Saving a wild creature and keeping it free

Chloe Dalton is a political advisor and foreign policy specialist in London with long experience working with the UK Parliament. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she moved to her home in the English countryside where she rescued a baby hare. Her memoir about the experience, published this week, is a refreshing peek into nature’s world and a responsibility to honor it.

Dalton’s unexpected undertaking starts with a barking dog and a man shouting. She ventures out to see what’s happening beyond the renovated barn where she lives during the lockdown, surrounded by arable farmland. What she finds, dog and man disappeared, is a leveret, a baby hare no longer than the width of her palm, its eyes open, and its ears held tightly against its back. She hopes it will hurry into the long grass, that its mother will find it, but four hours later, it’s still there, unprotected against predators, cars, and tractors.

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.

Dalton builds a nest of field grass inside her house and bottle feeds until the leveret transitions to garden plants and bowls of oats. Meanwhile, with insatiable curiosity, she educates herself about this often-misunderstood animal. She reads scientific articles, stories of myth and legend, histories of unlawful hunting, and even William Cowper’s 18th century poetry. It’s infectious, this curiosity, as she intertwines the information with what’s happening — reasons for the leveret’s changing coat; its drumming on pillows, boxes, papers, and shirts; its immaculate grooming; and its clocklike habits.

The leveret grows astonishingly fast. When it jumps over the garden fence, a rhythm of leaving and returning to the house develops. Sometimes the matured hare disappears for days. When the pandemic lockdown ends, Dalton travels for work again. She installs a hare-sized door at the house for access while she’s gone. Soon after, she discovers two leverets tucked behind a curtain in her home office. It’s a second litter — the first born in the garden and now gone. These two tear the house apart, demolishing a bench cover and pulling at the edges of carpets; one of them stares at the author with happy defiance. 

It’s hard to imagine giving wild hares free rein, but that’s the enticing charm of this book. Dalton isn’t a scientist, nor a wide-eyed innocent wanting a cuddly companion. She’s somewhere in between, patiently observing the untamed presence while keeping human imposition at bay. No cage. No names. Still, I can’t help wondering, What’s been left out? I’m imagining rooms infested with fleas and molting fur. Are they house-trained? But this would interfere with the charm, and charm wins. 

Raising Hair is a beautiful book, so pleasurable to read, every page a delight for Dalton’s attachment to the animal and her altering perspective. “I was only able to share its space because it allowed me to,” she writes. And I would say because she allowed the hare to be free – why we read the moment when it runs toward her as she approaches, or another when she comes in at dark and finds the hare, after a long absence, lying beside the fire. Dalton doesn’t know its future, but it will always be with her. The serenity and ordered routines of the hare challenged her priorities, and changed her life. Also, she admits to a greater sense of connection to wildlife now, its depth and importance, a marvel not to be missed.  

Raising Hare: A Memoir by Chloe Dalton is published by Pantheon. A version of this review was broadcast on Central Ohio’s NPR member station WOSU 89.7 FM.