"Raising Hare"

Chloe Dalton

The trees were frosted white with windblown snowflakes, while icy cobwebs hung in the hedgerows like frozen cat’s cradles. A lone kestrel brooded on the garden fence, spectral in the dim light. Lean foxes patrolled the landscape, stalking gully and thicket, their boldness heightened by hunger. A patch of bloody, clotted down was all that remained of a plump wood pigeon, as if a bag of feathers had been upended upon the ground.
Its fur was dark brown, thick and choppy, and grew in delicate curls along its spine. Long, pale guard hairs and whiskers stood out from its body and glowed in the weak sun, creating a corona of light around its rump and muzzle... Its forepaws were pressed tightly together, fringed in fur the colour of bone and overlapping as if for comfort. Its jet-black eyes were encircled with a thick, uneven band of creamy fur. High on its forehead was a distinct white mark that stood out like a minute dribble of paint.
* Its mouth was a tiny sooty line, situated on the underside of its rounded little head and curved down at both corners as if the leveret were already slightly disappointed by life. Its ebony eyes had the faintly milky, purple sheen of many newborn creatures.
When the centrifugal forces of the pandemic flung me home to the countryside and pinned me there, relief and awareness of my good fortune warred inside me with a deep restlessness and anxiety about the future.
I, on the other hand, am squeamish about blood and unsettled by illness and life’s other raw moments, preferring – or hoping – to keep such pain at a distance.
The sky is low, the wind forceful. Water runs underground, surfacing with spouts and gurgles into narrow streams that wind through low-hanging stands of alder, willow and birch; urgent in winter, unhurried in summer.
* each strand of its fur seemed to be marked in alternating shades of dark and light. This baffled me until I learnt that so-called agouti colouring – varying bands of pigmentation on an individual hair – is an essential feature of camouflage in hares and many other wild animals
Unlike a dog’s, the soles of the leveret’s paws were furry: soft and warm to the touch and always immaculate. One ancient Greek name for a hare translates as ‘shaggy foot’,
Perhaps to compensate for hours spent immobile in this way, and to loosen its joints and muscles, the leveret stretched itself carefully and comprehensively... For four or five seconds at a time the leveret’s body would be as straight as an arrow – with its ears held erect and alert – while it lengthened every muscle from its neck to its ankles.
The leveret’s eyes also began to change colour, from their original inky black. Hares, it seemed, weren’t born with the amber eyes they are known for. Over the course of a month, a pale outer ring developed around the black pupil, turning gradually into a striking, glowing iris.
In his poem ‘Epitaph on a Hare’, written in mourning after Tiney’s death, I finally came across what I was looking for: On twigs of hawthorn he regaled, / On pippins’ russet peel; / And, when his juicy salads failed, / Sliced carrot pleased him well.
* it loved an occasional raspberry. The sticky, squishy sound of a hare eating a raspberry has to be heard to be believed. Since hares don’t use their paws to help them eat, in the way that dogs or parrots grip their food at times to gain a better purchase, it would pick up the thimble-shaped cone in its mouth by one edge and slowly mash its jaws, drawing it in bead by bead while the raspberry bobbed up and down in front of its nose.
Hares, I learnt, are ‘crepuscular’ animals – creatures of the twilight. In other words, they are most active during dawn and dusk as well as the nocturnal hours, which help to mask them from predators.
* Rabbits and hares belong to the same ‘order’ of animals, Lagomorpha. They share certain characteristics, such as perforated latticework structures in their skulls designed to protect their brains against the jarring effects of jumping. But hares are generally twice the size of rabbits – in fact, the Greek name for rabbit translates into English as ‘half hare’.
‘jackass rabbit’, the name apparently bestowed upon hares in America by early European settlers. Mark Twain was at least partly responsible for popularising this unflattering designation... "He is just like any other rabbit, except that he is from one third to twice as large, has longer legs in proportion to his size, and has the most preposterous ears that ever were mounted on any creature but a jackass."
It would jump in the air from a standing start: springing up on its back legs, then stretching out at full length so that its head and haunches were higher than its stomach – its body concave – and its ears upright and exuberant. In mid-flight, it would invert the position, drawing its hind legs up around its ears with its forepaws pointed down to the earth, like a frog jumping, but seemingly hanging in the air. It would land, spin off in a different direction and repeat the leap again and again
The hare can move at thirty-seven of its own body lengths a second, more than the twenty-three body lengths per second achieved by a vigorous cheetah.
