🦊 Raising Hare
This is the touching story of a woman whose life had no room for anything besides work, until a baby hare in distress halted her life and changed how she saw the world.
In her memoir Raising Hare, Chloe Dalton tells the tale of her encounter with a leveret (a baby hare) she found outside her home, and the journey she went through to save it, raise it, love it.
Before the hare, Chloe was barely ever home, focusing all her energies on her high stakes role as a political advisor. After it settled into her home, she never left the house.
Chloe was told by wildlife experts that the leveret would not survive in her care. It did. She was told it could never return to the wild. It did. In fact, the hare lived a double life—resting in Chloe’s home and garden by day, wandering the wild woods by night.
Chloe’s descriptions of the rabbits touched me deeply. Her writing is an act of love for hares, for wildlife, for nature as a whole.
I visited my local park and did some watercolor sketching to capture some of my favorite imagined moments of her book.
The little leveret’s white tuft:
But its winter pelt came on rapidly, including a generous ruff of fur below its throat that swelled like a mane as the weeks passed, and that it would sink its neck into while resting.
The nibbler:
It developed a fascination with seams—such as the one on the side of my trouser leg—and would nibble its way down, like a crimping iron, its teeth never biting but its grip firm, leaving a raised ridge as if the cloth had been ironed. It would do this with the edges of pillowcases, duvets, the trimming on a cushion, the end of a shoelace, the tassel on a rug. Dangling objects would receive the same attention—not in play, like a cat, but chewed with a quiet purposefulness. Likewise papers on the ground. I grew to love the gnawed edges, the leveret leaving its mark.
A hopping gymnast:
One day I unrolled a rug on the grass, with the intention of lounging on it and reading my book in the sun. By the time I returned with the book and a cushion, the hare had already laid claim to the carpet. It leapt and spun in circles upon it at high speed, staying within its borders; like a gymnast practising floor exercises.
There was a moment when Chloe first let the hare out, when she wondered if it would ever come back (it did, thankfully.) The hare turned to look at her, and that glance meant everything.
I fell so in love with her hare that I was afraid to finish the book. I am extra sensitive these days, after losing my mom. I knew this tale couldn't last forever. I knew eventually the mother hare had to die, given their lifespans are only four years, typically.
In the final chapters, I slowed down my reading to a crawl's pace. Then came the part in the story where one of the hare’s baby leverets died. And then some tractors came for harvest on the farms next door, and afterwards, to her horror, Chloe found a trail of tiny leveret corpses. At this, she turned around and left, noting:
I couldn't go any further, afraid of what I might find.
I decided to do the same, and shut the book right then and there.
You can grab a copy of Raising Hare on Bookshop.org, at your local library, or on Amazon. You might also enjoy listening to this NPR interview with Chloe: What Has a Wild Animal Taught You?