Little paws

There was a time, before the pandemic took her to the countryside, before a bitterly cold winter walk, when Chloe Dalton “knew nothing about hares and gave them little thought”. After a rural childhood, she carved out an urban, international existence as a political adviser. It is testament to the intelligence of her writing that she does not measure the urban against the rural and find it wanting. Eventually though, during lockdown, she itched to get back to the countryside (“I also knew that life could not stand still, and truthfully, I wanted and needed to go”).

Such threads of ambivalence run throughout the book, preventing the narrative from drifts towards cliché. On the February day when Dalton returns home clutching a baby hare nestled in handfuls of dead grass, she is in two minds about her actions: “I felt embarrassed and worried. I had no intention of taming the hare, only sheltering it, but it seemed that I had committed a bad error of judgement”.

It would have been easy to make a book like this about human agency and the writer’s journey of self-discovery. It is testament to Dalton that she does not make it so, by thinking beyond herself. “I wondered if its mother was out in the fields, heavy with milk, and went to sleep with a troubled heart.” The “it” of the leveret becomes “she” and we realize that this is not the only hare of the title, and that Dalton is not the only one doing the raising. And while there are moments of tenderness and humour – such as the description of two leverets hidden behind a curtain, and Dalton’s charade of pretending that she hasn’t seen their little paws poking out – she does not shy away from the fundamental uncertainty of the situation. Just as the hare reaches “an accommodation with me, on her own terms”, so Dalton fully acknowledges her ignorance of the hare’s full experience of being in the world.

Raising Hare holds within it the tension between the wild and domestic, the human and non- human. As Dalton’s home becomes part of the hare’s home, bound­aries between these domains begin to break down both physically and psychologically: “I noticed that my perception of ‘indoors’ and ‘outdoors’ had dissolved since leaving part of the house permanently open to the elements and to the passage of this creature”.

This is a powerful and important book. It is about conservation, loss of biodiversity, loss of habitats. There are unbearable passages of violence and death: the aftermath of the mechanized harvest is heartbreaking (and immensely important). But equally, amid the fragility of life and the inevitability of loss, there is an abundance of hope in these pages.

The post Little paws appeared first on TLS.