Hares, like other prey animals, can suffer capture myopathy – a form of fatal trauma in wild animals as a result of being caught and handled. They have been known to hurl themselves at cage bars and break their limbs or necks, dying in their desperate desire to escape unnatural confinement.
* Hares, I learnt, engage in ‘cryptic behaviour’, an ecological strategy to avoid predators by means of disguise and camouflage. It has been suggested that the word ‘camouflage’ comes from the French camouflet, referring to an ancient type of smoke-producing military mine used to disorient an enemy, an apt metaphor for the purpose of the leveret’s intriguing colouring. Its stomach – the part of its body closest to the ground – was white, while its back was brown. This ‘counter-shading’, designed to confuse the eye of a predator and buy the hare time to flee if necessary, is a tactic used by sharks for the opposite purpose: to conceal their approach from a victim until it is too late. It distorts the shadow, rendering dark the part of the body that would normally be illuminated by the sun
* taboos against eating the meat of hares, going back to the Old Testament, in which the hare is deemed ‘unclean’ for its habit of eating its droppings, known as ‘refection’, which struck me as a little unfair, since both rabbits and hares have to reabsorb their first, soft green pellets in order to extract fully the nourishment within the grass
More than 2,000 years ago, Herodotus described how the hare ‘alone of all creatures . . . conceives in pregnancy’, so that while some of a hare’s young ‘are still forming in the womb others are already being chased and killed’. Aristotle... What both authors were recording is a process known as ‘superfetation’, by which hares are capable of carrying two litters of leverets simultaneously.
As it ate, its ears would swivel across different angles, monitoring sounds as its jaws moved continuously. When lying flat on its stomach in the sun, it would often hold them upright as if to compensate for its lowered defences. As the light shone through the firm but tender flesh, a web of three main veins could be clearly seen running down the length of each ear, joined by a filigree of finer capillaries.
* On wet days it would take time for the leveret to lick itself dry before it could lounge. Arriving in the house after a rain shower, it would spin on its back legs and leap away, flicking drops of water from its paws. If it was really soaking wet, it would balance on its back feet and spin to left and right, around 180 degrees, so fast it was reduced to a blur, spraying muddy water across the room to spatter on the pale walls, which were soon uniformly pocked with dark flecks to the height of a standing hare.
* washing: It would then attend to its ears, pulling each one down firmly with a forepaw, one at a time, to trap and press it to its mouth, so it could clean inside the ear with its tongue. When the ear was released, it did not automatically spring upright, but would dangle down until the leveret chose to flick it skywards again. ... It would then drop to all fours and use a hind paw to scratch vigorously inside each ear – half closing each eye protectively as its claws came perilously close – before sitting back on its haunches, spreading the furry toes on its back paws like a catcher’s mitt, and cleaning between them. When the toes were fully splayed, the arch created on the sole of the paw was so broad that the whole of the leveret’s wide muzzle fit snugly into it.
I discovered that far from resenting these inconveniences, I loved having a reason to change my habits. <> The leveret’s preoccupations influenced me in other, more subtle ways. As its gaze travelled further, so did mine, drawing my mind, and increasingly my feet, outdoors.
I felt a new spirit of attentiveness to nature, no less wonderful for being entirely unoriginal, for as old as it is as a human experience, it was new to me.
* the amount of space they use and need in which to search for food, to mate, rear young and find safety – not unlike humans. <> A hare’s home range averages between 21 and 190 hectares – or between roughly 30 and 300 football pitches in size, a huge area relative to the size of the animal. Many hares cover as much as fifteen to twenty kilometres (9–12 miles) of ground at night to forage.
It dawned on me that by raising the leveret in my home, the building was part – if not the centre – of its home range, and that it was possible that it associated the house with food and refuge. It might also explain the leveret’s sensitivity to changes in the house.
Whereas I had been impervious to well-intentioned advice from friends, the leveret worked upon my character soundlessly and wordlessly, easing some of the nervous tension and impatience that I realised I had been living with as a result of a life constantly on the move and on call for others.
