also to murderous farm machinery and hunters. On average only 25% of leverets reach adulthood, and few live past three or four years. 

In Britain, hundreds of thousands of hares are shot each year for recreation – “the only game species not protected by a closed hunting season.” 

Well aware that her “new spirit of attentiveness to nature” aroused by the hare is an old story, Dalton makes it fresh with often gorgeous descriptions of the silent hare’s highly expressive ear positions, its meticulous cleanliness, and its lustrous fur coat, which changes coloration with the seasons.  

“Raising Hare” is an open-ended rather than a “hare today, gone tomorrow” tale. Lacking the expected, traditional narrative arc that ends in loss, its final chapters drag a bit. But Dalton’s paean to her “wondrous,” life-changing communion with this animal offers many exquisite moments, including her description of hares leaping and cresting the tops of tall grasses in the fields surrounding her house “with a smooth flowing motion, [like] dolphins of the meadow.”