Narrow the aperture of your attention enough to take in any one thing fully, and it becomes a portal to everything. Anneal that attention enough so that you see whatever and whoever is before you free from expectation, unfiltered through your fantasies or needs, and it becomes love. Come to see anything or anyone this clearly — a falcon, or a mountain, or a patch of moss — and you will find yourself loving the world more deeply.
One winter day, walking through the placid English countryside while on pandemic-forced sabbatical from her roiling job as a foreign policy political advisor in London, Chloe Dalton stopped mid-stride at the sight of a small still creature haloed by the sunlight — a baby hare no bigger than her palm, right there in the middle of the path, about to change the course of her life, though she did not yet know it. In her moving memoir Raising Hare (public library), she recounts that catalytic encounter:
The path I took was a short, unpaved track leading along the edge of a cornfield and emerging into a narrow country lane flanked with tall hedges overflowing with bramble and snowberry. The track, formed of two strips of hard-packed earth, was solid enough for a car to pass but pocked with potholes and puddles. I crested the skyline, deep in my thoughts, and began to walk down the slight slope towards the lane, when I was brought up short by a tiny creature facing me on the grass strip running down the track’s centre. I stopped abruptly. Leveret. The word surfaced in my mind, even though I had never seen a young hare before.
The animal, no longer than the width of my palm, lay on its stomach with its eyes open and its short, silky ears held tightly against its back. 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. 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. 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. It did not stir as I came into view, but studied the ground in front of it, unmoving. Leveret.
Unlike rabbits, so populous and docile that we have tamed them into pets and children’s book characters, hares are rare and furtive to begin with — wild creatures glimpsed only out of the corner of the eye as they vanish into the thicket of their secret lives. Dalton had never seen a leveret before. She didn’t know what to do — if she left it there, stranded and helpless as any newborn, it would be vulnerable to becoming prey or roadkill; if she touched it to move it into the tall grass, its mother, if alive at all, might not find it or might reject it, as wild animals are apt to do when the smell of their young has been tainted.
One of life’s great cruelties is that quick decisions we make at a certain hour on a certain day, decisions we could have and would have made otherwise on a different day in a different state of mind, end up shaping the years and decades ahead, shaping our very self. One of life’s great mercies is that we never realize this at the crossing point of seemingly inconsequential choices — or else we would be paralyzed to take even the littlest step on the path of our becoming.
Unable to reason her way out of the paradox, Dalton follows her own animal instinct and carefully swaddles the leveret in dry grass to avoid touching it, then tucks it into her coat, thinking she was taking it home for the night. She ends up raising it, and in a sense being raised by it toward her full humanity — shaken awake from the trance of workaholism, freed from the conditionings and compulsions we mistake for needs, resensitized to the wonder of life. She chronicles the experience — one rife with biological, ecological, and existential revelations — with the tenderness of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s account of his three weeks cohabitating with a bunny, the respectful observational rigor of Thoreau’s overnight fosterage of a little owl, and the searching intellect of Helen Macdonald’s life with a goshawk, beginning with a lyrical prologue that imagines how the leveret entered the world before entering her world:
One February night the hare formed a nest in an overhang of tall grass at the edge of a field. There she gave birth silently under the moonlight to a leveret as dark as the night itself, save for a star-shaped white mark on its forehead. She licked it clean and then fed it, shielding it with her body until it had found use of its limbs, before nudging it anxiously out of its birthplace with her muzzle into a new hiding place within a dense tussock of dormant grass that created a snug tent around the little leveret.
Having concealed it to her satisfaction, the mother hare went back over her tracks, using the tips of her paws to obliterate her traces, racing to beat the dawn light breaking on the horizon. She moved with graceful, springing steps, as if to avoid turning a single blade. Once finished, she sprang away with a thrust of her powerful back legs, putting clear ground between her and her young. With no burrow in which to hide her leveret, the best she could do was to leave it, drawing off predators until nightfall, when she would return again under cover of darkness.
Once she has taken the leveret home, examined it for injuries, and attempted to feed it, Dalton calibrates her choice with conscientious awareness of its creaturely reality:
As adorable as it was, I could not forget that it was a wild creature, born into a landscape of ice and snow and lashing winds. It was not an animal moulded by centuries of selective breeding in human hands, in the way that pet rabbits, dogs, horses or even chickens have been bred for their appearance, size, strength, temperament, or other qualities deemed desirable. I disliked the idea of it being held to be played with, against its own nature, simply because it was too small to offer much resistance.