* Maintained over years, this steady, watchful, guarded attitude had become a way of life for me – one in which I constantly looked out for pitfalls, anticipated threats coming over the horizon, and readied myself to move and adapt at a moment’s notice and melt from the picture, not unlike the hare. Was it possible, I considered, that I had blended too much into the background of my own life, like a hare in the hedgerow, blurring my own identity in the process, without the benefit of the hare’s serenity?
The seasons changed, February returned, and at one year old the leveret passed imperceptibly into adulthood.
It is now believed to usually involve a female fending off a male. There are two types of fights: ‘distance fights’, in which only the paws of each hare touch, and ‘breast fights’, in which the hares will strike at one another’s chest and face... Courtship fights can last several days, and it is the male hare’s repeated touching of the body of the female that stimulates ovulation. The leveret’s early athleticism in the garden took on a new significance, as a form of preparation for this type of demand upon its body.
I set up cameras at discreet points, taping over any lights they had in order to avoid interfering with the hare’s eyesight, and used these to alert my mother to the hare’s arrival, since I couldn’t expect her to constantly check them as I did. I found myself monitoring the house on my phone in the back of taxis as I travelled around a Middle Eastern city in the weeks that followed
Pausing at a traffic light in the baking sun, I saw birds building a nest in the middle of a roundabout amid a tangle of concrete flyovers, persisting in their struggle to survive and reproduce despite the heat and choking fumes, and felt new respect for their tenacity and dignity.
Part of the reason that so many hedges had been cut back so sharply – or demolished altogether – is because of the related practice of ploughing the field right up to the very edge, to make the most of every inch of land. This has the effect of removing the uncultivated grass or wildflower corridors which hares use as thoroughfares, and which are an important source of plant diversity.
Every six metres or so we planted a taller specimen that, unlike the rest of the hedge, would be left to grow over time into a tall, spreading tree. And in the battered existing hedgerows I planted oak and spindle and maple, relishing making these incremental improvements to the habitat that, were it not for the hare, would perhaps never have occurred to me. <> In the process I learnt more about the land, including the existence of a deep shallow declivity nearby that, in the past, would have been a pond for the watering of plough horses or livestock.
* in all other respects they were copies of their mother. The floor around them appeared to be bone dry, without a trace of blood or afterbirth to stain the pale carpet, and they were immaculately clean, their fur standing out in a thick protective haze around their sturdy little bodies. I dropped the curtain back with a prickle in my throat.
I was grateful for the hare’s door, since leaving it open night and day meant that she could always reach her leverets. I noticed that my perception of ‘indoors’ and ‘outdoors’ had dissolved since leaving part of the house permanently open to the elements and to the passage of the mother hare. Gusts of wind blew in and stole around my legs. 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.
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 metres away, in the other room. The house smelled faintly like digestive biscuits: the scent of hares.
* The stoat scanned the ground and then poured out of the gap in a single, sinuous movement, like honey over the lip of a glass, its paws gripping the stone as it flowed down the wall. I felt a chill, as if the sight had awoken some deep ancestral memory of other, larger predators deadly to man.
One of the older leverets – still a permanent presence in the house and garden – appeared by the flower bed but came no closer, and did not attempt to intrude upon the ritual. It took a further half an hour for the twilight to deepen to the hare’s satisfaction, but finally I watched as she covered her leveret with her body and let it feed, confirming beyond a doubt that it was hers.
She had been born a winter leveret and her early pale colouring was designed to blend into the spring landscape. They were late-spring leverets, and their fur had quickly acquired all the rich, shiny, silky browns, foxy-red hues, and fine-grained texture of a hare’s summer disguise, blending into earth and stone and burnt grass alike.
An exercise ball in the corner of the room was a favourite prop, the leverets appearing to relish the rubbery recoil and hollow noise as they rattled their paws against its surface. The male leveret had the shock of his life when he sprang up onto the ball early one morning, paddling furiously to stay aloft before its rotation deposited him unceremoniously on the carpet.
The next day, as I gathered up my favourite pillow, blanket and clothes and eased my way out of the room past the sleeping leverets, I realised I too was moving my form, and doing so with far less ease than my animal companions.
