Raising Hare: A Memoir, by Chloe Dalton, published a few months ago, is a noble addition to the long lineage of books chronicling human relationships with wild animals. The author, a foreign policy specialist more attuned to ranging than rootedness, retreats to the English countryside during pandemic lockdown, and while out on a walk encounters a motherless leveret (a young hare), “no longer than the width of my palm,” blending into the winter landscape but for its panting and the “corona of light around its rump and muzzle.” Thus begins the improbable story of a friendship of sorts, though, as Dalton notes, while the hare could cross into her world, “hers will always be out of reach to me.” The story spans the domestic and the wild, as the hare is given free range of the house and then the outdoors as well, though she never uses her freedom to leave for good.
One of the pleasures of the book is watching Dalton be transformed by her relationship with the hare, whom she decides not to name so as not to reduce it to the status of a pet. As the house becomes the center of the hare’s home range, the hare becomes the center of hers. “I circled the barn and the hare, and I had my own preferred paths.” Spending more time outside than she has before, she becomes interested in gardening, and creates a new one alongside the house. As she becomes newly attuned to the natural world, she moves through it as though “acquiring a new set of faculties.”
Her observations about the hare are delightful, as when she tries to protect a plant in her new garden with a little fence and then discovers the hare inside, and realizes that her efforts to shield the plant “had created an even more comforting sense of shelter.” She describes the leveret’s drumming as “sustained, enthusiastic, and accompanied by vertical, whirling leaps.” When, astonishingly, the hare produces her own litter of leverets, Dalton notes the way they “sometimes gave a little hiccup while eating porridge oats–their whole body contracting and expanding, like a concertina.”
Even her descriptions of the predators that freeze her stomach with dread are mesmerizing. Two stoats, chasing each other, go “tumbling end over end in a brawling tangle–a ball of teeth and fur, as light as wind-blown seed.” A stoat slinking through an old stone wall “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.”
We are treated to both a natural history of Lepus europaeus, the **European brown hare, and a cultural history. She muses on the perplexing way that hares have been symbols of life, fertility and good fortune, and also harbingers of misfortune and the devil. She ranges from the **13th century Middle English poem, “The Names of the Hare”, which provides 77 incantatory names to ward off bad luck at seeing one—including “the-scare-the-man, the faith breaker”—to 18th century English poet William Cowper’s “Epitaph on a Hare”, in which he memorializes the diet of his beloved hare: “On twigs of hawthorn he regaled / on pippins’ russet peel.”
Living with the hare through “three winters and three harvests,” Dalton reflects on the way the animal made her reevaluate her sense of what constitutes a good life. “The sense 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.” The hare makes Dalton, a writer, “consider the dignity and persuasiveness of silence,” but her willingness to break it, here, is a gift. Raising Hare is a delight to read, a thoughtful meditation on our relationship to the natural world and a ravishing piece of nature writing. I am left with the indelible image of Dalton walking out into autumn fields during one of the hare’s long absences: “the grasses 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.”
Jared is an adult services librarian at the Howe Library in Hanover. He purchases a range of nonfiction for the library and conspires with a colleague to devise the library’s programming. When otherwise free, he’s usually in the mountains, swimming in local ponds and rivers, trying his hand at new cuisines, reading, or dreaming of walking the Scottish Highlands.