CHLOE DALTON Raising Hare. Reviewed by Ann Skea

Chloe Dalton’s memoir of raising an orphaned hare in the English countryside is both beautiful and unsentimental.

Chloe Dalton never expected to raise a hare. In her professional life as a foreign policy specialist and political advisor, she spent her time in offices, meeting rooms and airports. High on the adrenaline rush of responding to events and ‘international crises involving people’, she ‘seldom considered animals’.

The Covid pandemic stopped all that and ‘flung’ her home to the countryside, where she owns an old barn that she has converted as ‘a project [she] could fall back on’ if ‘swings in political fortune’ affected her work. Confined there, she is anxious, restless and struggling to cope with the sudden change of pace. It is mid-February, with the snow-melt still on the ground, when she hears a barking dog and a man shouting and goes out to investigate the disturbance:

I had grown up with stories of poachers cutting locks and forcing open gates to drive onto farmers’ fields and into the woods, hunting deer and rabbits and setting their dogs to chase hares. More benignly, dogs had been known to bolt from their owners walking down the lanes, in pursuit of a rabbit or simply drawn by the open spaces, scattering sheep or disturbing nesting birds in the process.

The dog and the man have vanished, so she sets off for a walk down an unpaved track along the edge of a cornfield. She is deep in thought when she sees a tiny creature in the middle of the track. ‘Leveret’ is the word that springs to her mind, although she has never seen a young hare before, and it seems abandoned, its mother perhaps scared off by the dog, but it is on an exposed part of the track and in danger from cars or predators. Not knowing what to do, she marks the spot and walks on, but when she returns the leveret is still there and she decides to take it with her and return it after nightfall in the hope that the mother will find it. Wrapping it in grasses she pulls from the field edge to keep her scent off the animal, she takes it home, then phones a local conservationist for advice.

He tells her that in spite of her care, her human scent will be on the animal and the mother will reject it. He also says that ‘in decades of working on the land, he had never heard of anyone successfully raising a leveret’, and it would probably die of hunger or shock.

I felt embarrassed and worried. I had no intention of taming the hare, only of sheltering it, but it seemed that I had committed a bad error of judgement.

So begins her responsibility for a small, helpless animal. She calls her farming sister and her mother for advice, both of whom had experience of caring for orphaned animals, and a new, absorbing and fascinating experience begins. Raising Hare records her progress as the hare grows, thrives, and, eventually, takes itself away from the barn/house into the wild and the company of other hares. It records, too, the beauty of the animal and the strange, trusting relationship that develops between them as Dalton does everything she can to allow the hare to remain wild.

Dalton’s first problem is finding information on how to care for a leveret. The internet offers plenty of information about hares, but little about caring for one, other than confirming that leverets are easily frightened and that a common cause of death is stress due to noise and excessive handling. Then, in a 1774 poem by William Cowper, who kept three hares as a cure for his ‘dejection of spirits’, she finds lists of the food he fed them: milk, oats, lettuce, twigs of hawthorn for them to gnaw on to keep their teeth short, sowthistle, straw, apple, carrot.

I tried nearly everything on Cowper’s list, with mixed success … I searched the verges for sowthistle, or hare’s lettuce … which the leveret didn’t seem to appreciate. It appeared politely uninterested in carrot, whether whole or sliced or shredded. I offered it parsley, which it nibbled, and coriander, which it devoured.

Caring for the hare, which she steadfastly refuses to name, because that would suggest it was a pet, becomes a full-time occupation, but it gives her the chance to observe it closely. Feeding it, as a tiny leveret nestling in her hand, she notices that every strand of fur is marked in alternating shades of dark and light, and she learns that this is called ‘agouti’, and is essential for camouflage.

Every possible distinct outline on the leveret was broken up or disguised by contrasting colours. The pale fur that ringed its eyes was surrounded with a band of kohl-black hair. The hair on its throat was of the softest grey, like cool ashes, and was shorter and finer than on any other part of its body. Its muzzle was edged in ivory, its mouth round, a small ‘O’ of perpetual surprise, trimmed in soot-coloured hair.

She learns, too, that adult hares can run at 50 to 70 kilometres an hour, and could outrun a cheetah; that they can leap ‘two metres high and nearly three metres wide’, and that captured hares can suffer myopathy, dying in an attempt to escape confinement. As the hare grows and she gives it the freedom of her small enclosed garden, it seems to enjoy chasing games with her, jinking and springing and leaping ‘vertically in the air while running’.

Adapting to the hare, conscious of the dangers to it of noise and stress, Dalton’s own life changes. She becomes aware of the birds and animals around her; turns off lights in the house and garden, conscious of the disturbing effects on the vision of nocturnal animals; worries about the loss of habitat that intensive farming and heavy farm machinery cause. She comes across Abraham Gottlob Werner’s fascinating 1814 nomenclature of colours, which describes each colour in terms of animal, vegetable and mineral examples: the ‘bluish green’ of ‘egg of thrush’, the ‘straw yellow’ of ‘the polar bear’. But she also reads everything she can find about hares, and learns of the superstitions, witchcraft, fear and false information that surround them. In an anonymous Middle English poem, the poet lists 77 ‘Names of the Hare’ that must be chanted to ward off evil if you encounter a hare (Seamus Heaney has translated this). She records her own observations of the meticulous grooming even a young leveret performs, the protective stillness it instinctively adopts, and the importance of the home range a hare establishes and always returns to.

Chapter headings chart the hare’s progress, from ‘A Winter Leveret’ through, for example, to ‘One Month Old’, ‘Independence’, ‘Leveret no More’ and ‘Two Years Old: Wonder’, to ‘Harekind’ and ‘Secret Places’. In the chapter headed ‘Ultimate Trust’, Dalton describes the birth of the hare’s own leverets, the first of which the hare hid behind a curtain in the barn/house that had become her home territory. Glimpsing a ‘flash of white tail’ and a slight quivering behind a long curtain near her desk, Dalton waits until the hare is temporarily out and investigates:

Holding my breath, I pulled it a few centimetres away from the wall, and looked behind it.

There, pressed closely together, with dark chocolate fur and bottomless, coal-black eyes, were a pair of leverets. They lay with their muzzles to the wall, their ears squeezed tightly to their backs … 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 thick protective haze around their sturdy little bodies. I dropped the curtain back with a prickle in my throat.

Of course the hare wins her heart, and she writes beautifully about it, so the reader, too, is enchanted by it. Throughout the book, the images of the hare, drawn by Denise Nestor, are a delight. But Dalton never wants to ‘own’ the hare, and she is gratefully aware of the insights about her own life that she has gained through her care for it. Towards the end of the book, she writes that

Under the subtle influence of the hare, my own wants have simplified. To be dependable in love and friendship rather than in work. To leave the land in a more natural state than I found it. And to take better care of what is to hand, seeing beauty and value in the ordinary.

Raising Hare is a beautiful book, unsentimental, thoughtful, and at times poetic, with the hare, of course, at its heart.

Chloe Dalton Raising Hare Allen & Unwin 2025 PB 336pp $24.99

Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994, and currently available for free download here). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (ann.skea.com) are archived by the British Library.

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Tags: Chloe | Dalton, English countryside, English writers, hares, leverets, memoir, nature writing, William Cowper