Review: Vivien Horler

Raising Hare – The heartwarming true story of an unlikely friendship, by Chloe Dalton (Canongate)

On a bitter winter day, Chloe Dalton left her converted barn home for a walk in the English countryside. It was during Covid and she, a busy, foreign policy political adviser based in London, had been grounded.

Walking down the lane, she spotted something on the middelmannetjie. “Set against the bare earth and dry grass it was hard to tell where its fur ended and the ground began. It blended into the dead winter landscape so completely that, but for the rapid rise and fall of its flanks, I would have mistaken it for a stone.”

It was a leveret, a baby hare, no longer than the width of Dalton’s palm, lying on its stomach with its eyes open and its short ears flattened against its back.

What to do? It was an icy day, and dangers were everywhere, from passing dogs or foxes or cars, to the buzzards wheeling above. There seemed to be no mother close by. There were perils in every course of action.

Dalton, who had spent youthful holidays in the countryside, knew something of the dos and don’ts of the situation. She decided to go on with her walk.

Four hours later she returned, and there was the leveret, exactly as it had been. She felt she could not leave it and, carefully lining her hands with grass so she wouldn’t transfer her scent to it, she picked it up and took it home.

She placed it on a countertop and checked it for injuries. There seemed to be none.

“It pushed itself up on trembling front paws, each barely half the length of my little finger and as slender as a pencil, and sat unsteadily on its hindquarters, blinking, its nostrils flaring…”

At first it was a stop-gap measure. She rang a former gamekeeper, who said even if she could find the mother, she would reject it as it would now smell of humans. And in all his years on the land he had never heard of someone successfully raising a leveret. It was likely to die of hunger or shock.

Dalton then rang her sister, who had a small farm nearby. She suggested a milk substitute used for rearing motherless kittens, and in the meantime, she would drop off some of the supplement used to hand-rear lambs.

Dalton weighed the leveret on her kitchen scales. It was 100 grams. Then using a dropper, she squeezed out a few drops of milk. The leveret swallowed and blinked. Dalton repeated the process until the leveret seemed to doze off in her hand.

Then she put it into a grass-lined shoebox and went to bed. The next morning she found it had made itself a tiny nest in the grass and was sitting beside it, “its diminutive ears pointing skywards, as if it were ready for the world”.

And so began an adventure that changed the course of Dalton’s life.

Watching the little creature as it grew and became less timid, she felt soothed. She was charmed when it raced around her room, and then her garden outside. “I couldn’t help but compare its serenity and steadiness to the sense of frenetic activity that had pervaded my life for years, marked by constant vigilance, unpredictability and stress.”

She was deeply conscious the leveret was not a pet, and she imagined it would one day leave and move back to the fields outside her house. So she never named it, and didn’t even know if it were male or female, until it provided incontrovertible evidence.

The leveret opened Dalton’s eyes to the world around her. They were not just fields and woods, they provided homes to scores of creatures. And yet when huge combine harvesters came by, their blades flashing, many creatures were sliced up.

Dalton researched hares, their difference from rabbits – for one thing they are born with eyes open and able to move, unlike blind baby bunnies in burrows – and also the fact that hare coursing – hunting hares with dogs for sport – had no closed season. Often pregnant or lactating mothers would be killed.

Under the influence of the hare and Dalton’s increasing interest in the natural world around her, she writes that her own needs had simplified. Instead of placing the imperatives of work first, she realised it was more important to be dependable in love and friendship, and to leave the land in a more natural state than she found it.

“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’s – and nature’s – endless capacity for renewal, we can find hope.”

This is a glorious little book, lyrically written and illustrated with charming sketches. It represents nature writing at its finest.

• In case we think hares have nothing to do with us, South Africa is home to two species of hares, the Cape Hare (Lepus capensis) and the scrub hare (Lepus saxatilis). Their numbers are decreasing.