Throughout these summer weeks the mother hare arrived in the house at just before eight every morning, and then stayed until nightfall. She often spent twelve hours in a row on her bench, her eyes squeezed tightly shut. Sometimes she stayed later still, and we passed the evening together with her resting on the bench while I read or worked or made calls on the sofa, the clouds outside rimmed in light. Every now and then she would rub her forehead on the mat I’d laid on her bench for her to rest on, using its rough fibres as we might a brush. At intervals, the leverets came in to eat. If the wind was low, I could hear the haunting calls of white barn owls coming out to hunt. From nine o’clock in the morning, when they took to their hiding places, was my time to go out and live in the space we now shared.
* She died as she had lived, without a sound. <> Her front paws were curled down towards her back legs as if she were in flight, her spirit running even now across the fields she had not lived to explore. Every detail of her body remained perfect, from her soft grey mouth to the moulding of her head, her long pliant ears and her unsullied fur with its indescribable textures and hues. No brush could be fine enough to capture the richness and subtlety of her beauty.
The potatoes and surrounding soil were gouged out of the ground, sucked into the maw of the machine and passed over a web that separated out the tubers and dropped them, via a conveyor belt, into the trailer, while the discarded earth was cast into ridges and furrows in the wake of their passage. The sight compounded my sense of helplessness after the death of the leveret. My emotions, still raw, were pulped as thoroughly as the earth.
I saw an adult hare close by, in the field verge. I followed the little leveret no further, not wishing to drive it deeper into the field where it would be more visible to crows and hawks, or to preclude the chance of its mother finding it. <> I stood at the edge of the fourteen-acre field and wondered with a sinking heart how many other leverets, or indeed ground-nesting birds, had been crushed beneath those implacable wheels and now lay within the ridges or lost to sight against the rutted brown earth.
* We have forgotten our dependence on the natural world, along with our appreciation for those who grow our food, who are in many ways the custodians of the land and who face relentless economic pressures. Our wider value system is distorted and the price is paid by the powerless, be they human or animal. As in so many areas of human endeavour, if we are not attentive, there is blood in the harvest.
There is no reason why we could not decide to give a little more space to hares and other creatures and to take a little less ourselves – following the example of the hare itself – while ensuring sufficient sustainable food production to meet human needs.
I realised how limited a vocabulary I had for colour, and how quickly it ran dry when confronted by the nuances of the landscape. I read about the German mineralogist Abraham Gottlob Werner, who classified colours according to an animal, vegetable or mineral equivalent. His work was so influential that Charles Darwin carried a book of colour samples based on Werner’s system on the HMS Beagle. I was intrigued by reproductions of Werner’s colours: the ‘bluish green’ of ‘egg of thrush’, the ‘straw yellow’ of ‘the polar bear’,
Despite this sad thought, I found a paradoxical happiness in realising how little I knew of the realm of grasses and trees, and what pleasure could lie in acquiring even a slender store of knowledge. Starting anew brings a sense of renewal and possibility.
The clouds hid the stars from sight, including the constellation named Lepus by early astrologers because it lies at the feet of Orion, the celestial hunter. I recalled reading about a Germanic goddess who was said to be accompanied by a train of torch-bearing hares, and thought how handy such a retinue would have been in this moment. Around me – unseen – stalked, loped, hopped, flitted, crawled and swooped a nocturnal society of creatures whose ranks I could not join. I could no more see with a hare’s eyes than I could shapeshift into a hare’s body. Perhaps the witch-hare’s true magic, I thought, is the wish she inspires, just for a moment, to step out of the human form. To race across the ground with the speed and power of a hare, without tiring; to inhabit its senses and revel in a world of sound, scent and sensation far greater than our own; and to move through the night as effortlessly as if through sunlight.
For the first time in my life, I have had cause to study animals rather than people, and to see that we are not diminished by making way for them. 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.
* 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 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.
Moments later, rounding the corner of the wood and stepping out from shade into the late afternoon sunshine that illuminated a cloud of insects dancing like fireflies above the tall grass
I turned away from the sight of fresh blood beading on its fur, the words _arterial blood red, head of the cock gold-finch 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.
* Whereas before I sought out exceptional experiences and set myself against the crowd, 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. As we jostle for space on this planet, for position and place and name, and agonise about missteps and paths lost, and feel the fragility of our hopes and all that we hold dear, 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. She made me perceive animals in a new light, in relation to her and to each other. She made me re-evaluate my life, and the question of what constitutes a good one. I have learnt to savour beautiful experiences while they last – however small and domestic they may be in scope – to find the peace to live in a particular state of feeling, and to try to find a simplicity of self. 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.