She refuses to give the leveret a name, or impose on it the identity implied by a gender pronoun, or otherwise anthropomorphize it. Devoted to meeting its creaturely needs on its creaturely terms, disheartened by the paucity of scientific literature on hares, she is stunned to find the most useful guidance in a suite of 250-year-old poems by a man who had been given a leveret by a neighbor’s pitying children while suffering with “dejection of spirits” (depression only entered the lexicon as a mental health term in the past century) in the wake of heartbreak; the hare so salved his soul that he acquired two more, then immortalized them all in poems full of details about their habits, rhythms, and favorite foods.
In the long tradition of filling with speculative fiction the gaps in our knowledge and understanding of the realities of nature — creation myths and weather gods, alchemy and astrology — hares were once thought to be witches in disguise fleeing from persecution, with phrases prescribed to chant upon seeing one in order to ward off bad luck. Perhaps confused by the lack of sexual dimorphism in hares — unlike humans, cardinals, and lions, the male and female are indistinguishable visually — the Romans saw the hare as the Orlando of the wild world, believing that males give birth and change sex.
Dalton counters that very human impulse toward speculation with the discipline of observation. “To domesticate,” she writes, “is to alter the nature of an animal in order to fit it into our way of life as humans. For innately wild animals such as the hare, a better way is to coexist.” In the course of that mostly felicitous, sometimes frustrating, endlessly surprising coexistence, she meets the leveret’s otherness with a tender, wonder-smitten curiosity:
[The leveret] made no equivalent of a cat’s mewing or a dog’s bark to prompt me, but there was no mistaking its eagerness. If I overslept, it simply sat on the edge of the runner, waiting patiently for as long as was necessary for me to arrive. The chit-chit noise of its younger days was no longer a constant accompaniment as it explored the house. But it would often produce a strange musical call as it ran away from me after feeding. Louder than a puff, sharper than a sigh, softer than a grunt and more musical than a snort, the sound eluded description. It was like the faintest note the gentlest breath on a harmonica could produce: a short, sharp exhalation compressed over I did not know what, since I’d read that hares lack vocal cords.
There is no mightier antidote to our pathological self-reference, to the inherent narcissism of even our Golden Rule, than the discovery that we share the world with lives unrecognizably unlike ours, governed by profoundly different needs and imperatives. A hare’s whiskers, Dalton discovers, may look like hairs to us but are in fact organs known as vibrissae, pitted into the flesh and encircled by nerve endings continually decoding signals from the environment. The peculiar pattern of its fur — white belly, dark back — is not an aesthetic adornment but an evolutionary concealment strategy known as counter-shading: a kind of optical illusion distorting the shadow to deceive the predator. By far the otherest of the hare’s biological endowments is its ability to carry two litters at once — a process known as superfetation, in which a second ovum is fertilized shortly after the start of a pregnancy, producing two different fetuses in two different stages of maturity within the same uterus.
Acutely aware of the creature’s wildness from the outset, acutely resistant to any notion of domesticating it or turning it into a pet, Dalton finds herself questioning the concepts themselves:
I pondered the concept of “owning” a living creature in any context. Interaction with animals nurtures the loving, empathetic, compassionate aspects of human nature. It taps into a primordial reverence towards the living world and a sense of the commonality and connectedness across species. It is a gateway, as I was discovering, into a state of greater respect for nature and the environment as a whole. But at the same time, there is an immense power imbalance. We all too easily subordinate animals to our will, constraining or confining them to suit our purposes, needs and lifestyles.
[…]
Now I had come to appreciate that affection for an animal is of a different kind entirely: untinged by the regret, complexities and compromises of human relationships. It has an innocence and purity all its own. In the absence of verbal communication, we extend ourselves to comprehend and meet their needs and, in return, derive companionship and interest from their presence, while also steeling ourselves for inevitable hurt, since their lives are for the most part much shorter than ours.
In consonance with the great naturalist John Muir’s insistence that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” Dalton’s affectionate attention to the hare ends up magnifying her attention to the world itself, deepening her love for it, changing how she relates to any one thing constellating the dazzling wholeness of everything. One warm night, as she finds herself yearning to experience the hare’s nocturnal world, she realizes just how much one’s reality doubles and deepens by paying close and compassionate attention to another’s:
The night closed in around me. A flock of migrating geese passed overhead, their familiar cries uncanny in the dark — as, to me, was their ability to navigate at night. 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.
Couple Raising Hare — an attention-annealing, life-deepening read in its entirety — with onetime soldier turned backyard naturalist Hockley Clarke’s moving memoir of coexisting with a family of blackbirds in the English countryside in the 1950s, then revisit a parish minister’s passionate reckoning with the souls of animals.
