RAISING HARE

Made more humane by a hare.

A political adviser whose demanding work often had her leaving England, Dalton spent much of the Covid-19 pandemic at her converted barn in the countryside. Out for a walk one February day, she spotted a creature in the middle of an unpaved path. “Leveret,” she writes. “The word surfaced in my mind, even though I had never seen a young hare before.” Hours later, she returned to the spot and found that the russet-colored animal hadn’t moved, defenseless against predators and cars. Unsure of what to do, Dalton carefully picked up the animal and brought it home. Thus begins an astounding debut memoir in which Dalton shows how a serene and long-misunderstood creature opened her eyes in many ways. It just might do the same for readers. The leveret—a diminutive of the French word for hare, lièvre—is a fluff ball that fits in her palm, lighter than an apple. When Dalton feeds it, “its tiny ivory-coloured paws would…knead the air in a trembling, milky ecstasy.” Not knowing how to care for the animal—unlike rabbits, a smaller species, hares haven’t been domesticated—Dalton educates herself. The books she reads say much about hunting and cooking hares, but little else. To the rescue comes an 18th-century poem by William Cowper that cites the food that “little one” comes to devour: oats. Those oats (and pears) help the hare quickly grow to its full size, a lean and lively “miniature bucking bronco” that, when not “unmoving as a sphinx,” loves to dance about the house. What becomes of the animal in a land where hares’ numbers have drastically declined? No secrets will be spilled here. But Dalton herself is changed, calmed by an endearing creature that, as she writes, “challenged my priorities and woke up my senses.”

A soulful and gracefully written book about an animal’s power to rekindle curiosity.